Gotta be the finest thing since sliced bread. I am shocked! About 10 yrs back I got pi$$$ed at Windows98 and went looking for an alternative. My first distro was a store bought ML 9.0 (I think.) It sucked. Tech support was pure agony. Thanks to forums like LQ,I got over it and have run dual boot Linux for years. Slackware is (and will probably always will be) my favorite but Mandriva is amazing.

I bought a new Acer 5610 brand new,out of the box with Vista pre-installed. Whatta piece of garbage. I'm now triple booting Slackware,Ubuntu and Mandriva.

(What I'm getting at)

I've lived free (not as in beer but software) for 10 yrs. Go buy your favorite distro.

(Sorry if this post is incoherent but I'm flipping around thru drak3d.) Amazing.

Is it already 10 years since Win98 was hot stuff? Wow..

Every Linux distribution has evolved a great deal. Back when I started out, there were not much Linux support around, GUIs were a whole lot uglier (if any) and I had never even dreamed about a place like LQ (which has been standing for seven years now, right?). Heck, the whole thing called "internet" was all new and shiny then

I dislike paying for licences (as in Microsoft or most Windows software), but paying for good software or it's support is sensible. No idea what Mandrake costs today, but I assume it's not too much compared to what you get.

I have been a faithful Mandrake / Mandriva user since about 1998 (about the time Win98 released). My first Linux distribution was RedHat 5.2 (such a disappointment), couldn't even get it to boot to a command prompt (tried several times to install it). The experience nearly convinced me to stick with Windows, but then I saw a box of Mandrake Linux 6.5 (the O'Reiley release of Mandrake 6.1), so I decided to give it a try. The install went well, and the GUI even worked on the first try. I started with Mandrake because it worked on the computer I had at the time, but I kept using it because of the Newbie mailing list. The people on the Newbie mailing list always seemed willing to help new users with problems. They did not always give me the fix, but they always helped me learn how to find it myself. This often included the dreaded "RTFM!" statement, but it was usually deserved. Sadly, such a response appears to be considered bad form today, but I think it is what drove me to do the work myself, and eventually helped me learn enough to become proficient (note how I avoid the guru word - I am certainly not that good). I think that the LQ Mandriva forum is the modern Mandrake newbie mailing list, but in such an improved form, and I hope it serves to help today's new Linux users to become proficient as well.

I have tried several Debian flavors, RedHat (and Fedora - several times), Suse, and a number of smaller (less popular) distributions, but I always return to my Mandriva because I am familiar with it and I miss my MCC, so I guess MCC is the reason I stick with Mandriva today. Until about a year ago I dual booted Mandriva and WinXP. Now I have XP in a VM so I can run it from within Mandriva when I need to. I also have another VM set up for other Linux distributions so I can check them out when I get curious.

There is one thing I have learned, and that is that (generally speaking) Linux is Linux no matter which distribution you choose. All distributions are built on the same source code base. The differences between distributions are found in the distribution specific software and configuration utilities, or in the manner in which the distribution is organized. There is no best distribution. There is only a best distribution for me, (Mandriva). The best distribution for you could be Mandriva, but it could also be Fedora, Suse, Knoppix, Debian, Ubuntu, PCLOS, or any of a thousand others. Do not be afraid to experiment. If you have a working system (Linux or Windows) on a fast computer with plenty of RAM, get a VM installed and try out Linux distributions with it (to protect your existing OS installation). f you are not already, maybe you'll get as hooked on Linux as I did.

My dad loves Linux. He used to show me different flavors on his box. They were very ugly and unappealing to me. After that, my friend introduced me to RedHat (7 or 8). I installed it as a dual boot with Win98. I used it for a few months. It was too much work for me to learn it. Plus, I wasn't sure about file sharing compatibility. So, I uninstalled it.

However, I liked RedHat enough to give Linux a try a few years later. I had messed up XP by installing too much hardware at one time. The computer shut down. I had no idea why. After many crashes with Win98, I was not happy to be doing this again with XP.

So, I did my research and tried Mandriva -- my dad seemed to like Mandrake a whole lot, too. I fell in love! I have since looked at Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS, but they don't impress me as much.

[I have to say that using open source software on Windows was the biggest draw for me. I was going to use oss anyway on Windows, so why not switch?]