On Aug 20, 2009, at 12:07 AM, Jason House wrote:
Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro at the moment. It's easy to
install, keep up to date, and find help. I highly recommend it for
newcomers to Linux. I have not tried the other distro's recommended
in this thread but do like Ubuntu better than others I have tried.
There are a couple of factors that you may want to take into account:
- Number of packages: Ubuntu and OpenSUSE are very comfortable in this
respect, since they do not only offer many packages in the default
repositories, but allow users to offer personal package repositories.
- Bleeding edge-ness: Some distributions ride on the edge, the upside
is up to date software, the downside is that they break more often.
E.g. Arch, Gentoo, and Fedora are typical bleeding edge distributions,
while Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)/CentOS are very conservative.
- Support time: some distributions are supported for years with
security and reliability updates (for instance seven years for RHEL/
CentOS), while others are only for a short amount of time.
- User-friendliness: Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo let you configure
everything by hand Red Hat-ish distributions, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE
provide nice graphical configuration tools.
- Hardware support: some distributions include closed-source binary
drivers or make it easy to install them, some don't. Generally, those
who do are easier to install.
Ubuntu seems to satisfy in most respects: it provides many packages,
it is user-friendly, has good hardware support, and the LTS version is
also supported for a very long time. If you like to get rid of all the
shiny stuff after some time, you can try Debian, which is the base of
Ubuntu, but requires more knowledge to configure.
Take care,
Daniel (typing on OS X, which has found the sweetest spot :p)
