another choosing a distro thread

[necrosis]

Hi guys,


I have used Mandrake and Mandriva for about 3 years now for my server and love it. I just purchased a gateway laptop its a T-1625 with AMD64x2 chip and ATi graphics card. I want to dual boot Linux on it and am thinking of trying a new version (maybe fedora or Ubuntu) I will be using it mostly for school and to play around with linux. Wine is one of the programs I am most excieted to try out. Dose anyone have any recomendations on what distro I should try? I hear Ununtu has a lot of advantages for laptops but I also hear Fedora has a larger community. I'm very new to using Linux for anything other than a web server so any help would be greatly apreaceated. Oh, should I use a 64 or 32 bit copy?



Thanks for any advice

[techieMoe]

I recommend this thread for both the "which distro" question and the 32/64-bit one:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/lin...ead-first.html

In my personal experience, 64-bit distributions have come a long way in offering an identical experience to their 32-bit counterparts, but there are still a few "gotchas," such as no 64-bit version of Flash.

[kajla76]

You definitely should consider SUSE as well openSUSE 10.3 from Novell®.

It doesn't really matter which you choose since you want to 'play around with linux'. It would be best if you got some experience with each of these three. Hmm, start with Fedora, then Suse, then Ubuntu... you will stay with Suse or Ubuntu, I think.