Yea Google is looking at adding an extension API as well, so you might find that one no longer true.

At this point though I am waiting for Chrome on the Mac. I might consider Opera sometime as well. The maint hing for me is that Firefox is leaving the area I enjoyed it for, being small fast and lean by default, in favor of incorporating things that would work better as etensions that come with the install. It has gotten progressively slower on startup for me. I am also looking at Chrome due to the per-tab processes though, that really was a good idea.

Seablade

I think I am gonig to give the new mint a spin.

Huh, it said that Fedora, mandriva, OpenSUSE and Kubuntu were 100% for me.

The results for me were that I try Gentoo or Slackware. Well I guess this makes sense since I've been a Gentoo user for years. But I must say the articles, though enlightening for those inexperienced to Linux, I think don't offer much for those who're already users.

My advice to anyone who wants try out Linux is to first try one of the many distributions on a "live-disc". As a matter of fact I would suggest trying at least 4 or 5 distros that way before installing any permanently.

There are so many differences between distros, as far as usability, convenience, ease of setup and operation, type of default GUI environment, complexity of user space tools, size of package repositories, size of installed user base, quality of help forums,... the list goes on.

The trick is to find out what you like and feel comfortable with, then run with it. The beauty of Linux is you can make it your own. Everything is customizable and each distro has it's own take on things.

Try it you'll like it!!!

Ciao

Due to an XP malfunction on my main PC, I turned to Ubuntu (not a big gamer)... 9.04 and 9.10 do all I want and more _ I have it on a 1Gb memory stick (9.10) and it was a breeze to install - now running the 64bit version... I have tried it on all of my netbooks, ranging from an Eeepc900 upwards and it works flawlessly 'out of the box'.. The biggest bugbear of ALL distros has been Wifi support, followed by sound.. (God help you if your laptop has a broadcomm adaptor)... Ubuntu is by far the best for this, sound and webcams....
I have experimented with Puppy, which is very fast, but wifi connectivity lets it down...
SUSE not bad, Wifi....poor...
Chrome OS works well though, still messing with that one...
Moblin - very very good, if you have an ATOM based netbook and want a quick boot and shutdown... Make sure your Wifi card is intel (I got it going on a Dell Mini9 with a push - Broadcomm wifi card again)...
gOS - very pleasingly odd - looks more like a MAC setup with the object dock and is aimed at 'cloud' computing... Wifi ok, but very buggy....
Messed with Mandrive in the past, good, but not tried it recently (always had poor support for PCMCIA cards)...

So, if you are a lazy M$ user and want to try Linux out use Ubuntu in my view....

Also if you have a netbook, Linux is faster and more suited for it esp if it is an Atom CPU or one of the Celeron 900's... The Via C7's work, but need a bit of fiddling with to sort out the CPU scaling.. Have found with the M$ bundled netbooks, XP is OK, win7 and Vista, so slllllooooowwww, plus they benefit with 2gb of RAM, which you don't need to do if you are running Linux...

(On a side note my Toshiba Satellite U200 runs all linux distros with no issues, yet to fathom that out.. Used it as a test bed for live cds and USB sticks...)....

Just to clarify, when you say sound you are meaning consumer sound. If you want professional sound Ubuntu is not a good choice, but those of us that do that are few and far between and if someone needs help with that it is better just to ask in a seperate thread and I can give you a hand

Seablade

Ive thought about turning an old Pentium 3 computer into a Linux system but again with so many distros I cant decide. My gut feeling was Ubuntu but Im still undecided.

If you are using a computer that old, you should go with Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux, or one of the other minimalist distributions really.

Seablade

What about a system with newer hardware? Would you recommend Ubuntu then?

Yes... Ubuntu is the most user friendly, esp the last two (9.04 and 9.10 where wifi is involved)... A lot of other distros are ubuntu based (which in turn is Debian based)... For a small Distro, puppy is good, and I have had Damn small Linux work albeit slowly on a thin client PC on a 128mb PCMCIA card as a hard drive, 8mb of system RAM and a 275Mhz CPU... Biggest issue was internet - too slow.... I am going to give Linux mint a good beating this weekend on a netbook....

I know that I'm responding to an old post, but I wanted to say that I've been using Zenwalk on my Dell Latitude C400 (Pentium 3 256MB RAM) and have not had any problems.

Actually its good you responded because I wasnt sure that kind of an old CPU could handle an OS.

I'll look into Zenwalk!

Actually with most linux distros you can run on anything newer than a Pentium (586). Easy way to tell is to see how the repositories are named or the extension to the names of the binaries. For example: if your distro lists a i686 or amd64 repo, the first would run on any hardware newer than a Pentium-pro the latter any AMD or Intel 64bit processor. Another example could be a binary named tar-1.22-i586.rpm would be compiled for any 32bit or 64bit processor equal to or newer than an original Pentium. On the other hand a binary named tar-1.22-amd64.rpm will run on any 64bit processor from Intel or AMD.

Check out different distros, most have more than one repo and each repo is compiled for different architectures. I don't know if this is still the case as I haven't run Debian in more than 5 years, but at that time they still compiled and supported the i386 which was 20 years old at that point. It may take forever to run an app on a 386 but it would indeed run on one.

I hope this clarifies things.

Ciao