Brilliant.. Practice practice practice.

What I did was started with mandrake (mandriva), switched through some other stuff, and ended up on Arch. Mepis and Ubuntu are both good newbie distros that are based off Debian, which has a massive user base. I love arch because it's simple, and works. I also like configuring things myself. Automagical configs tend to get in my way.

I had millions of sheets of paper everywhere around my desk lined with commands and various programs/things that I found important.

Keep at it, you'll get there. Just remember, the greatest thing about Linux is the community. Never be afraid to look for the answer, and if you can't find it. ask. ask. ask.

One thing I always tell my students is to never be afraid of asking a stupid question, you even learn from them. So, keep at it. You might even find, like me, that after a point, you get sick of everything being done for you, and you want an easy way to config your computer.

Oh ya, forgot to add.....

Debian based Linux distros seem to be the easiest to use. Im running Linux on an older machine (pentium2), so Im kinda limited to what I can use on this computer. Damn Small Linux (www.damnsmalllinux.org) seems to be pretty easy to use and configure. It has detected all of my hardware, w/out a problem.

I have heard some good things about Ubuntu. I used a live CD of it once, and it seemed REALLY easy to use. And it has lots of tools to configure it (like windows control panel)

anyways, find one you like and stick with it.

Adamant1988, have you considered Vector linux? its slackware based and as a relative 'newb' like yourself (ive been using linux for 6 months now) its great. some things are precompiled and work out of the box, and other things require you to think and ask questions. there is mp3 and video support, but say if you want to read .chm files, you will need to compile from source, so you still learn, it seems like the perfect bridge between Fedora core 4 (which was my first distro) and slackware (which will be my next distro, so i can learn more). also Vector comes with a good range of alternative window managers and semi desktops, for instance it comes with Fluxbox, IceWM, and XFCE window managers and optional Rox extensions which allow for icon support on the desktop and and an easy to use point-and-click folder system (which are all pre-configured options for you to try at the login screen). just keep trying different distributions untill you find one that gives you a foothold. also trying different distros allows us to look at different software, so go for something wildly different than FC4 or RH, and you might find a few programs that you like that you can migrate to another distro down the line, if you want to move on.

Actually that vector linux thing sounds pretty nice... I attempted to add support to my SUSE installation (for mp3s) but I was met with a dependancy hell in yast2 unlike any other. Basically I got a dependancy error for every single peice of software installed on the system already...

Frightened I was.

Suse 10.1 seems to be kind of 'hit or miss' with detecting my cd's and I'm getting a lot of errors at pretty random intervals. I'm figuring that I had a bad burn or download and some things got corrupted along the way... I'll look into Vector Linux

Jump in the deep end with Slackware/Vector or Debian. Any other distro all you are really learning is how to use that distro, if you want to get your hands dirty and really learn how to harness the power of Linux use Slack or Debian.

The Debian netinstall is very simple. Or you can use a livecd like Kanotix or Ubuntu and install it.
Vector will give you a working Slackware syetm and it is super easy to install plsu it boots super fast.

Another thing you might want to consider is running linux inside Vmware, that way you can play around with several distros as long as you have the space on your HD. I run Fedora Core5, SUSE, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS and PC-BSD this way; as well as windowsXP inside Debian.

The VM ware solution was an option but windows hates me... I attempted to install the VMware program and was met with an installation hang-up...

I could always try again though..

I've never really liked .RPM based distros, something about the .RPM packaging has always irked me the wrong way. In all honesty, if you really want to learn linux, you should use Slackware. It is, after all, the oldest linux distro out there. It's the most basic, and also one of my most solid. Vector is very solid too.

But, as I said before, as to your problem with YaST, I hate programs that try to do everything automatically for you. It takes away the degree of control that Linux gives the end user!

I have been wracking my brain over why people choose to install RPM/Debs over source. Yes source may take longer but it seems like it's worth it in the long run, and if I'm not mistaken, dependancies arent a big problem with source are they?