Brian wrote:

> Hi all,
> I've been wanting to switch to linux for awhile now but am getting
> confused about which distro to try. I've heard great things about
> Mandrake but I've been hearing good things about Fedora also. On a
> Windows geek scale of 1 to 10 I'm a 7 (which would probably be around 2
> for linux... lol) I've heard that mandrake may be having some financial
> problems so would it be wise to learn on it?

I would suggest a Debian based distribution such as knoppix (or even Debian
GNU Linux itself), etc.

The package management system of Debian is really the best that I have
experienced in many years of linux use. One of my gripes about the distros
I grew up with was the need to download an rpm, try to install it, find
that it had dependencies and go looking for the new package as well. At
least that is how things used to be with RedHat. I am told that stuff is
now getting better there too.

If you are really interested in learning everything hands on, go for
Slackware. I have learnt more about linux in 2-3 months of using Slackware
than I did in nearly 2 years of using Redhat. However, Slack is not very
newbie friendly (if that newbie is coming from losedoze).

Btw. there is no such thing as a windows geek 

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]