I'd like to give Linux a try.

[SlowSpyder]

Hi all,

I'd like to install Linux to get a bit familiar with it. Right now I use XP Pro. I'm fairly knowledgable technically (I work as a Sr. Desktop Support tech) but 99% of my knowledge is in a Windows environment. I'd like to give Linux a try. Is there a distribution that is better then the others for a newbie? Also, are you able to run the same software (games mostly) on Linux that you run on Windows fairly easy? How much disk space should I set aside to run Linux, I figure if I partition 20-30 gigs that should be enough? Any tips that anyone can give me for getting used to Linux would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[n0cmonkey]

20-30 gigs should be plenty.

My biggest tip is: Make sure you backup all important information. Newbies are more likely to blow everything away a couple of times before getting comfortable.

 

[Brazen]

Yay! Another "What linux distro?" thread!!

 

[nweaver]

I recommend the "Search the freaking forum" distro

 

[Brazen]

Ubuntu

Ubuntu

Ubuntu

Anandtech's forum search engine SUX0RS! :| And shockingly, there is no other "what linux" thread on the first page (a rarity).

 

[Hyperblaze]

All depends on your focus.

If you want to use a linux distro to do work with, and just want it to work right, I'd suggest something like fedora core.
I know there are a lot of ubuntu fan boys, I'm not one of them. I can't stand ubuntu actually, or debian (father of ubuntu).

If you really want to learn how the Linux operating system works, tinker with the nuts and bolts, my best recommendation would actually be Gentoo. I've had very good experiences with it. Some folks don't like Gentoo because it takes so long to install. Instead of 1 hour, it takes a few days, but the things you learn while installing it are amazing.

 

[Robor]

From what I've read I think Gentoo would be a nightmare for a beginning Linux user. It's a big enough change going from Windows to an 'easy' distro like Ubuntu (my preference) or Fedora Core.

I recommend Ubuntu. It's very popular and hence has a large user base and excellent community support.

 

[shamgar03]

I like gentoo, that said its more of a fun tinkering system than something where you want to just try out the operating system. I would recommend you download a couple different distro's and try a couple different ones. Make sure you back stuff up on your windows partition, just in case. Mandriva is nice in that almost everything works first try out (usually), suse is extremely nice as well. I don't really like ubuntu personally because I don't really like the way the package mangers work. Honestly the best package manager ever is gentoo's portage, but like somone already said, gentoo has a 2 day install time (95% is just compiling packages where you don't do anything). I am bitter about fedora 2 ruining my master boot record 2 years ago, but I am sure its much better now. Fedora is really the de-facto standard for linux, just because red hat and fedora have been around for so long. My advice, in short:
try fedora first if you don't like it or something doesnt work move to suse or mandriva.

Edit: one thing you might want to look at yourself is how active the help forums are for the different distro's, gentoo has an extremely good set of wiki's to the point of you can find instructions to do just about anything with it. Because ubuntu has gotten so big it probobly has a pretty good support space as well, but I can't vouch for that myself.

 

[Noema]

Ubuntu, or perhaps Mandriva.

 

[BobDaMenkey]

I've been enjoying Ubuntu, and had very briefly used Mandrivia before. Mandrivia seems to work pretty well out of the box, but seems like a little bit more of a resource hog than Ubuntu. My P3 933mhz 256mb RAM system spelunks quite well along with Xubuntu, a variation of Ubuntu.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I did search, the threads I read seemed to have people suggest 10+ different versions. I thought that explaining my background (new to Linux) and what I'm looking for a bit might narrow it down.

Thanks to those who have made a suggestion.

 

[Brazen]

Originally posted by: SlowSpyder
I did search, the threads I read seemed to have people suggest 10+ different versions. I thought that explaining my background (new to Linux) and what I'm looking for a bit might narrow it down.

Thanks to those who have made a suggestion.

Everybody says they are "new to linux" and want a good one that "installs alongside Windows" and want to "play games" on it.

 

[InlineFive]

I would strongly advise against dual-booting. My luck with this in the past hasn't been very good and I've ended up losing installations because of the two being meshed together.

What I would do is unplug your other hard drives while installing a OS on one drive. Then use the BIOS to choose a master boot drive and then you can use a Boot selection menu (F8 on some mobos) to select the HDD/OS you would like to boot to. It has saved me a lot of frusteration.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Run windows for when you want to play games on it.
Linux is generally a horrible gaming platform. (sure, SOME games work without major hassle, but even moreso don't work at all)

That being said, I love linux and I am very happy with Slackware.

