Where do you go to school??

Sorry for being off-topic, I've just never heard of any school (at least in the US) using Linux-based computers before.

Ok, this more like a personal option but as many mentioned, download live CDs and see which one you like better. This is my farm:

1)Home Server: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
2)Laptop: W$nxp and OpenSuse 11
3)Desktop: Ubuntu 9.04
4)Jump Drive: BackTrack 3

and I'm downloading FEDORA 11 to add it to my laptop.
Good Luck and HAVE FUN!!!

Hi,
As with a lot of the other respondents i too have tried a lot of different distros and for a newbee making the switch from Windows i would go with Linux Mint - another debian off shoot like Ubuntu but has a few added extras that make it even easier to use and has nice attractive interface as well, if your into that sort of thing.

Cheers.

If you are working with older computers, I would like to suggest two other distributions, with apologies to those who have suggested that you select one of the top ten distros at distrowatch.com.

I am not sure where these two distros are found in the list, however, I have found them both to work very well, with minimal difficulty installing and configuring, compared with other distributions, or with Windows XP.

Crunchbang
Puppy

I think they are both very well done, especially for slightly older computers with a 32 bit cpu.

Both of these distributions work as well with more modern computers too, but most of my time is spent using them on older hardware, and they are both simple to work with, in my experience, compared with all of those other distros, listed above, in the preceding posts. yes, I have tried them all!!

Regards,
CAI ENG

Hi,
As per my suggestion go for fedora 11 very user friendly and you will like windows operating system and in November they are releasing fedora 12 also

Fedora were two originations combined working Redhat company and fedora company .

You can download fedora 11 from INTERNET it is free

Well, is in a "operating systems" class in our school.

In fact, we install Ubuntu on a bunch of IBM servers, configure a dns server, web server and samba server.

I hope that answers your question MrCode

I disagree with only the top 10, though it's an excellent place to start. Ubuntu (and derivatives like Kubuntu) are known for extreme user friendliness but they do not like proprietary drivers and codecs (thought it only takes a couple clicks to fix that). I personally run Gentoo but that is definitely NOT for beginners but Sabayon, which is based on Gentoo and comes with KDE or GNOME and is a complete system right out of the box, is great. I installed it on my laptop (with a Atheros/Broadcom wireless card) and everything worked right out of the box. I had wireless, audio, and all the apps I needed -- OpenOffice (office suite), Amarok (music), Kmail (mail), and even games right out of the box. It also refused to take out libdvdcss (used to play and rip encoded DVDs) in order to be hosted on more mirrors and be placed on the cover of magazines. And if there is anything else you need you can just open up it's package manager and search for it, then click it to install. Also, Sabayon is ranked 7th for page hits on Distrowatch.

Fedora is a great distro but is even worse than Ubuntu about proprietary drivers and is rather bloated as it comes with GNOME and KDE (assuming you go with the DVD rather than CD) but I guess it's better to have it even if you don't need it rather than have to install it.

Mandriva is $50 for the latest version if I am not mistaken? I also have not used Madriva so I cannot comment on it.

There is also Linux Mint which is based on Ubuntu but includes better media support (proprietary codecs) and is a great distribution with what many consider to be the best package management and it is extremely user friendly.

The major distributions are compared here and if you click on one you can get some more info and where to download it from.

I would reccomend Sabayon or LinuxMint.

That is if you go for the 'PowerPack'. Mandrive Free & One cost nothing like many other distros available for download.

That's not quite accurate either. They choose not to include proprietary drivers and codecs that are not free in the open source context.

NVIDA and ATI cards both require closed source drivers for good hardware acceleration. It is only a matter of clicking and icon in the system tray and selecting yes in the dialog that pops up to enable them but some people dislike that "idea". And many things like libdvdcss are not installed to begin with, but they are easy to install. On Fedora, however, you have to add third party repositories to get libdvdcss so...

You cannot go wrong with the out of the box media support of Mint and Sabayon.

My advice is experiment with all distros , be it ubuntu, fedora, mandriva etc. basically all are the same but with different flavours, with some tweeking here and there. So first try with the first disto that you can put hands on.
Some distos like ubuntu are available as live CDs which allows you to test without installing on HDD. Others need installation on HDDs. So keep one drive (partition) say of 20 GB for your "experiments with linux", which can be reused.
Secondly you shall be ready to experiment and also be ready to do a lot of googling. Configuring the video, printer, modem and other peripherals may be problematic as no installation or driver disks are available for linux. Many a times I spent long hours in configuring the video cards and printers.
If every thing goes fine, ubuntu will be much near to winxp in look and feel.

wow I just finished installing Fedora 11 and I really like it! lol

Another Opinion about Distro's
 

I'm just going to offer my opinion, which is worth, well... You know.

If you want a distro that will let you do basic things and installs in
in a snap, try something like X-Ubuntu. Very cool and runs well with limited resources.

For something that is very polished and reliable but can still work as a serious workstation, try the most recent Fedora. I liked it but there were a couple of application issues with it's own version of Java, and I'm not smart enough to want to fool with it. :-)

My favorite for a very long time is Slackware. I think it combines the best of both worlds in terms of ease of use teaching us how to do things. I find it the most "Unix Like" of all the distro's I've seen.

Everyone else here had great advise too, you might also check www.lwn.net, the Linux Weekly News, it has a huge distro list too.

Have fun!

Photon Blizzard

I use ubuntu 8.04 at home. It is the best stable release till now. ( only my opinion ) . I am looking forward to Ubuntu 9.10 ( Karmic Koala).

Wait for Oct 29, and you will get one of best desktop Linux ever i.e. ubuntu 9.10

I will add my 5 öre advice here too ;)

First, try what friends have. That is THE recommendation from me. If no friends run Linux, you should continue read :)

I would recommend Ubuntu (any flavor) or Mint as they are Debian based and adjusted for easy use (All you do in Ubuntu or Mint you can do in Debian, buy you have to make more choices yourself)

In Ubuntu you could install on a separate disk partition, but if you want to try you don't need that.

Just insert an Ubuntu installation CD when MS Windows runs and autostart from the CD. It then will create a large file in MS Windows file system, use it as a hard disk and install Ubuntu on it. The when you boot your machine, it will ask if you want to run Ubuntu or MS Windows.
It will also make it uninstallable from MS Windows if you don't like it, like ordinary MS Windows programs (should) do.
It will be a bit slower then installing on a real partition, but works ok to test.

Another way is to install VirtualBox in MS Windows (or MacOS X) and install Linux distributions in that. This is very easy to install, start and remove an installation from Virtual Box. I really recommend this if you cant do an installation in a MS Windows file as I mention above or if you want to test another distribution than Ubuntu.

So I suggest in order one of these:
1) Install Ubuntu from MS Windows in a large file, aprox 4-10 GB, on C: disk (You choose Ubuntu or MS Windows when you start your computer)

2) Install VirtualBox and in a virtual machine in VirtualBox install any Linux distribution you want to test. Here you have to have at least 768 MByte RAM free for the virtual machine and aprox. 4-10 GB disk space for each virtual machines virtual hard disk.

3) Prepare MS Windows disk (check disk and defragment) and then boot some modern Linux distributions installation media, CD or USB memory stick, to make room for itself and then install Linux there for dual boot (choose what to run when machine starts). (if possible, make a separate partition for /home to store user files in)

Service at hand...

Distrowatch has a search engine that can be set for different hardware, needs, etc., giving you suggestions to narrow the field.

http://distrowatch.com/search.php