"Hello all I am asking for everyone's opinion on which linux is best, easiest and the least issues for an old windows user wanting to convert. I had RH9 and had alot of issues and hear alot of talk about Mandrake and Suse mainly. Any opinion on why and why not which is best would be greatly appreciated to help me make up my mind on which I should install on my system." -----------------
Tony, I highly recommend going to Amazon.com and reading the customer reviews of each of the popular distros. This is where I go to do a lot of product research, and it's never let me down. Ignore any hostile reviews/complaints about things not working - rarely is it the product's fault. It's most always due to user error or the junk hardware they're trying to install it on. For me personally, I highly recommend starting with SuSE 10. You'll love it, I promise. There's a reason you're hearing so much about it. There's no universal law that states that you must try every flavor of Linux to make a decision, though I do give a few other popular distros a chance every couple of years just in case a better mousetrap comes along. I always end up coming back to SuSE, however, based on "best of all worlds" criteria. And no matter what brand you eventually decide on, SuSE is an excellent place to at least start from (and even stay) for device driver installation alone, which is unmatched. I hear great things about Mandrake, and others too, but not nearly as much as SuSE. As with most popular versions of Linux these days, you can download free live trial versions of it to run directly off of CD so you can try it fully on your system before even installing it to a hard drive. I recommend it highly. SuSE's device detection and automatic driver installation is better than anyone else's I've ever seen, even down to wireless gear. The gem of SuSE is the control panel/setup utility called YEAST (which stands for "yet another setup tool"). YAST always eems to be the envy of all Linux distros. You will hardly read a SuSE review without the writer gushing over YAST. Also, SuSE's implementation of the KDE desktop is extremely well done - if you like KDE, that is (most Windows users do, uncluding myself). Some folks prefer Gnome, which SuSE also incorporates fairly well, but not as default and not as well as KDE. As for Red Hat, we all woke up one morning a number of years ago to discover that Red Hat had literally dumped it's interest in home versions of Linux and went high-dollar corporate with it's product. As a result, free version 9 is getting really old and becoming more problematic to use on newer systems. Because of this, SuSE woke up that same morning to find that it was the new king of the hill in the home user Linux market. Novell, a networking giant of old, jumped on it and immediately started the process of acquiring SuSE. SuSE Linux is now owned by Novell. So now there's tons of support behind SuSE Linux from a well-known, decades old, global company that hates Microsoft and is fully behind it's Linux products and the entire Linux effort in general. There's all sorts of reasons to like SuSE. http://suse.com BTW: No, I don't work for SuSE - but man, I sure wish I did. Bob To unsubscribe from this list, please email [EMAIL PROTECTED] & you will be removed. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LINUX_Newbies/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
