Re: Newbie Question

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:25:57 +0000, Pete wrote:

I am learning really to dislike Micro$haft.
Would like to move toward Linux. What is the absolute easiest distro to use?
The easiest would be the best way for me to start.
Yes, of course, I am willing to learn. :-)
-Pete

If there were an 'easiest distro to use' there would not be 350+ active
distros and you wouldn't have to ask.

Questions:
1) what do you want to do?
2) what's your hardware like - old, cutting edge, . . .
3) what's your internet connection - broadband, wireless, dial-up?
4) do you plan to dual/multi boot?

Believe it or not, all of these could have significant impacts on the
answer. Your best bet is to become acquainted with distrowatch.com and
learn. You might want to boot some Live CDs first - they will boot and run
from the CD without installation - my favourites are Knoppix and Elive,
but there are several dozen, including the *buntu 'live install' CDs. This
will give you an idea of whether you really want to make the jump - and
whether you'd prefer to go 'whole hog' or dual boot for a while.

There is not really much difference in 'ease of use' from one Linux distro
to the next. I find that, generally, distros based on Debian are easier to
administer - synaptic makes it painless to install software and takes care
of dependencies - IMHO - better than RPM based distros. You will probably
find that the KDE desktop (as used by kubuntu, mandrivel, suse and others)
will be more similar to MS if that's what you want. Gnome is slightly
'lighter' and a little more different. If you have under 600mhz, you'd
probably want to consider a 'lighter' desktop like XFCE or Enlightenment
(Elive is a shining example). These are quite different from MS, but
certainly not difficult to master.

IMHO - generally, Linux is no more difficult to use than MS, it's just a
little different.

Good resources:
www.distrowatch.com
www.yolinux.com
www.tldp.org
www.iosn.net - has a good desktop tutorial as well as some admin tutorials


.

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