[Wylug-help] Which Version of Linux?

[Philip Wyett]

On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 20:35 +0000, Stuart Taylor wrote:
> Ay-up.
> 
> After much hair pulling over windows I've decided to have a go with
> Linux. Ican't seem to make my mind up over the various distributions
> available though. I've narrowed it down to SuSe, Mandriva, Fedora or
> Knoppix, but I've no idea how they compare or ease of use.
> 
> I'm an absolute beginner to Linux (although no stranger to comuters
> and command prompts don't scare me) and it's only for a home machine.
> I would like to keep Windows XP on the machine as well so if any of
> the above don't work well with dual boot can you let me know ( i've
> already got a nice empty hard drive just waiting for the install).
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Stuart
> 

Hi Stuart,

All Linux distributions have merits and issues and often it comes down
to trying until you find something your happy with. Of all I've tried
and run now, it falls like this for me.

Mandrake/Mandriva - Waste of space and dependency hell.

SuSE - Slick, nicely put together and works well with good
       hardware support. Downs are it's a very mixed batch of
       KDE and Gnome.

Ubuntu - Got on well with this one and it's ever improving.

Fedora - Fairly bleeding edge, can be twitchy but usually good.

CentOS - (Red Hat Enterprise Clone) - Solid, Gnome centric, long
         support life and my production/development system of choice.

Note: All the above is personal opinion. :-)

One tip if you choose Fedora is not to move to latest version upon
release. Wait for around a month after when a few release day bugs have
been fixed and if you intend to use any proprietary graphics drivers;
the latest drivers post the OS release have been released.

Your intention to dual boot is not really an issue these days, though I
would advise you have two HDD's in your machine - Splitting a disk is
messy. Install Windows on the first HDD and then install Linux on the
second. Most distributions are adept at detecting Windows and doing the
chainloader for you.

Regards

Phil

-- 

Personal email: philip.wyett at w-tech.co.uk

Work email: pwyett at a-novo.co.uk

Blog: http://www.philipwyett.blogspot.com

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