Linux distro for a beginner

"something easy to start out with" and "learn linux to its full potential" seem almost oxymoronic, although I wouldn't call them impossible.

To learn linux to its full potential many linux users, including to some degree myself swear by Gentoo. Once during the installation it makes you feel like putting a gun to your head, the job has been done, quite successfuly at that. Gentoo is difficult, but once you have it going it will be like a rock and very friendly. Not to mention gentoo probably has the best documentation and most active user forums of any distribution (except for possibly Ubuntu).

To take the easy way out, yes, PCLInuxOS is great, used it myself for a little while. The downside is that until .93 (full not minime) comes out .92 is not really "bleeding edge" and in fact actually down right missing some very IMPORTANT linux developments that have taken place in the last 1/2 year, most notibly modular xorg7 (which also is required to install xgl / compiz, which is quite nice), Some of my other recommendations from this ballpark are Ubuntu Dapper , Mandriva 2006, Kannotix, and Zenwalk.

To get a happy blend of the 2, that is a learning experience and a pretty easy setup, I would recommend my current choice, Arch Gimmick. You start out by installing a base system, connecting to the network, and then using their package manager, pacman to install everything else. Its very flexible since after installing xorg, you get to pick which WM you want be it KDE, Gnome, XFCE, e17, Windowmaker, Fluxbox, or IceWM. You also then go on to installing the programs you want for office (openoffice or koffice or gnome-office or abiworld), to internet programs (gaim or kopete, thunderbird, evolution, or kmail, firefox, epiphany, opera or konqueror) to media players (xine, xmms, mplayer, etc) and so forth....bottom line.. you build your own system! Furhtermore, its i686 optimized so it will be fast (not quite where gentoo is, but much faster than ubuntu which is i386)

depends what chip you have. if you have a P4 then x86 is where you wanna go. if you have a PM x86 is where you wanna go. if you have AMD64 you go amd64 if you want it in 64 bit mode, or x86 if you want it in 32bit mode. not sure what alpha and hppa are. ppc is motorola/ibm powerpc, sparc is what SunMicrosystems uses on their systems, so dont worry about it either.

gentoo is not as hard as people make it seem. ok, yeah, its hard, you just gotta be willing to read, google, experiment, and have the nerve to work through all the littel details that other distros set up for you automatically, but its by far the best way to learn linux

I am using and loving Myah2.0. It is Slackware based fast,stable,upgradable etc. Also since slack based huge community. I think you might want to stick with 32 bit X86 code until comfortable with Linux as 64 bit still pretty rough around the edges unfortunately.

Linspire is the easiest Linux to use.

i tried myah2 but it just wasnt working out for me. also it uses xorg 6.9, modular xorg is better in terms of flexibility, and the compiz / xgl configuration which can be pretty leet. in terms of a slack based os i actually recommend zenwalk and vector.

you're kidding me right?

linspire is dog slow. hell, ubuntu is no speed demon but comared to linspire it feels like gentoo for crying out loud. i couldn't figure out networking under it for the life of me. dhcpcd would fail to connect my lan AND wlan rendering me completely networkless. those flash demos they have preloaded, 1 word: google! and lastcly, cnr... why would anyone in their right mind pay for a package manager when you have APT (since linspire is a debian based distro). if you are not a debian user there are better package managers still out htere (portage, pacman, sourcery, conary). overall linspire Five-0 gets thumbs down.

I have tried many Linux versions and Linspire was the easiest to use in my case. Also I never had any issues with hardware everyhitng always worked out the box. This is just my experance I am nto a linux user and I was just telling the person asking what the easiest was for me.

For the record, the alpha choice on Gentoo is for alpha chips I believe, they were a chip that was bought out some time ago and disbanded unfortunatly, especially since they were they first to break the GHZ barrier on clock speed and from what i Have been told were EXELLENT chips.

Seablade

ABF ,
This is NOT a flame
Just because it didn't work for you doesn't make it trash ! I myself found Linspire 5.0 the EASIEST to install on my equiptment (M6811) with EVERYTHING working out of the box. And without problems This is the main problem I find with Linuxin general, what works on one box might not on another . Kind of like building your own comp. sometimes misc. parts cause errors or conflicts . To just say one distro is better overall without the same equiptment is misguided! I find myself guilty of promoting distros that work for me but try not to discourage as too many veriables in hardware to flat out say don't try it! As long as it's not windows we have done our job.

GRR - F**K Arch - I just spend hours trying to set up Arch - why couldn't they tell me that once installed your let out in the middle of nowhere. If before installing you don't print out how to set up network and xfce with pacman - you'll be busted.

