Ubuntu vs CentOS vs OpenSuse

[charlie205]

I'm trying to decide which distro (between these three) I should load on my new laptop. It is being supplied to me and will probably be an HP (maybe a dv2000). I will dual boot it to XP and Linux. I haven't decided which distro to go with yet. Here are my thoughts:

Ubuntu - good community support, wide adoption, ease of use, unsure if I like the idea of constantly sudo'ing every other command (and I don't want to work around it), like the concept that Canonical represents

CentOS - great documentation, useful to employers (RHEL), not very slick looking

OpenSuse - Slick look, but never used it, not real excited about Novell

What do you think? I don't want to load a bunch of VMs. This has to be native and stable for my job. Any ideas?

[daark.child]

There is never an accurate answer for such questions. Try all of the distros and stick with the one that you like or the one that works best on your system. As far as I know, all three distros have live discs so you don't actually need to install anything.

[timbo63]

I have loaded them all over the years, all have their pros & cons, however I have just loaded PCLinuxOS with "Mac4Lin" desktop & I love it. Give it a go first.

Tim

[bigtomrodney]

There are plenty of threads on distro decisions along with polls for various categories. The only way to decide without having a specific criteria that would discount some distros is to try them out. Particularly if you are trying Linux for the first time - how it feels to you when you are using it is what's important.