azhrei_fje
First Post
Well, Henry, it sounds like everyone has chimed in; the last post was almost two days ago.
If you're a newb, you'll want as much of a hand-holding environment as possible. Generally, I've found that this means you do not want The Latest and Greatest, because it hasn't settled down yet.
If you're looking to use this box at work (as in, your employers office), you might be better off with a distribution that your employer can obtain a service contract for in the future. While I don't believe in such contracts in general, many PHBs do (PHB=pointy-haired boss; think Dilbert
).
That means RedHat or SUSE in the USA, probably SUSE or Mandriva in Europe. RedHat has the largest market share in the USA (as far as can be determined, anyway) so there are plenty of other people using it and that means a vast community of users to help with any questions you might have. Many of those users will be in the same boat as you, so you won't be talked down to as is sometimes the case on the forums for the more "geeky" distributions.
SUSE has much better internationalization support than RedHat, if multiple language capability is important to you. The biggest problem I have with SUSE is the lack of multimedia support out-of-the-box, so to speak. MPlayer and friends are available for download (packman being the preferred site), but can sometimes be difficult to find or integrate into a customized system.
I have a RedHat 7.3 firewall, Fedora Core 3 on my Sony VAIO laptop, SUSE 9.2 and 10.0 on my Compaq laptop, KnoppMyth on a DELL Dimension desktop (with a TV tuner card in it), SUSE 9.1 on an old IBM ThinkPad, and a separate "sandbox" partition on the Compaq laptop that has the flavor-of-the-week. Right now, it's FC3 since I just taught a Linux Internals class last week. But next week it might have Ubuntu (a good OS, but I don't like the default brown theme), Kubuntu (I like KDE much better than GNOME), Debian, or Mandriva. I'm always downloading and trying out the latest distributions. I base my decision of which one to use on hardware support. Laptops are notorious for having poorly documented hardware, so a distribution that works immediately after install is a big plus. And SUSE 10.0 and Fedora Core 4 have been the best at it so far.
On my new POS eMachines T6212 (Athlon64 on MSI motherboard), SUSE 10.0 was the only OS that would boot, install, and work right away (even Windoze won't install from the recovery partition!). Even then I still had to tweak the boot line to get the 9-in-1 card reader to work (it's connected to the USB bus and this machine's BIOS screws up the IRQ assignments). On a server, you likely don't care...
I would suggest that you try a bunch of distributions until you find one you like. Fedora Core has a lot of support. SUSE focuses on KDE instead of GNOME and does a good job integrating the desktop. Ubuntu and Kubuntu tend to be more bleeding edge, which is important for new hardware but not so critical for older stuff. Mandriva is probably the simplest to install and use, but it's not available for free download.
Check out http://www.distrowatch.com/ where you can find one-paragraph descriptions of each of the major players before you decide...
Sorry, this rambled quite a bit. My goal was to point out that picking a good OS is like choosing the right automobile: it's very dependent on what is important to you and how much (money/time) you're willing to spend.
If you're a newb, you'll want as much of a hand-holding environment as possible. Generally, I've found that this means you do not want The Latest and Greatest, because it hasn't settled down yet.
If you're looking to use this box at work (as in, your employers office), you might be better off with a distribution that your employer can obtain a service contract for in the future. While I don't believe in such contracts in general, many PHBs do (PHB=pointy-haired boss; think Dilbert
).That means RedHat or SUSE in the USA, probably SUSE or Mandriva in Europe. RedHat has the largest market share in the USA (as far as can be determined, anyway) so there are plenty of other people using it and that means a vast community of users to help with any questions you might have. Many of those users will be in the same boat as you, so you won't be talked down to as is sometimes the case on the forums for the more "geeky" distributions.
SUSE has much better internationalization support than RedHat, if multiple language capability is important to you. The biggest problem I have with SUSE is the lack of multimedia support out-of-the-box, so to speak. MPlayer and friends are available for download (packman being the preferred site), but can sometimes be difficult to find or integrate into a customized system.
I have a RedHat 7.3 firewall, Fedora Core 3 on my Sony VAIO laptop, SUSE 9.2 and 10.0 on my Compaq laptop, KnoppMyth on a DELL Dimension desktop (with a TV tuner card in it), SUSE 9.1 on an old IBM ThinkPad, and a separate "sandbox" partition on the Compaq laptop that has the flavor-of-the-week. Right now, it's FC3 since I just taught a Linux Internals class last week. But next week it might have Ubuntu (a good OS, but I don't like the default brown theme), Kubuntu (I like KDE much better than GNOME), Debian, or Mandriva. I'm always downloading and trying out the latest distributions. I base my decision of which one to use on hardware support. Laptops are notorious for having poorly documented hardware, so a distribution that works immediately after install is a big plus. And SUSE 10.0 and Fedora Core 4 have been the best at it so far.
On my new POS eMachines T6212 (Athlon64 on MSI motherboard), SUSE 10.0 was the only OS that would boot, install, and work right away (even Windoze won't install from the recovery partition!). Even then I still had to tweak the boot line to get the 9-in-1 card reader to work (it's connected to the USB bus and this machine's BIOS screws up the IRQ assignments). On a server, you likely don't care...
I would suggest that you try a bunch of distributions until you find one you like. Fedora Core has a lot of support. SUSE focuses on KDE instead of GNOME and does a good job integrating the desktop. Ubuntu and Kubuntu tend to be more bleeding edge, which is important for new hardware but not so critical for older stuff. Mandriva is probably the simplest to install and use, but it's not available for free download.
Check out http://www.distrowatch.com/ where you can find one-paragraph descriptions of each of the major players before you decide...
Sorry, this rambled quite a bit. My goal was to point out that picking a good OS is like choosing the right automobile: it's very dependent on what is important to you and how much (money/time) you're willing to spend.
