What Linux distros do you recommend?

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Last week I downloaded Linux Mint and have been trying it out (up until now I've been a Windows User). Currently I have my laptop running on a dual-boot. I think I like Linux but am wondering if I chose a good distribution or not. I guess I'll explain what sort of computer I have and what I do with it:

I have a fairly new (~5 months old) Acer notebook with an Intel i5 core. It has 4GB of memory (if I recall correctly) and a 500GB hard drive. Plus I have a 2TB hard drive on my desk that I can plug in. It has no internal disc drive, but I have a DVD super multi drive that I plug in via USB cable.

I use my computer for a lot of web browsing and word-processing. I also end up using some other software (spread sheets, graphing software etc.) for schoolwork. I don't play too many games, although I have an old copy of Civilization that I wouldn't mind getting installed if I can. I don't do any video editing, but keep a few movies on my hard drive to watch. I do however keep a music and ebook library that I'd like to manage.

As I said, I am very new to Linux and have practically no experience with the Shell. I do want to learn, but for now I want a system that has a good GUI. Linux Mint seems pretty good that way, but I know practically nothing about the other distros.

I like Ubuntu the best out of all of the other OS distributions. It is by far the most popular distribution, and the most advanced out of all of them. Like all the other ones, it is of course free.

If you want to get transferable experience I would recommend fedora for laptops and Centos for servers since they are rebranded Redhat distributions.
http://fedoraproject.org/
If you want to see which ones you like I'd recommend downloading unetbootin which will allow you to boot a variety of live distributions from USB stick
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Nothing wrong with Mint.



For Civilisation, try PlanOnLinux, it will help you with WINE and installing games. I'm pretty sure it had scripts for Civ 4.
For Music, Banshee if on Gnome, or Amarok or Clementine on KDE.

For all your video needs, VLC is second to none, usually not default on any distros but it is one of the best. However, Kaffeine (KDE) and Totem (gnome) will probably be default on most distros, and they'll take care of things.



Are you using Gnome? Are you happy with it and want to stick with it?

Personally, to me Unity is butchery and GNOME3 is too rigid. I prefer the flexibility of KDE. (But each to his own) And if you want KDE OpenSUSE is the distro to try, however they don't use deb packages, so instead of apt-get you will be using zypper.
OpenSUSE has YaST which will do a lot of things you would normally have to do in the terminal. I suggest you try it.

Fedora is bleeding edge and things will inherently break.

Edit: I'll add to that. Arch is not a distro that you want to go for, as a beginner, it's documentation is second to none. If you need to know something, most likely you will find and answer in the Arch Wiki, not all of it will be transferable to whatever distro you chose but it will give you a good idea on a direction to take with whatever problem you may have.
(Everything else Arch is NOT geared towards new users, and their community will try their best to destroy you if you asked a n00b question )

Libre Office (or Open Office) provides standard office tools - wordprocessor, spreadsheet and presentations. It handles files that work with Microsoft Office. There are also some very good scripted graph-making packages in Linux for creating graph images that can be embedded in other documents. Calibre manages eBook libraries, translates most formats and handles file transfer to an eBook reader device.

Register with the user forums for your distribution, or the Ubuntu forums (which are very active), to get more information about software experiences, and ask technical questions. There is a level of help that does not exist for Windows.

I haven't had too much trouble sorting out software (except how to sync my iPhone). I've been using OpenOffice since I first bought this laptop since at that point I could no longer keep using familiar old Office 2003 and did want to switch to the new version with the stupid ribbon. Mint comes with LibreOffice as its default office suite, but since they're pretty much the same anyways I haven't bothered to install OpenOffice.

I already have Calibre installed--I like it except for Kindle Store's stupid DRMs making everything more difficult. For graphing I was actually able to install my old graphing software and it works flawlessly with Wine.

I haven't had a problem with GNOME so far--it's functional, if not the most visually appealing thing. KDE does look much prettier, but at the same time a bit more complicated to use--one thing I've like about GNOME is it's relative simplicity. I might try downloading that multiboot for a USB drive (assuming my USB drives are big enough). I should have asked this question before I invested so much time into customizing Mint though.

Last edited by AstroGeek on 03 Oct 2011, 5:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Mint is a great choice, have fun with it!

All Linux distros use the same "kernel" (well, some use older or newer versions, but...) so it is the same basic operating system. What differs is the pre-installed software applications, the artwork/themes, the desktop environment or "skin," the release cycle, the development process, the community, etc.

So my advice is to find a distro that is easy to use (Mint definitely fits this bill!) and has a friendly community where you can hang out and get your questions answered (another vote for Mint).

A couple other newbie-friendly distros include Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS. Here is a good comparison of the Top 10: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

Personally I am typing this from Scientific Linux (rebranded Red Hat, same category as CentOS) on my work computer (procrastinating). Red Hat family is a great choice for a server or workstation that needs to be 100% reliable, maybe not such a good choice for home/school/personal use where you want the latest applications and laptop hardware support. For that situation you probably want a distro that releases every 6 months (Ubuntu, Mint, arguably Fedora) so you have the latest & greatest.

I currently use Ubuntu 10.04 because of the long term support. I didn't like my experience with Mint or the Mint community at all. I really wanted to like Debian, but hated the fact that there was absolutely nothing for proprietary driver and codec support, so there were no Flash, and no Nvidia drivers available.

--I would truly like to see a distro that has 100% compatibility with Debian stable releases that is not Arch or Mint.

Another distro you might want to check out would be Scientific Linux which is Fermilab's clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fermilabs started developing this when Red Had decided that they were a major corporation and start charging SysV prices for their Linux distro. --AFAIK, it's still 100% compatible with RHEL, and the cool factor is that it is now jointly developed by both Fermilab and CERN.

Most distros require you to install Flash and "non-free" hardware drivers post-install. This is not something specific to Debian but rather is fundamental to the "open source" philosophy.

http://wiki.debian.org/FlashPlayer
http://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

Someone really needs to develop a backwards-compatible FOSS version of Flash. Or is that even possible? I don't know the details of such things.

If your game enough I would recommend Arch Linux, its got great documentation and a helpful community on the forums.

GNASH:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash

I use Mint on an older machine, and duel boot SUSE (KDE) and Window's 7 on my newer one.

If your new to Linux, than Ubuntu or Fedora. The main difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is the package management and frankly they are both rather easy and user friendly. Once you get an idea of how Linux works than I, like lxuser, recommend Arch Linux based on documentation and customization.

For your old copy of Civilization, see wine

Yes they do. You just have to enable the non-free repos. I'm fairly certain it's still that way in Ubuntu (at least for Flash) and in most distros that aren't Mint.

Stay away from the Red Hat distros; they're crap. Fedora is buggy as hell, and SL wouldn't even let me install Scilab OR Octave without a massive fight. What kind of "scientific" distro doesn't include the ability to install a decent numerical analysis system? Red Hat should only be used if it's someone else's computer and some other sysadmin's problem.

Have you recently used Fedora? I have and I have never found it buggy like you say. Ubuntu had a lot more bugs then Fedora did. Also Red Hat is based on Fedora not the other way round.