Best distro for a newbie who wants to get his hands dirty and customize

Hullo,

I'm a newbie to Linux, but not to technology. I consider myself somewhat advance and ability to learn. I program in C++ currently, and have done some advanced things with Windows such as a shell replacement and registry editing.

I want the distro to be very good for customization, so that I can use something else than GNOME or KDE, and other things. While I'm not scared to get my hands dirty, and to narrow it down, I'd like the distro to be suited for customization, and if possible, newbies, but not newbies and not customization.

EDIT: Could you also please list all the distro's you know of, and from there I can look at some other specific things and reviews.

SuSE and Ubuntu for the beginner seems to be the more popular picks; however, most any distro will suffice. Try out a few and see which one you like. As for reviews, check out Techiemoe's reviews.

Excellent starting point - http://distrowatch.com/

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Originally Posted by AdamskiAirsoft

Hullo,

I'm a newbie to Linux, but not to technology. I consider myself somewhat advance and ability to learn. I program in C++ currently, and have done some advanced things with Windows such as a shell replacement and registry editing.

I want the distro to be very good for customization, so that I can use something else than GNOME or KDE, and other things. While I'm not scared to get my hands dirty, and to narrow it down, I'd like the distro to be suited for customization, and if possible, newbies, but not newbies and not customization.

EDIT: Could you also please list all the distro's you know of, and from there I can look at some other specific things and reviews.

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DistroWatch is a great place for lists and reviews. As for your other question, I think most of us here would agree that the two most configurable distros of Linux out there today are Gentoo and Linux From Scratch. LFS isn't really a "distro", more of a Linux hobby kit you assemble yourself from their instructions, and Gentoo is a little more automated in that they have a very powerful package management system called Portage. Neither of these distributions are easy, but you'll learn a lot about the way Linux works from both.

If you are totally new to linux try out Puppy linux or Damn small linux.
If you are familiar to some tech try Ubuntu(This goes for Kubuntu too), SUSE, or Fedora Core

CRUX is another good one if you want to get down and nasty with Linux. :)

I haven't used Slackware, but I hear it's the kind of thing you're asking for. I have used Gentoo, and it's probably the most configurable distro I've tried. It was actually a little too config-heavy for me, meaning there are certain things you just HAVE to configure (such as use flags) that I really didn't know what to do with at the time, and still probably wouldn't be too good with.

I'm using Debian and find that it's plenty configurable while still being usable right from the get-go. It's also less dependent on specialized/distro-unique GUI config tools than its derivatives are.