Hello Guys

You've probably head this question a million times before and for that I apologise. I havce been using windows for years and I am looking for a new challenge now, I have decided on Linux.

I know its not going to be easy and I am willing to put the effort in. The only thing I need to decide now is which distribution to use. I have not seen anything definitive about the ins and outs of each one. I am looking to use it only on a single desktop. Does anyone have a URL that explains the features of each distribution? Or is anyone willing to post it here.

Whatever it is, thanks a lot in advance.

http://distrowatch.com
http://www.linuxquestions.org/reviews/index.php

if you think we've heard it a million times did you actually try searching for one of those other posts?

Yes, but must have overlooked what I was looking for. Thanks for the info though.

http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html

is a good place to learn about the diff. distro's. I ended w/ Slackware 9.0, and I'm really happy with my choice.

-jayjwa

So you would recommend Slackware for a complete newbie?

You can do what I did.. try em all

Started with Mandrake, went to Red Hat for awhile, then Debian, then a Knoppix hard drive install and now to Slack 9.1

Each has their relative strengths and weaknesses, find the one that suits you best.

If you're looking for a challenge, try Slack.

When you guys are trying out all these distros, are you compleatly dumping the old one or adding a small partition of for different distros?

I'm on mandrake9.1 now, and with all the problems I'm having with my hardware, I'm getting ready to try SuSE... I have alot of unused/unpartitioned space on my drive still (about 10-20Gig)

I'm thinking of keeping drake, just so I can work with it once in a while as I get to know linux, see if I can actually get it working.

You can replace your distro with a new one, or, since you have a lot of free space, you can make new partitons for them. They could share certain partitions, such as /boot and swap.

I actually dumped them eachl when I switched. You can always install a new distro and update your LILO or GRUB to allow you to switch.

What I did was partition my HD when I first installed windows. I set it up with hda1 as windows, hda2 as linux (ext2), and hda3 for swap.

I currently have 3 going.. WinXP, Slack, and slack.old. I recompiled my kernel so I kept my old kernel as slack.old just in case.

You dont need more than a 3-5GB partition to give a distro a good test. With the size of disk drives being what they are now days you can have as many distros installed as you like, and play till your hearts content.