I have avoided this thread because I'm nowhere near as savvy as most contributors, so don't want to get too involved BUT I have thought, reading some of the posts, that it's definitely going to put some off from experimenting with Linux, which would be a shame.TheMotorcycleBoy wrote:
I've been a Linux nerd since 2001, and have experimented with zillions of these distros e.g. Suse, RH, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, Mint back in the day. Have rebuilt kernels, farted around with the System-V boot scripts (before Debian kicked off the "Upstart" project - i.e. more dynamic configuration that most Linuxes these days will use) built new drivers etc. I was so impressed by RH 9 that I spent almost a decade stuck on Centos+Fedora Core. I used to spend ages playing with configuring new FC distros to load the nvidia, ethernet, sound card drivers etc. etc. Yes the tedium was immense.
Matt
I initially started with Fedora, because it was recommended by the heritage telephone group I belonged to, the THG, but it was updated far too frequently for my liking and I simply didn't require such cutting-edge software. So I ended up with Centos which waited for things to settle down before updating and was therefore far more stable. However, recently problems weren't getting addressed and I simply felt it was losing the necessary support.
So I plumped for Ubunto about a year ago and it's been brilliant. As others have said, it has all the general software you could need and I have it set up to update every day, so no issues there. I would encourage anyone to give it go if you're sick of Windows. I very much doubt you'll be disappointed.
Sussexlad