I have used Fedora Core 3, Suse, Ubuntu & Gentoo (actually I'm still trying to use Gentoo). I'd say I'm a noob but with a lot of experience with windows that I have been able to translate across to linux. I prefer Fedora out of all of them. Suse was my first but I found it difficult to set up samba and integrate it into a windows network with kerberos. I left Linux for a while and when I had time I tried Fedora. I loved it so much I created a server at home and am now well ahead with a mythtv network. I have also run game servers with it. I also recently gave Ubuntu a try and its ok. Very easy to set up but I don't like the default configuration or the visual theme. I currently have Ubuntu as a media server.

I would reccommend Progeny Debian for a newbie. Real stable when compared to other flavors and more likely to survive newbie mistakes. LOL

I would recommend Lycoris, Xandros and Linspire, in that order. Yes, they all cost money... you get what you pay for... and it does including installation support.

The time investment in learning to use something like Fedora Core or Mandrake is just too big... but I imagine a newbie would just use web browser, email, IM and some productivity applications, maybe watch movies and play the occasional game, for that those three distros would be quite suitable.

I use Fedora Core 3, but only as a web server. I play a lot of games, so I use Windows XP, which I'm very happy with. I keep a 98 installation around for those games that don't work under 98.
I had a full-blown Mandrake 9.1 workstation at some point, even running DirectX games... and then it promptly destroyed its own partition.

Hi,

I like SuSe, Slax and Ubuntu!
You can discuss all distros in a single discussion list made specially for workstation configurations at: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/linux-workstation
(or subscribe via email: linux-workstation-subscribe@googlegroups.com)

Thanks,
Beco.

I have my father using Gentoo. But that's only because I'm giving support and Gentoo gives me power. If you're in the standard scenario, and the newb is on his/her own, I don't recommend said newb go Gentoo.

I highly recommend Linspire 5.0. I have it installed on a dual boot win xp pro.
it took me a while to figure out the wireless card but now that I have it working I am about ready to dump win xp for good. Linspire is very much like the windows enviroment, easy to use, many programs are available through their CNR. Great distro. Everything was recognized right off the bat except for the WiFi Card.

It have great support, and it's easy out-of-the-box

greetings from italy!!!
i'm a Suse (9.2 pro) user and i'm very happy...it's easy to install and to use, no problem with the upgrade and with the installation of software (thks RPM), no problem to share file with windows...
Great!
Igor

I went the SuSE way. Great distro and great support Forum @ http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?.

I am a newbie. I chose Suse. I can't comment on the others (except Fedora 3 - don't!) because I didn't (or haven't yet) tried them. I found SuSe to be very easy to install. It found all of my Gateway Solo9550 hardware. The only thing I still don't have working yet is my wireless Linksys pcmcia card. I like it so far.

Damn Small Linux (or DSL) is compact (at or under 50MB), reasonably complete, and totally rocks on older hardware. It will boot from CD, USB Key Drive, Hard Disk, or Compact Flash. You can find it at http://www.damnsmalllinux.org

Gentoo!!!

Ok, just kidding... but I'd recommend SUSE or Xandros

Knoppix

Big, bloated, Overwhelming. Knoppix features great detection scripts, but makes available too many choices to the novice.

Damn Small Linux

Slick. Great interface. With its lean approach, DSL allows persons to get right into the game.

Puppy

For the Windows 95/98 users. Requires configuring Internet access, a challenge for most -- even with the GUI auto detect applet.

AUSTRUMI

For the Windows 95/98 users. This Live CD gracefully ejects itself after loading its contents into RAM. Like Puppy, requires configuring Internet access, a challenge for most -- even with the GUI auto detect applet.

dyne:bolic

Great for music enthusiats. If you have a PC to dedicate as an mp3 server for a home network, dyne:bolic makes an excellent choice.

MoviX

Spectacular for movie enthusiasts. If you'er a MS Windows uers and want to burn your own self-contained players with movies, then this is the choice to decide.

The LiveCD List

Live CD List provides a great web app selection tool to help you decide.

LinuxLinks.com

Another great great web app selection tool to help you decide comes from LinuxLinks.com

Hellix is the easiest distro for newbies.

Beatrix (www.watsky.net) by a long shot! Small, very fast and very user friendly.

as a complete linux newbie, i managed to install mandrake 10, set up a sound card, and eventually, after much grief, get my modem up and running. still got a long way to go, but the trip has been great so far.

debian

I have not tried Ubunto or Knoppix. Xandros is simple, clean and user-friendly.

