The Best Linux Distro for a New User?

GhostCypher asks: "I've been a Mac user for nigh on 12 years, and recently made the reverse-switch (yes, Mac to PC) due to an unfortunate accident to my PowerBook. Now that I have this spiffy new HP laptop, I want to run Linux or Unix of some flavor on it, but I don't know the best one to run. I've been considering FreeBSD and OpenBSD, as well as SuSE Linux, Fedora, and Mandrake. Could the wisened Linux gurus here offer some insight as to the best package for a former Mac user to introduce him to the greater world of Linux without major headaches in setting it all up?"

Comments

Knoppix

[n1ywb]

Knoppix is your friend.

For the love of god...

[ameoba]

Don't go with OpenBSD. OpenBSD has many noble design philosophies however "make the system usable" is possibly at the bottom of their list. I think they view "unusable base system" as the same thing as "confuses hackers if they get in & prevents them from doing any damage".

FreeBSD is considerably better but I'd still not suggest it for a unix newbie.

As far as user-friendly Linux distros go, I've had good luck sending friends to Redhat/Fedora and Mandrake (I'd assume SuSE is in the same boat but I've never given any real consideration to dropping the $$$ for it). Currently, I'd say that Fedora's the strongest option, it's more recent & seems to have more development energy than Mandrake.

Your best bet, however, would be to bite the bullet and go for Debian (or try a HDD install of Knoppix); once you actually get it up it should stay up & up to date (unless you're running unstable and try to update on a day when they're pushing seriously broken packages...).

Friday afternoon, huh?

[Otter]

...and tech worker productivity in North America ends early for the week, as everyone gets sucked into a straight-up Linux distro war. And then people will post comments referencing vi vs Emacs or KDE vs GNOME, and those will be taken up in all seriousness, as well.

My advice is:
1) If you have a high-speed connection and a CD burner, download a bunch of ISOs (Fedora, Mandrake, SuSe, Knoppix) and try them out. Probably half will detect your hardware correctly and half won't -- that can be solved but at this stage just use what worked. ** Put /home on a separate partition so you can reformat and reinstall easily! **
2) Maybe try some of the new friendly distros like Lycoris.
3) You said your PowerBook is dead, but if you have another Mac around, I'd strongly suggest trying Yellow Dog on it.
4) And once you've been through all that learning experience, you'll be ready to switch to Gentoo!

Sun's SuSe + Java Desktop

[DynaSoar]

It's not the best distro available, but it's easy to set up and run, and comes with installation, migration and operation support as part of the selling price. List price is $100, but it might still be selling for half that as the intro sale. It'd be my "For Dummies" pick.

"Hard" Systems

[Brandybuck]

As people have already told you, it depends on the user. If they want to learn Unix, learn the OS and environment inside and out, how it works, etc., then stay away from the newbie distros. The hard systems are the way to go.

Slackware, FreeBSD, or Debian. Without the handholding, they'll actually learn the system. They'll be forced to drop into the command line to configure some stuff. They'll come to understand how it all fits together. This is a Good Thing(tm).

SuSE, without any doubt.

[arcade]

I know this is flamebait material, but I'll do it anyways - as it's a good question.

The linux distros I've personally used are: Slackware, Debian, RedHat, SuSE, Turbolinux, Storm Linux and Mandrake. I've also fiddled a bit with Gentoo, but not much.

Slackware, for me, was a bitch. I was new to linux, and that was the first distro I tried. It was hell. No good documentation at the time, and nothing worked out of the box. I fiddled with it for about two weeks, then gave up. Forget that one.

Debian. Great system for servers. Used it for four years on various boxes. Only had a few problems with it, namely a single box when I updated from slink to potato, and a box where I attempted to upgrade mysql from 3.22 to 3.23 by using unstable on a few binaries/libraries. This was before potato was out, if I remember correctly. I've always thought that Debian sucks for workstations, but quite a few people disagree. It's neither very easy to install nor very easy to configure. When you've got it up and running it's extremely easy to maintain.

RedHat. Used it for a few servers, and use it regularly as a workstation at the University. To be quite frank - I think it sucks as both. I really don't think it's any good at anything. Neither the installer, up2date, nor default configuration works as it should. And this is "the" mainstream linux? Blargh!

Mandrake. I used to use Mandrake, but they fscked up a lot of things between 8.1 and 8.2 , and I've not used it seriously afterwards. I used to be a paying member of mandrakeclub - but really didn't renew the payment after the 9.0 release which stunk just as much as 8.2 for me. The problem was quite simply that 8.1 just 'worked' on my computers, while 8.2 and 9.0 was riddled with lockups, various flaws and lots of other stuff. It's a very NICE distro though, it's easy to install, shiny, and so forth.

I'll drop commenting on TurboLinux and Storm, as it's several years since I tried them out, and they never did impress me.

Now onto the distro that I really, really like.

SUSE!

SuSE both installs easily, and is slick, shiny and well built. It's obvious that a lot of work has gone into making things work out of the box, especially if you're a KDE user (and you should be). YaST is a really wonderfull tool when it comes to installing and updating stuff, it works wonderfully on my HP Omnibook 6100, it works wonderfully on my servers, my desktops, and all my works desktop computers.. we've also bought SuSE OpenExchange, which works like a charm.

In short, I've got nothing wrong to say about SuSE, and I've been using it for about two years now, after using nothing but Linux the last 5 years. No other distro has shown me such ease of installation, such ease of installing other programs, such ease of security updates, such ease of maintainance, and so forth.

A single negative and important note about SuSE though - it uses ReiserFS as default. Change it to ext3 or something else - ReiserFS is notorious for corrupting data. I've had three systems where ReiserFS has fucked up my data badly. I don't trust that filesystem. Steer away from it like a pest. It sucks. It's bad for you. It destroys your data.

*phew*.

My *nix history:

[rubicon7]

1995: SCO UNIX (I know, i know, but I had to use it at work)
1997: Slackware
1999: Debian
2000?: Gentoo
2001?: Back to Debian

Still using Debian (mix of stable+testing) and, barring conflict.dependency issues with mplayer-k7/libvorbis, I've never been happier.

I'd recommend starting with Slackware - it worked for me.