Favorite Desktop Distro for New Users - 2009

[VivianLee]

I believe it depends on the willingness of the beginner.

Example: I started Linux two years ago. I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning, but I was very eager to learn. I decided to throw a plain vanilla Debian testing install onto my 5-year-old Compaq and spent hours configuring it to my needs. I enjoyed it every step of the way.

A friend of mine, even though he was a "techie", just wanted something that worked. I pointed him in the direction of Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and Mandriva. He started using PCLOS and loved it. Nowadays he's moved on to openSUSE, but I feel like PCLOS was just what he needed to get started.

It really boils down to what the newbie user wants, as opposed to which distro offers the best.

[xsandz]

I misstyped in my last post here by typing "xgce" instaed of "xfce"
Sorry for my unintentional mistake

[darksyde]

i just wanna go with Ubuntu...its really easy for the newbies and I wud like to prefer gnome rather than kde because of its simplicity

i just wanna go with Ubuntu...its really easy for the newbies and I wud like to prefer gnome rather than kde because of its simplicity

Yeah, I can understand that, which is another reason that Mint is so nice. It is based on Ubuntu so it's easy to use and it comes with GNOME, though there are KDE versions (I personally hate KDE). I have Ubuntu on my other computer and have begun to like it a lot but Mint is my fave. Bottom line- both are great!

[darksyde]

I started out with suse 10 because I bought the set of disks at the store where I bought my computer. I do not know anything about computers so it perplexed me a whole lot. I just started using Ubuntu and already I like it a lot more than suse. Due to the comments on this thread I just might try the mint distro.

Give it (Mint) a try, Lucky...I think you might be impressed. That's yet another great thing about GNU/Linux. We can try almost every distro without spending a penny and then decide for ourselves. I believe that I've tried about 20 different ones so far.

[jayd512]

It really boils down to what the newbie user wants, as opposed to which distro offers the best.

Couldn't have said it better myself!
Which is why most of us here love Linux so much. Look for what you want... and if you can't find it...tweak it!

[MikeTbob]

Couldn't have said it better myself!
Which is why most of us here love Linux so much. Look for what you want... and if you can't find it...tweak it!

Or in the words of roky:

Use it like you stole it!

[jayd512]

Or in the words of roky:

Use it like you stole it!

ROFL!

You better believe it, brother!!

[hansul]

I use SUSE, Redhat and CENTOS. I like them all, they all have there virtues. I like yast on SUSE, i think its a really nice little utility, it reminds me of SMIT on AIX. Leanring commands lines is a little difficult to start with & its probably best in hindsight to pick the easiest one like UBUNTU etc which is essentially out of the box install.

“If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.”

[grishi_111]

ubuntu, although i didn't used it initially but now i am sure it is best for new users.

[TaylanUB]

Pardus Linux.

One flaw i heard of is some bad English.
It's made by the Turkish science something institute you know.
For the same reason English is not the default language either.

But other than that...

Easiest installation process i have seen in my life.
Well i've only ever installed Win XP, Pardus, Puppy Linux and FreeBSD* actually but i just don't see how it could get any easier.
It's a very pure and simple nice graphical interface taking you through steps that anyone could understand, except maybe totally PC-illiterate people (``Uhh... What does `keyboard layout' mean?''), and i remember how amazed i was when i found out that the only thing i had to do to connect to the net was to set a name for my connection. =P

It's awesome for any kind of PC-newb, not just Linux-newbs.


* The FreeBSD installation was a big failure actually but i tried at least.