And now what? Distros confusion!

[alzogbi]

I read a lot of posts (in these forums) about distros recommendations and I am confused even before installing any of them.

RH, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, Libranet, FreeBSD, etc. :o

Now what? I am a very *newbie* to the Linux world and I need to install a distro that I can learn *REAL* Linux/Unix from and at the same time I can do a lovely C++ development for KDE/GNOME.

Free software has it's pros and cons and I see this as a Con, really. I mean distros IMHO should be specific and not all general so they make it easy (for people coming from other background) to adopt Linux.

Anyway, I appreciate any help.

[bpark]

Try out the "easier to install" distros such as Redhat and Mandrake. If you want my opinion, try Debian when you get a chance. I don't think I'll ever leave this distro.

[caffeine]

There's lots of distros because lots of people have their own ideas about what linux should be. And since they're mostly free, you can keep trying them till you find one you like.

Everyone suggests you start with something like RedHat, or Mandrake but if you know the basics ( what a partition is, what cpu do you have, what graphics/network card do you have ), don't be afraid to try a proper distro like Debian or (my personal favorite) Gentoo. I don't know about Debian, but the Gentoo support forums are first rate.

Anyway good luck.

[Dolda2000]

You might want to know, though, that FreeBSD isn't Linux. It's another free UNIX that has existed much longer than Linux has.