As a non-techie I was only 75% happy with Mandrake, but have finally found almost total bliss with Xandros (full retail distro). It found all my hardware, my ADSL connection and network was all configured for me, no problem with my three printers and two digital cameras. Even allows me to browse my Windows only PCs on the local network. It really just worked out of the box and apart from a slight problem with me not understanding how to install non-Xandros supported packages (I know now!) I have had no problems with it so far.

My personal PC system is not top notch, and is a bit of a home brew with all sorts of hardware addons, but it all works fine with Linux. I loved Xandros over Windows because it never asked me for driver disks etc etc, and it only took about 15 minutes from start to end of install.

I can see it becoming my fave, but I was also impressed with Mepis which also found all my hardware and certainly shows promise. I might just do an HD install of Mepis onto my son's PC to see how it goes in the near future.

But for now Xandros is simply the best so far for this newbie! :-)

Mike K
WALES/CYMRU

For someone who starts using linux, and does not have the financial capabilities to buy all the newest stuff. Then i would recommend Vectorlinux SOHO edition.

On older hardware it works out of the box, couldnt test it on newer hardware, because i don't have it. standard installed with all the packages you need for an small office and somewhat multimedia box.

comes standard with kde 3.3.2 installed so the step for windows users is very small
based on slackware, so it's pretty secure. The only thing you have to do is wanting to learn the system, otherwise you will be stuck with the stock packages of vectorlinx

And as personal note, not one other system runs as fast on my old machine even with kde witch is probably the heaviest wdm for linux

I would recommend Suze for any Linux newbie.

Ubuntu is good for slower computers. Kubuntu is good for faster computers. They are both pretty easy to use, and if you are using Ubuntu and are dissatisfied with GNOME, you can easily use apt-get to install KDE, and thus Kubuntu.

I've tried several distros and I recommend PCLinuxOS. Boot the CD and take it for a test drive, all the applications are there to try, then install to your hard drive.

It just works and you don't have to add apps because almost everything is already there ready to go: office wordprocs, spreadsheets, presentations, browsers, the Gimp, Xine, bittorrents, limewire...and updates are a snap using Synaptic.

I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva since release 8.something and have tried a spindle full of other distros and not one of them installed as easily as Mandrake. The installation is fast (depending on the software category selections) and totally graphical. Mandrake's partitioning tool is unquestionably the best of the lot. The reason I would recommend Mepis over Mandrake is unless you buy the boxed version or pay for the same as a download, you will have to install Java, Macromedia flash, Realplayer, as well as proprietary ATI and nVidia drivers yourself. While thiss is easily done using urpmi, or Mandrake's package tool, the setup may be daunting for the command line challenged. You will then have to configure Firefox or Konqueror for these programs. Mepis enables all of these in the free download version. Mepis is also less bloated installing from one cd compared to four for Mandrake, assuming you install all packages. If something you need is missing, Synaptic a graphical package manager, can install from any Debian software source.

Rich D.

I tried several distros before I settled on Mandriva, including SuSE, Red Hat, Fedora and Ubuntu. I'm an IT Professional in the Windows/Novell world and decided to switch to Linux at home about 6 months ago. All the distros above were good. They all have their little quirks but overall I found Mandriva to be the most stable, easiest to navigate and find/install apps, etc. I spend all day working on computers and the last thing I want to do after work is spend all night at home working on computers. I felt that Mandriva made the switch less painful and it seems I have less maintenance involved. I use Mandriva on my work laptop as well now.

As a "newbie" to linux, I had a hard time trying to read your current issue (June 2005). Scrolling to the next page took me to Page 3, and I could not find or get pages 1 and 2. The cover page had the "hand" run all over it, but nothing clickable. Etc. ad nauseum.

I find little value in one BIG file for this zine when it could have a table of contents and separate web files (or pointers to sections) without having to eat the whole pie at one sitting. We're on the Web, not in a printing press, remember? How about giving your zine some of the flexibility that the Web makes available!

And then we have "The URL of your homepage is not valid. Remember that it must be fully qualified, i.e. of the form http://example.com/directory." Can't handle a Web URL without the http://? Goodness gracious!

Oh yes, and what's all that stuff below this box that's labelled "Formatting guidelines"? And then it says "More information about formatting options" below that! You appear to have limited capability in handling a Web Site. Sorry!

I run Windows XP Pro on a 3.3GHz machine with 2 GB ram, and have Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat both installed and running fine on all other uses. Been in the business using Windows and its predecessors for over 20 years.

err this thread seems to be drifting from "what distribution you would recommend to a newbie" to "what distribution do you prefer". So far, I've been trying different live-cd distributions and so far I haven't noticed many major differences between them. All of them detected my hardware fine (except for PCLinuxOS, which didn't mount my ntfs drives, maybe I have a corrupt disk) and I had instant internet right out of the box with all of the distros (i use a router, which makes connecting under different OSes so much easier).

