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Ok, I'm bored. I want to install Linux on my computer, but I don't know what distro to use. I've used Red Hat 8 before and it was alright, but if someone could point me in the direction of a nice Linux distro, it'd be much appreciated.
Oh, and I have Mandrake 9 already on CD's that my friend gave me. How is Mandrake?
Thanks in advance.:)
What do you want out of Linux? Different distros are for different people of differeing skill levels that want to do different things. If you want your hand held, Mandrake is good. If you want your hand held a bit less, Redhat is OK. If you're more sadistic, you can use Gentoo or Debian or Slackware. If you have a couple weeks to waste, you can try LFS, Linux From Scratch, which makes you build everything from source from scratch. I did that, but I kind of suck at Linux, so the end result wasn't as good as Redhat or something.
Anyways Redhat is what I use now. Redhat is releasing version 9 in a couple weeks, so that might be an idea. Redhat has good hardware support. The bad thing about it is the way they changed KDE and Gnome a ton to be more Redhat-ish, and the way they're pretty non-standard about a lot, but you can change everything back the way you like it. You can always just install the bare minimum and then add what you want after you boot. Another good thing about Redhat is RPMs, because I have a ton of trouble installing things from source sometimes even though RPM builds work, because of the stupid way Linux handles library dependencies. I have Redhat running Apache and sshd mail servers and OpenOffice and KDE + Gnome and just about everything else I need, and it didn't take me a month to configure it all. Plus it comes with Perl and gcc, and MySQL and PHP and various other hacking tools if you want them. It sets up LILO or GRUB pretty much perfectly, even for dual-boot. It sets up a firewall for you, which is good because I'd have no way to set it up myself, and it auto-detected my USB mouse and ethernet card and whatnot. The ONLY two things Redhat doesn't set up automatically is NTFS filesystem support, which means I ALWAYS have to recompile the kernel when I install Redhat, and nVidia drivers, which you have to download / install from nVidia's site anyways. Blah. But other than that it's good.
Linux is Linux though, pretty much, and you can do whatever you want with it once it's installed. A distro is just a place to start.