Greetings from Ohio

[keepitreall89]

Hi all!
I am an Undergraduate going into my 3rd year at Wittenberg University in Ohio, USA. I am a Physics major, with a Computational Science minor, and possibly and Computer Science minor, though that has yet to be officially declared.

I have been "playing" with different linux distro's for going on 6 years now, but never really had a chance to work completely in a linux environment until recently because my primary computer is a gaming tower... and we all should know how difficult it is to get games such as Far Cry or Counter-strike, or anything requiring DX10/9 on anything but windows.

I currently have a system that has Ubuntu 8 installed and set as the primary OS, with a windows dual boot just in case I need it. Sadly both my gaming tower and my tablet pc are running Windows RC1, no complaints so far other than I like linux a little more still.

I prefer using a minimal debian install, then installing the things I need from there, just didn't have the patients recently and so used a Ubuntu install, but I am finding that I like the way that I can find/get packages easily with the ubuntu GUI. But we all know how cool you feel when you use command lines instead

I am currently interested in high speed computing and GPGPU applications, so I am playing with both Windows and Linux, trying to see what is out there for both. As we speak I have several linux distro iso's downloading. I intend to install maybe... 10? on my spare 500 GB hard drive and use GRUB as a bootmanager, just to see what the newest versions are like. I haven't really used a linux distro other than Debian or Ubuntu in 5 years, so I am interested to see if the other popular ones have changed as much as far as UI as these 2 have in 5 years.

The primary linux flavors I want to install in the next few days are Suse, Red Hat/fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Slackware. Anybody have any other suggestions for me? I know those were the big ones when I was first looking in to linux

[oz]

Welcome to the forums... glad you are having fun with Linux!

I think any of the top 10 or 20 at DistroWatch.com are worth considering. Best of luck with your efforts on each distro that you try.

[rokytnji]

Howdy and Welcome. I agree with ozar. The only thing I might suggest is to try out different Desktop enviorments in whatever Distro you choose to run like fluxbox, icewm,xfce,Gnome and KDE to find out which you prefer to run.

[keepitreall89]

Oh yes, thank you, I have only used KDE and Gnome before, so I should try the others.

[computerophil]

welcome here