Favorite Desktop Distro for New Users

[budman7]

I personally would recommend Mepis or PcLinuxOS.
Both are livecds with install options.

[bigtomrodney]

I use openSUSE and find it a fine choice for anyone, but I voted for Ubuntu on the grounds of excellent hardware support and of course excellent community and package support.

Most Ubuntu users I find seem to be new to Linux and very enthusiastic, so you can be sure if you have a problem that someone else has had it and fixed it before you.

[bryansmith]

I have to vote for Ubuntu simply because, as mentioned by bigtomrodney, if something has gone wrong then you know someone else has had that problem as well. This is the benefit of such a large user base.

[oz]

Wow... ubuntu seems to be running away with it, at least at the time of this post.

[MikeTbob]

Ubuntu is the most popular no doubt.
I still haven't tried it yet or PcLinuxOS. So I voted Mepis because it's the easiest I have seen so far.
MP3's, MPEG's, Streaming audio/video, works right out of the box, along with video, WIFI and everything else.

[kagashe]

Debian all the way! I've used Ubuntu but eventually came back to Debian. Debian's Testing branch is just as stable, if not more, and will always be up-to-date since changes are always being added to it. When I upgraded from Ubuntu 6.04 to 6.10 a few months ago (when 6.10 came out) it somehow screwed with the partitions on my drive, this is really unacceptable. I've also used Mandriva, Mepis and Ark Linux, but Mepis is just a LiveCD and appearantly I can't deal with RPM (Mandriva and Ark).

I voted for Ubuntu.

You are right about the upgrade which was discouraged on the forums. There is improved support available for an upgrade now on the forums as well as community documentation.

kagashe

[bidi]

There is improved support available for an upgrade now on the forums as well as community documentation.

That is why I prefer Debian! The fact that I can install Testing and always be updated and not having to worry about upgrades is awesome, specially for new users. The biggest problem with stable upgrades is that a lot changes and all bugs are uncovered at once, as opposed to a slowly discoverying and fixing them. For the server, obviously it's best to use an extremely stable version, but Ubuntu doesn't exactly fall on that category as does Debian and, lets say, Red Hat.

[apoorv_khurasia]

I have tried almost every distro that appeared in that list and I believe that for newbies Ubuntu is the best.

[lightsycle]

ok guy I have an older Dual P3 (coppermine) system one is 700 Mhz the other is 750 Mhz, with DVD ROM 3 HD's D-link wireless and wired NIC. Mandriva and opensuse will not install, Tried suse 9.2 got many errors. I see that Ubuntu seems to be the most suggested for new users. Will it work with older hardware?

[techieMoe]

ok guy I have an older Dual P3 (coppermine) system one is 700 Mhz the other is 750 Mhz, with DVD ROM 3 HD's D-link wireless and wired NIC. Mandriva and opensuse will not install, Tried suse 9.2 got many errors. I see that Ubuntu seems to be the most suggested for new users. Will it work with older hardware?

As long as you have a decent amount of RAM (192MB+) then you should be fine with Ubuntu.