Best Linux OS?

[Saundres]

Thought I'd try something new, as I'm getting bored of Windows altogether.

Tried installing Mac Leopard for a Dual Boot but that went horribly wrong

Saw Linux and thought I'd give it a go.

What would you recommend for a Linux beginner, who wants a reasonable amount of features, but nothing that eats at performance too much?

Toying with the idea of Ubuntu (which I've heard has the "amazing rotating cube") but wanted to know if there were any tried/tested ones people could recommend.

Thanks.

[mg_uk]

Personally I like Fedora Redhat, but other swear by Suse and Mandrake. The are pretty much all built on the same core kernel. but im not really up to date

dont fall for the old unix hoax by someone suggesting you type rm i. rm -rf as this removes files from directory's

i swear by osx 10.4

[Saundres]

One of my friends had the Ubuntu disk he used lying around, and since I'm too lazy to download (it takes days on my current connection) I used that.

Thought it was great, decided I wanted to have this as a dual boot, so I set the partitioner to 50/50 (30gigs for each OS).

Apparently I clicked the wrong option, as it deleted everything to install Ubuntu, so now all the thousands of songs and hours of films I saved up on XP have disappeared

Can't even be bothered to reinstall windows, so now I'm starting from scratch, on a Ubuntu only laptop

This is why I don't mess around with partitioners and non-windows based Os's, lol.

Still trying to get my head around the idea of using Terminal to do most things.

Do I need to get special versions of Photoshop, Messenger, iTunes, etc for Ubuntu?

I know a lot of files need to be .tar... etc.

Thanks

[zarazilla]

Hey RyanIsle,

To avoid that in future you should create a partition on your hard drive to store stuff on - so when you format your C drive it doesn't delete everything!

There are Linux-version software for most of the things you mention - I know GIMP is popular for image-fixing as opposed to photoshop, and a lot of people use Gaim in place of Messenger. I'm not sure about ITunes, but seeing as it's created for a Mac which runs Linux software, there should hopefully be a version out there.

If you really must use Windows software try downloading WINE which simulates a window environment.

Hope I helped!

[Saundres]

Thanks,

I thought I had partitioned the hard-drive, it asked me how much I wanted to set aside and I set it to half (which would be 30gigs) and made sure I actually had that much free space...

Probably read it wrong.

Sorry to say that I'm a big giver upper, as much as I like the customizability (Is that a word?) of Linux OSes, in the end the big, evil, blood-sucking windows prevails...

Maybe it's cause I've grown up with it, but it's just more convenient...

Thanks for the input anyway guys.

[zarazilla]

Aw, well I have to agree XP is easy to work with!

I tried Ubuntu for awhile but I just couldn't get it to work with my wireless card, so had to give up.

Usually repartitioning *will* reformat your hard drive, but I thought linux installations could repartition without reformatting... maybe you did choose the wrong option

But hopefully now that you have repartitioned you'll never have that problem again

[flozzaa]

I tried Ubuntu for a bit, was pretty easy to use and a nice change from Windows, but I missed XP so I changed back lol.
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[Saundres]

Ooh, just downloaded BackTrack.

More of an experiment to check how secure my internet connection is (although I live in a village, and I'm reasonably sure my 80 year old next door neighbours won't be able to hack into my internet... or have a need to).

I'm bored, and there's only so much beach I can stand before having a day off at home (Summer Holidays for me).

Anybody have experience with BackTrack at all?