Suse, Mandriva, Linspire, Ubuntu, Debian?

Question

I've narrowed my Linux search down to the above. Which one is most user friendly, Most attractive, easiest for a beginner to pick up?

Answer 1

hi :)
tried all but Lin/Freespire (even RedHat) and always ended up with OpenSuse.;
mostly because (Open-)Suse has a **very** good hardware support, whereas other distro always fail to configure some of the hardware properly; unless you are keen spending nights getting the HW (& matching programs / drivers) running, stick with what works.
OpenSuse does, for me, even though, admittedly, my rig isn't exactly your average LostDOS pc >:) =))

another advantage of OpenSuse, even though it comes at the price of a hefty download (> 3GB) is that it includes KDE as well as Gnome as well as pretty much any graphical user interface, out there. Even though Gnome is tempting for a fresh convert from LostDOS, because it prechews a lot of aspects of the OS, just like LostDOS does. If you are really looking to move away from that patronizing aspect, KDE might be a better choice. you may of course install KDE on top of any distro afterwards, but, hell, why not get it out of the box, right? OpenSuse lets you install all of them (!!! GBs) and lets you try them out side by side (even though the HW updates are not always ported automatically from one GUI to the others)
the (Open-)Suse support forums provide the usual support, of course.

PS: would recommend to start w/ version 10.1, as 10.2 comes w/ Xorg 7.2 which isn't widely supported yet.

Answer 2

Mandriva is a very user friendly environment, I was really impressed that it installed from the beginning the drivers for my nvidia card. Well it is a bit disappointing on the help part. The club has a fee of 120 euro/year. But help is mainly the same for every Linux distribution so you manage.
Unbuntu is another friendly environment well they call it "Linux for human beings" :). It is interesting that mandriva comes with the the glide effect and you can switch very easy to beryl too. It is easy to install them on unbuntu too. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can follow the links at the end. But mainly it is about the cool visual effects like the rotating cube and the teleporting windows. It is much better than aero :).
http://www.beryl-project.org/features.php

Answer 3

I am learning Ubuntu and am very happy with it.

The community support is helping me quite a bit too.

Answer 4

Red Hat

Answer 5

well mandrake installs and is cool !

SUSE could be worth getting

remember use the harddrive installer

ps magasines have a cool version runs from CD use one of them
www.linuxCD.org !

Answer 6

ubuntu is very friendly