Subj : Re: Linux for a Beginner To : comp.os.linux From : robertharvey Date : Fri Jul 02 2004 06:36 am drietow@hotmail.com (David R) wrote in message news:... > I'm a Windows person who grew up from DOS to Windows 3.0 and now > Windows XP. Now I want to try Linux but there are so many > distrabutions (I don't know the proper term). Is there one > distribution that stands out for beginners over the others? Should I > buy with support or download? This is something of a chestnut, I'm afraid, and often leads to a flame war of one sort or another. Me, I use Suse, and you will get some support if you buy the boxed copy. You get a rather good book too. After that it gets complicated - Linspire and Xandros may have the most familiar user interface, but what's the point of trying something new if you then pretend it's something else? Suse is close to vanilla KDE/Gnome desktops - Red hat messed them about a bit more, and Mandrake is more closer to the spirit of the desktops but the installer and software tools aren't quite as nice as Suse. But frankly, the difference between distros is much smaller than the leap to Linux in the first place. Get hold of one of the runs-from-a-booted-CD demos, the so called "live" distros [1] like Knopix, Suse Live, Mandrake Move, and have a fiddle. It doesn't hurt. .