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I started with Fedora, and later moved to RHEL5, when I switched from Windows. There were initial hiccups, but I got enough help here, and finally got them right.
I will suggest to try the same, if you are in exploring phase as these will give immense Linux exposure and includes almost all features those might not be there in OpenSUSE or others flavors.
It's now been ~ 30 hours since you started this thread. Depending on your sleep cycle, you could have installed maybe 3 to 5 different versions of Linux by now------the point is that sometimes you have to just jump into the water.
One bit of folk wisdom that I left out: For a particular user, the "best" version of Linux could simply be the last one they tried.
So, set up that distrowatch article on the wall, get a dart, and.......
I suggest you get a copy of Virtualbox, D/L some isos, and take a few for a spin. When I first was getting a taste in linux back in 2004, Redhat was what I used. I went back to windows for several years because although I liked it it didn't work well with a lot of hardware (specifically wireless). When I recently came back earlier this year, I tried out openSUSE, Mint, and Fedora. I liked Mint the best because of default desktop environments, codecs preinstalled (big pain in the a** avoided), and all my hardware worked perfectly.
I might give another distro a try in the future but right now I'm at home with Mint.
Just to clarify - these are the default desktop environments, but any of those distros can run any of the other desktop environments. OpenSUSE has Gnome and XFCE readily available if you prefer them over KDE, as well as other lesser-known DEs you can choose from...as do the other choices listed above.
Just to clarify: this is not always advisable. The default environment(s) for a distro is what most people use and what gets the quickest bug fixes.
For example, when I tested the DVD of OpenSUSE, I found that choosing a custom installation with Xfce or Gnome provided a broken video player that had to be replaced, and that the repository lacks the file-search tools for both. As for installing a distro with the default DE, replacing that with one out of the repository, and re-configuring your system, that can go smoothly or it can leave a horrible mess. A quick check of my records shows I've used 21 GUIs in 75 distributions, so I think I've seen everything (and some of it was not a pretty sight...)
Just to clarify: this is not always advisable. The default environment(s) for a distro is what most people use and what gets the quickest bug fixes.
For example, when I tested the DVD of OpenSUSE, I found that choosing a custom installation with Xfce or Gnome provided a broken video player that had to be replaced, and that the repository lacks the file-search tools for both. As for installing a distro with the default DE, replacing that with one out of the repository, and re-configuring your system, that can go smoothly or it can leave a horrible mess. A quick check of my records shows I've used 21 GUIs in 75 distributions, so I think I've seen everything (and some of it was not a pretty sight...)
Just because you want to use a different DE, doesn't mean you have to remove or replace the default. That's most likely why your video player broke. Not because you installed or used XFCE, but because you didn't install KDE and all of its libraries, which the video player likely depended on. There's no reason to remove the default DE if you want to use another, just have them both on the system and boot into the one you like. I regularly use XFCE on OpenSUSE and have never noticed any issues, in fact in my experience it's a bit more stable than KDE on the same system.
Just because something is updated more rapidly, doesn't mean it's more stable. Just look at CentOS vs Fedora, Gnome 2 vs Gnome 3, etc.
Last edited by suicidaleggroll; 07-17-2012 at 11:36 AM.
When I do the same I selected Ubuntu its superb to start with Linux if you are a windows user, There is pinguy OS that has a great looks, it is actually a better front of ubuntu so it is stable and good support. So I will suggest you to go with pinguyOS. You will enjoy it, Is more than 1 year I am using the same, and my experience says only one word alll the time, Waaaaaooooo !!!
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