fedora or debian?
 

which is better for a somewhat new linux user, debian or fedora?

hmm fedora out of the two
u cud also consider Mandrake

Stock answer is:
Check our Reviewssection for opinions
Also go to DistroWatch for even more reviews
And Search LQ - questions on "which is the best distro for...." are asked on a daily basis.

My opinion is Fedora

I have been told that debian is by far one of the hardest distro's to use. I am ver new to linux and was recomended redhat. Since that recomendation, I have loaded redhat 3 times and have had very few problems.

I have tried debian, and had to get three diferent experts to help me just get it installed, and after they all left, I broke it the next day trying to install a program. always have to check what the apt-get is doing before you say yes to go ahead with it.

go redhat 9.0, or fedora core 1. fedora core 2 is still testing, but promises to be better than the first.

well ive been using debian for a while and i had originally started with redhat and ive found that debian is actually pretty simple to use. i think the apt-get system is very well done and other distros, like slackware, were impossibly hard to install correctly and actually ended with crashes during the injstaller. so i started the poll just out of curiosity really.

I'd say Fedora. Debian is not bad, but once you get it working, it works just as well with apt-get as Fedora/Redhat does. Some things with Debian are archaic though, the installer is pre-historic and buggy. I've a cyclone network card that worked great with Potato 2.x, but would not work with Woody 3.0, even using the very same arguments to install the network card...

Still, Debian has it's place. If you have a very low end machine, most likely Fedora won't install on it, while Debian will (i386).

If you are going to try Debian, try getting a Debian-based distro as Libranet. It has hardware detection and a nice installer.

As stated above, be careful with apt-get. It will brake your distro sooner or later. That's why I'm coming back to Slackware. You compile the program, it works, just that simple... those fancy tools brings more pain then hope sometimes...

hey, only I've voted the pool?, lol :)

Tried both; Debian was a non-starter; Fedora was OK. Overall I'd suggest taking a look at other distros too. -- J.W.

I couldn't agree more. I've been using Linux for around a month and started with Libranet. It had no problems detecting my USB mouse (as some other distros did) and the only manual adjustments I had to make were to use the generic VESA driver for my video card.