As long as I can't install a desktop environment without internet it is nowhere near a beginner distribution. Might be quick - but it's a pain to start up and install packages via the commandline not knowing what to do. If it could provide a --help which tells you to use pacman it would be allright. I consider it a bloddy expert distribution. Never crashed my sytem so badly before (didn't have any other installation cd's and it took me three hours by trying out how to get windows back into grub bootloader).

Ok time for me to correct something. If hardware works in one distro it CAN work in any distro.

What makes a distro better or worse varies from person to person, for some people it will be how easy it is to customize, or how fast it runs, or how well it handles hardware out of the box.

However I do agree with ABF, I wouldnt touch Linspire myself, not only do I not believe it is all that great of a distro, but there are some ethical issues as well with how they deal with Open Source I have heard about that make me question it on occasion. Plus I like Gentoo and Ubuntu to much

Seablade

If you having bootloader issues use this http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing.../diskdirector/

Best bootloader evermade.

Well for beginners Linspire is perfect its easy to instlal easy to setup and easy to use. It also includes most things anyone will need. Another good one is Novell's Suse Desktop.

For me the only distribution which I got running without big probs is dapper drake. However I still havent succeded in patching the kernel with phc and undervolting it. I allways get errors upon make. I even installed KDE to use Kompile - but it didn't work either.

As well Linux is far to fast to push my CPU frequency up - It nearly always runs at 1000 Mhz minimum while surfing and doing nothing else. As well it doesn't support my tv-card as there are no drivers yet. (very new chipset - There doesn't even exist one single prog in windows to fully use it). Otherwise I could use linux as working environment. So for the moment I only keep it as back up in case I get a virus or something.

Must say I'm a linux noob.

Having like ABF used a fair amount of distros in my time I can say that I disagree with this. To each their own, I find Linspire, Suse, and the like tend to cause more problems than they fix with their customized tools for system administration. They may be good in a corporate environment(Well RedHat and Suse anyways) but for the personal user I tend to believe there are better. Not to mention at least Suse will install everything but the kitchen sink for your basic user, and if you ask it, it will throw in the kitchen sink. This causes a lot of bloat, though I have been told it has gotten better in recent versions I dont try it because I find anywhere I would have reccomended Suse or the like, I find Ubuntu tends to run much better. I used to reccomend Suse for a newb distro, until I realised how much bloat and other useless things it did. It would run on the computer fine, just would do a million and one things I never needed it to do and as a result slow down what I needed done.

Again this is just my opinion, like everyone's it should be taken with a grain of salt as YMMV.

Seablade

the concept is that you have a 2nd computer which you use to look up the wiki on while you do the work. that said, pacman is one of the easiest package managers i ever used, one of the fastest too. simply "packman -Sy package" and you've got it going on. so to install xfce you simply do "pacman -Sy xorg xfce4" and it will install xorg 7 and xfce 4.3 or if you do xfce-cvs it will install the most recent cvs build, which is pretty cool too. you DONT need a gui tool to configure networking. simply use ifconfig, dhcpcd, and if using wireless wireless-tools to do all the work through the terminal, very easy for example to bring my wireless up all i did was

done! no tools needed. i mean, i am not trying to claim here arch is perfect, but its not as difficult as you make it sound. furthermore, you're free to use the latest 0.7.2 FULL cd http://www.archlinux.org/download.php called arch-0.7.2.iso (not base) you can install a desktop and xorg7 straight from cd... you can choose gnome, kde, xfce, and icewm and windowmaker i believe just from the cd. so yeah, much like suse, its able to give you everything and the kitchen sink... from 1 cd, not 5!

Ok I guess I should clarify, work with minimal hassle! (I can't to this day fix all my errrors). Some don't have two computers, some want to install and run, some don't want to have to learn, some don't want or need to customize . But for anyone to pronounce one distro better for eveyone is foolish. Now for Linspire charging for open source, I believe they charge for conveniance and support . You don't like it don't support them (but just because you don't like their bussiness model or their software didn't work for you, can you really say it's terrible for all? ) . I paid for it and it worked for me and alot of other folks too as they are still open . That being said I no longer use Linspire as I found other distro's that fit me better . I read alot and tried alot and in no way shape or form claim that what I recommend is gospel. I say again as long as it's not M.S. ! It is all good.

Well I did indeed download the full CD,

However when I tried to install the packages that include XFCE - the installation crashed. Worse even trying to install the driver repository.

Indeed pacman doesn't seem to be difficult. However having no printer I have to write out everything before installing it. Before installation I read the whole helpfile from arch with their philosophy and so forth, nowhere however did they speak a word about pacman and how to configure my 2915 wifi which is Wep encrytpted.

I like linux for desktop PCs - for notebooks its just too complicated for me. (compiling a kernel and patching it just to get what rmcclock does in 3 minutes under windows). On top of it is unacceptable that my CPU runs average 1,4 Ghz while doing nothing else then writing this post under dapper. My fan is louder than while encoding an xvid under windows.