Oye the questions!

[nishikotarou]

Greetings everyone,
Firstly I am new here, so if this is either the incorrect place for this question or I word the question incorrectly, I plead for your mercy. At any rate, on to the point! I am building my first system and while I have enjoyed Vista to some degree, the speed with which Microsoft throws out new OS's is leaving me a tad annoyed. It seems only yesterday I purchased Vista and now Windows 7 seems poised for a holiday release. I am tried of Windows, tired of Microsoft and I am prepared to break the chains of servitude that have bound me for years!
So now that I'm done ranting, I am curious as to which version of Linux is best for me. I'm going to list the guts of my soon to be new machine below....

Motherboard: XFX nForce 750i SLI - Motherboard - ATX - nForce 750i SLI - LGA775 Socket - UDMA133, Serial ATA-300 (RAID), eSATA - Gigabit Ethernet - FireWire - HD Audio

Processor: Intel BX80580Q8200 Core2 Quad Processor Q8200 Processor

RAM: PNY OPTIMA 4GB (2x2GB) Dual Channel Kit DDR2 667 MHz PC2-5300 Desktop DIMM Memory Modules MD4096KD2-667

Hard Drive: Samsung SpinPoint F1 Desktop Class HD753LJ - Hard drive - 750 GB - internal - 3.5" - SATA-300 - 7200 rpm - buffer: 32 MB

PSU: PC Power and Cooling PPCS500 Silencer 500 EPS 12V 80+ Certified Power Supply

Not entirely sure if listing ALL of that was necessary but I wanted to provide as complete a representation of the sort of system I'll have as possible. It's certainly not the best, but it ain't bad folks. Feel free to flame, laugh, scoff, whatever... As long as I find out which Linux OS is best for me, that's all I ask!

[Hal343]

It looks to me like everything should work in linux. What I have done is burned copies of of different distributions Live CD's so I could try them out without installing. Even then, wireless on my laptop wouldn't work in Ubuntu 8.04, but did work in Mint XFCE. As far as my desktop is concerned, I haven't found a distribution that doesn't work, so I keep a separate home partition so I can install a diffent distro to use for a while, without losing anything I want to keep.

[nishikotarou]

That's good to hear that you haven't had any problems with any of the distros on your desktop. Do you have a favorite? I'm trying to figure out which would be optimal but downloading all the live distros is a great idea if I can't pinpoint one.

[jayd512]

Welcome to LinuxForums!

The hardware looks good for pretty much anything you wanna throw on it. As far as what distro, try the distro quiz found here. It seems to give a pretty accurate guess at what you may be interested in.
Besides, we can't tell you what is the best distro for you anymore than we could tell you what is the best flavor of ice cream for you! Try some out, see what you like.

See you around!

[Hal343]

At present I am using Ubuntu 8.04. It works well, but I am thinking of trying a slackware derivative, just because it will give me more fine-grained control of the system. For your first linux distribution Ubuntu is a good place to start learning, because it is set up to be easy to use. I started with Red Hat 5 years ago, then Mandrake 7, then SUSE 9.3 and finally Ubuntu 5.04 and have kept coming back to Ubuntu when I screw up other distros, or find that they don't work the way I would like them to. I find that as I learn more that I look for different distros just to see if I can set them up in a way that I like better.

[nishikotarou]

I'm gonna tell ya, this is pretty overwhelming. The test at least provided me with a few options. Although I find Mint and Open Suse to be pretty darn attractive, I'm going to download Ubuntu and partition my current hard drive to give it a run. Hopefully it will run on this janky machine I have now.

[saivin]

Hi,
Welcome to THE forum.

Looks like you have a powerful machine. You can try a distro with all the bells n whistles, heavily customized to be user-friendly and being as out-of-the-box ready as possible. My vote: Mandriva One 2009.1 (KDE version). I am using it for sometime now and I'm in love with it. So much so that I'm planning to purchase the PowerPack version or simply to contribute to their fund. So much attention and care towards the end-user (who are mostly newbies). You can give it a shot and see.

Good luck with linux.

[L4Linux]

I usually recommend Ubuntu to new Linux users, as it is probably the most user-friendly distro.
Just install ubuntu-restricted-extras from System->Administration->Synaptic or from the terminal and you'll have codecs for everything, JAVA and MS fonts:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

THe Nvidia driver is also very easy to install from System->Administration->Hardware Drivers