 

[Nothinman]

Also, are you able to run the same software (games mostly) on Linux that you run on Windows fairly easy?

It's hit or miss, some work fine and some won't work at all. But you shouldn't be looking to run Windows apps on Linux, you should be looking to run Linux apps on Linux.

I don't really like ubuntu personally because I don't really like the way the package mangers work. Honestly the best package manager ever is gentoo's portage,

That's funny because dpkg/apt is generally considered the best package manager out there. If you run Debian or enable universe and multiverse in Ubuntu just about any package you could want can be installed automatically. And also funny is that portage is crap, or at least it was I haven't looked to see if they ever fixed any of the huge glaring bugs like the fact that it doesn't check dependencies on removal so it's trivial to completely and unknowningly hose your machine.

try fedora first if you don't like it or something doesnt work move to suse or mandriva.

I would recommend against FC, yum is slow as hell and to get a decent number of packages you have to start adding 3rd party repos right off the bat.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I would recommend against FC, yum is slow as hell and to get a decent number of packages you have to start adding 3rd party repos right off the bat.

Yum's speed's been fine for me. I did add one third party repo and I can only think of one thing I use off hand that wasn't proprietary software that hasn't been in the repo.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I would recommend against FC, yum is slow as hell and to get a decent number of packages you have to start adding 3rd party repos right off the bat.

The Pup frontend for Yum is slow but if you run Yum from the command line it's pretty speedy.

 

[Nothinman]

The Pup frontend for Yum is slow but if you run Yum from the command line it's pretty speedy.

If you think it's speedy then you haven't compared it to anything else, go ahead and run a search and time it and see how long it takes compared to APT. I redirected the output to /dev/null so that the time wouldn't be affected by any delays in displaying the output.

time apt-cache search firefox > /dev/null

real 0m0.457s
user 0m0.364s
sys 0m0.088s

 

[nweaver]

sorry guys, but I have tried Gentoo, (for quite a while), Debian, and FC. Apt is by far the Luxery car of package management.

My older gentoo box is so broken I can't even update it anymore. Only one of 2 left, and I've been putting off moving them over to Deb Stable

 

[DasFox]

SlowSpyder it's REAL simple. Go to Distrowatch --------> http://distrowatch.com/

Look on the right side for the RANKINGS, and start at the top with #1 and work your way down playing with different ones till you find one you like, which will most likely end up with you using something in the top 10.

ALOHA

 

[WT]

Linspire Live CD ?? Its an easy way to see how Linux works, and since it runs entirely from the CD, you won't be messing up your Windows partition if something goes wrong. I know the hardcore Linux guys will poo poo this as a waste of time, but I was impressed with it, and for a totally new Linux user, its UI is .. ermmm .. comfortably easy.

 

[Nothinman]

Linspire Live CD ?? Its an easy way to see how Linux works, and since it runs entirely from the CD, you won't be messing up your Windows partition if something goes wrong. I know the hardcore Linux guys will poo poo this as a waste of time, but I was impressed with it, and for a totally new Linux user, its UI is .. ermmm .. comfortably easy.

I might consider Linspire itself a waste of time, but Live CDs definitely aren't one. They're probably the best way to see how much of your hardware will work out of the box and get a chance to poke around the system before actually comitting to anything.

 

[imported_LoKe]

LiveCD's are amazing, I wouldn't have tried Linux without one. I suggest the Ubuntu or OpenSuse LiveCD.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: LoKe
LiveCD's are amazing, I wouldn't have tried Linux without one. I suggest the Ubuntu or OpenSuse LiveCD.

 

[Hyperblaze]

Originally posted by: Robor
From what I've read I think Gentoo would be a nightmare for a beginning Linux user. It's a big enough change going from Windows to an 'easy' distro like Ubuntu (my preference) or Fedora Core.

I recommend Ubuntu. It's very popular and hence has a large user base and excellent community support.

It's really not THAT bad. Gentoo is an ideal distro if you really want to LEARN about the system. Again, it all depends on your focus.

It's a big enough change from going from Windows to Ubuntu?

Are you afraid of the command line by any chance?