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Distros we tried, liked or hated all the same post your experience with them here

Try:
- Arch - A realy good distro, easy setup, fast, reliable, great package manager and repository. And a great logo ^^
- Ubuntu - Can't realy complain about this one, it's fast, it uses install cd rather than dvd, great package manager, boring(no challenge)
- Debian - same as ubuntu, boring, but realy stable
- Gentoo - Worth a try but i would pick arch over it any day because i don't have to compile everything from source in arch. Installing X+Gnome takes about 6 hours on a laptop, realy fast and stable once running. posibility to get a netbook faster then the most expencive desktop because of the many bootstrapping choises, the disto is for 1337 users.
- Slackware - Installed it in virtual box and it worked nicely though it was nothing for me as it was to much work, no package manager for updating the system everything must be done manually.
- Backtrack - Great live cd if you've lost your internett access and you want to get the wep key from your neighbour so you could access the web(Not that i have done thid )
- Fedora - Don't really like it but it's really secure thanks to the SELinux system, worth using if you're gonna host some webserver of ftp server of some sort for others to see. I got some sound issues with this one

Haven't tested:
- OpenSolaris - Haven't really used it but got a suggestion from a friend saying that it's great for file servers because of the great file system it posesses ZFS. (Sooner or later i'm gonna have to try this)

Avoid:
Sabayon - Bloated piece of shit which crashes after first update
SuSe - owned by novel, hard to get things working + Slow + Brings nothing new to the table + had the same sound issues with this one as with fedora

Well I think this is an impressive list but you forgot the obvious choice for any Windows hopper - Mandriva! It works, it has Live CD, and a community that is not to big, so you might get an answer.
Then you have the small nice ones; Puppy it is easy to use and it is fast because you put it in the memory.
And Nimblex is a fast litle charmer too (Slackware based).

Never installed mandriva myself, but i tested yours and seems good enough.
keep them coming i'm sure n00bs finds it interesting what distributions other people are using and what they like/dislike about them ^^
I know i was confused the first time i tried Linux, firstly finding the right distro for beginners

Yes you are right about that. Let us agree on something for the sake of the newbies. You don't start with Ubuntu. I know that is the only Linux you have heard about but trust me that is no place to start. Starters typically should pick Mandriva or Suse.

I started my Windows tenure years ago with DOS cli. I learned Linux years ago with CLI.

Because of it, I can fix anything I want to with the right command in cli. I don't have to wait on some *supposedly* sleezy-easy GUI to load to do it.

I have also never, in Windows or Linux, had a terminal crash on me.

Now what say you?

No not suse, slow and boring grrr..
Mandriva is a good choise but so is ubuntu, it doesn't have the same control panels which are good for beginners, but it has great documentation which shows them how to do the more difficult stuff, and isn't that the point teaching them and pushing them to one day using arch? hehe.

but i'd say mint/ubuntu/mandriva for beginners.

EDIT: Can't agrue with you there dedanna, Terminals rarely crashes, which helps my point on learning to do the stuff the hard way. Most of the stuff posted on ubunto forums are CLI commands for fixing problems ^^

Read again. I was a beginner.

One also needs to know how to modify files with CLI in Arch.

Well you are about my age dedanna so we started with the same. I remembered I was laughing at Win. I had made this nice batch menu system that could start Dbase ans Lotus symphony on the IBM XT. I really liked dbase. And I found win to slow me down. The reason why I eventually used it was that the printout would be much better. Remember the 11 12 13 win diskettes 3.11. I still have them:)

Well i'm not nearly close to your age, but i know for a fact that CLI commands goes much faster then using a slow gui like dedanna sais. Although i also know it's easier to recognise then to memorize, what i mean is it is much easier to recognise a button then to memorise the commands in a shell, i prefer the CLI way but we must accept that not everybody does (although they should - there is no excuse for not wanting to learn to use a computer, we are in a computer age ffs)

viking60 wrote:Well you are about my age dedanna so we started with the same. I remembered I was laughing at Win. I had made this nice batch menu system that could start Dbase ans Lotus symphony on the IBM XT. I really liked dbase. And I found win to slow me down. The reason why I eventually used it was that the printout would be much better. Remember the 11 12 13 win diskettes 3.11. I still have them:)

Holy crap! I still have mine around somewhere too! WOW.

If one learns with CLI then one actually has it much easier. It makes them able to do anything they want with anything they want. It's a psychology that's more than proven time and time again.

I've noticed that 95% of issues nowadays in Linux or any OS for that matter, are GUI issues. So, they have to revert to CLI anyway. What happens if they don't know it? Then it's up to all of us to try over a period of days on a forum just to get someone to type a simple command in a terminal, because they don't get it.

I've seen 4-page threads or more of doing just that. So, I start with the hard stuff, so they can manipulate the GUI a lot more efficiently if they need to. Not only that, but when they see (and I've seen this on the MDV forum even) that their issue is actually fixed with CLI, unlike the GUI, then they become more interested in the CLI, because it actually fixes the issue.

Agreed, and your views on this surely will bring some thoughts in to the brains of the newbies