My impression of different distros so far is that they keep reinventing the wheel. Newbies really don't need to have 300 distro options if all of them are running KDE and OpenOffice. What newbies really need is to know that they can install linux and that it will work right out of the box and that it will look similar enough to Windows or MacOS.

In my opinion, what tends to scare newbies away are all of the not-so-descriptive software acronyms (such as WINE, XMMS, GIMP etc).
Sure most linux users know what these are, but a newbie will find it a lot easier to understand names like Windows Media Player and Photoshop (or even stuff like WallpaperChanger.exe).

As for what distribution to recommend, I'd say knoppix was the easiest to find, download and get running (mind you I had absolutely no linux experience whatsoever at the time and I still am quite a newbie myself). SimplyMepis has a nice install-from-live-cd icon right on the desktop, but it took me some 15 minutes to find the iso on the website. So for the whole demystification purposes, knoppix is my choice for a newbie.

Xandros ; I feel is the best for newers

I've used Mandrake for years, and have found it very easy to use. I would have no trouble suggesting it to a newbie. I have in the past tried RedHat, Suse, Debian, Linspire and Mepis, in an effort to see if there was anything better than Mandrake. In each case, I was disappointed. RedHat and Debian were very difficult to install/manage -- Mandrake did a much better job of auto-installing all the right stuff for my hardware. I had trouble with Suse -- but it could be just that I was so familiar with Mandrake, and Suse was too different. The problem with Mepis was that it didn't have many packages available -- with Mandrake (and the Penguin Liberation Front), I get easy access to thousands of apps -- all the good stuff. And it all works pretty much without issue, out of the box. I've used Knoppix quite alot, as an emergency repair sort of thing. I've never considered it a viable alternative as a desktop OS -- not enuf apps! Linspire seemed nice, but again, app availability wasn't as good as Mandrake, and you have to pay rent to boot. I don't know about Ubuntu and Kubuntu. I think I would much prefer Kubuntu, as I'm definitely a KDE kinda guy.

Bottom line: for a person who wants a half-home-oriented, half-business-oriented uber OS which they can use for everything, which is easy to install (finds/installs all your hardware correctly), and easy to maintain (has thosands of apps available -- all the good stuff), and easy on the eyes (KDE, nicely put together), then Mandrake/Mandriva is an excellent choice.

Linspire is the very best distro by far!! Everything else is a joke compared to Linspire.

Not even mentioning SuSE as a distribution for the newbie really sucks. It's got the best manuals of any and is widely regarded as very user-friendly. In contrast, Knoppix isn't really a distro, just a good test kit, which also happens to be able to be transferred to hard disk.

Usually I don't even bother to comment on crappy biased polls like these...

I would and have, recommend Linspire Five-O. The ease of installation and the minimal cost to use the Click-n-run has saved my friends countless hours getting their systems running.

Linspire

As an advanced Windows user and novice UNIX user (I'm a DBA by trade), I decided to install Linux on an old Dell P3 that we'd been using for a doorstop to use as my PHP/MySQL development sandbox. Looking for “free

SUSE is pretty good & reasonably easy to use

definitely yoper

Mandrake/mandrive is by far the easier and friendlier distro I have tryed from installation to configuration and usage
Santo

Hi all,

Well I would "HEARTILY" Recommend ANY LINUX DIST. Over Windows Simply because it's LINUX.. but I truly feel that for a noob... Mandriva has got to be the simplest choice.. it's installer set the bar that others try to achieve, and it's usability is beyond compair.. On the downside to Mandriva. it's not exactly Small machine friendly.. I have a small 700 Mhz. Pc in my network here at home and I don't think I would run Mandriva on anything much smaller.. tho I am sure it will. It will probably wind up disappointing, for smaller computers I would say that "Damn Small Linux" ( DSL ) would be best..

An added plus is that Mandriva Move is their live CD version that runs from CD and also their ( Commercial ) Live CD has the ability to save your settings on a USB Thumb drive :)

Just my two cents.

Tho above and beyond.. Linux over WinBlows any day of the week regardless of what distro. It's worth the investigation and your time.
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Can we drop all the code-head speak and post in plain english? I'm getting real tired of windows and I want to learn linux. I'm looking for a graphical interface that I can learn quickly and install without needing to know all kinds of code and command line junk. I want to install it on a PII 400 or an older Mac G3. Can anyone help me out?