Finnaly diving into Linux, what to choose?

Hello everyone. I'm sure there are 100's of posts like this and that everyone will have a different answer but I have been reading around this forum for a bit and decided just to ask.

I am what some would call wasted potential and am just looking to play around with Linux and see what I can learn in my free time. I am a very fast learner, I know some advanced VB and a bit of C code but for reasons you don't care about I gave up on that route in life and it has been sometime since I have used any of it. (vb6 or vb.net are the last i remember using)

ANYWAY... I grew up on dos and bbs's and have been a windows user my whole life. Looking into linux for two things. A stable OS for day to day use and as I said before to see what I can learn.

I have been reading up for sometime now and I am looking at Ubuntu and possibly Gentoo, leaning toward Ubuntu. Please keep in mind that I know virtually nothing about Linux but I would consider myself an advanced windows user.

Well, there you have it. Thanks in advance for any comments, suggestions, thoughts, flames, hate mail, etc.

Welcome to Dev Shed.

I've never used Ubuntu or Gentoo, so can't comment on that. Although, I can comment on my preference for a new user... When I started using Linux, I started with Fedora Core with no knowledge of linux.... this was about 5 or so years ago... and now I am an advanced linux user from playing around with it.... Setup my own server (mail, web, DNS, ftp), and am still learning....

Just my two cents.

I prefer Fedora. You have to be willing to deal with rapid version updates though, so for a production server you'd be better with RHEL or CentOS that remain stable for longer periods.

I used SuSE once. Didn't like it.

I'll throw my hat in for Ubuntu. While I wasn't a beginner when I first started using it, I found it to be very beginner friendly. Fedora is also considered a beginner friendly distribution too. I wouldn't try Gentoo first unless you want to really force yourself to understand the inner workings of Linux (which isn't necessarily a bad route to take, I actually went that route myself).

cool, thanks fellas... was hoping for a few more responces but ya... off to check out fedora.

Exactly how complicate is it to use gentoo? can anyone point me to an example or even a tut on gentoo?

You couldn't be more right. I've read this question on probably a dozen forums for 10 years.



gentoo.org - you'll need to sit and read the documentation thoroughly before you begin, and have a second machine handy to refer back to it during the process.

If you're just learning Linux, unless you want to get heavily into internals and compiling software right off the bat, I'd steer clear of Gentoo. Even Slackware or Debian can be confusing for a beginner.

Ultimately, I vote for Ubuntu for a beginner, as I recently downloaded and tried the live version and then decided to install on a spare machine. Exceedingly simple to load, install and use, IMHO. Get the thing loaded, install some dev libraries and off you go.

And yet it's still relevant, since there are so many distros suited to so many different types of user. Both Linux's greatest advantage and greatest disadvantage, in different ways.

I'd also run something like Ubuntu at the start. One thing that hasn't really been mentioned is that because of its popularity, there are loads of user forums dedicated to it, so it's pretty easy to get help when you need it.

I ran Gentoo for a while and it was a great learning experience because it pretty much forces you to understand what you're doing in quite a detailed way (it's been a couple of years, so this may be outdated advice). An excellent choice if you want to dive in the deep end, but be warned that when you're learning you WILL break things so I wouldn't play with it on my primary computer.

Excellent, thanks again.