before considering installling a linux distro, and settling on mandrake 10.0, one of the things i had heard from a friend or two was that it is largely customisable. i guess my question is just how customisable is it, what levels of knowledge are necessary for these customistations and are there any online tutorials to get me started im a windows veteran, linux n00b... i know most of it is probably out of my league for a while, but i hope to be able to use linux like a power user some day as well, so...

Hard question to answer. Linux is NOT like windows. You can do everything from just changing your screen saver to rewriting the kernel source code or ANYTHING in between. You do not have all these options with any version of MS windows.

Until you have used linux it's a little hard to believe just how much it can be customized. I'm not sure how long you have been around, but a comparison might be to DOS where DOS runs on the PC and you could load win3.1 or GEM onto it - which were totally different.

Linux is just the DOS-like core, only much more powerful. On top of that runs the window environment and on top of that the window manager or desktop environment. You have windows like systems like KDE or Gnome, and then others that work totally differently like windowmaker or enlightenment. Each of these may have dozens of themes so the look is very customizeable, as is the feel and how windows behave and what clicks and button do what. So the interface is very customizeable and that part is relatively easy.

But linux is also very customizable under the hood as well. You can install what packages you want or leave out what you want. The deeper you go the more you will need to know, of course, but you can go right to the core and recompile the linux kernel to suit your needs if you want, or need to run particular software that might be a bit difficult. With kernel compiling it can mean that the core of your OS can be updated every month if you are particularly worried about security, or just updated when you need a particular feature. Actually my old printer server is still running a 2.2 kernel, while this box has the latest stable release of 2.6.7

On thing to note, the linux world is a big place and you will never know it all. There's always more to learn or try...

right then, thanks for clearing that up with me the next step is to find something i want to change and then learn how, and i'm sure that will come with time. To be honest i'm not bothered about package customisation, i was thinking more of customising the UI, probably should have made this clear in the original post. sorry.

UI customization is tied to packages to some extent as you need to load several to get the various types of UI... But usually it comes with the distro. You can have the complex clutter of KDE and gnome, or the blank simpicity of windowmaker and such... it's pretty cool.