I''m very new to Linux, with little more than tinkering under my belt for a month or so, and I was wondering about a few things. At present, after a hard drive crash on my laptop I went out and purchased Mandrake 9 as I knew xp (the only ms option at the time) was too much for the crap spare computer I had. While my laptop was being fixed I spent a few days with Linux and found that I liked the speed and stability it maintained even on my older system. So, I dual installed mandrake and xp on my new system but after a while find myself wondering that if I want to get serious with Linux is Mandrake the way to go? IIRC I think that Mandrake is one of the less secure of systems among other negatives things that I can''t seem to recall. With this in mind I ask...should I stick with mandrake or upgrade to something else? I''ve heard about Suse, Red Hat etc and I was wondering which comes most recommended based on ease of use, features and such. Thanks again.

I''ve been using Mandrake for about a year and a half now, and it still seems great. As for it being less secure, well i doubt its any less secure than XP. I vote stick with Mandrake.

Current Projects: GK3 for Linux | Landscape Engine | Bug Hunt

having used mandrake for a while I believe it''s the most "user friendly" linux distro. It feels less bloated than Red Hat (700+ packages by default was just too much...), and it provides a ton of useful utilities and simplifies many of the more difficult configuration aspects of linux (mdk9.1 comes with zeroconf, a utility that rivals windows XP''s automatic ethernet configuration - a real plus). if you''re happy with mandrake, i''d stick with it. you''ll get all the benefits of linux without having to understand every nook and cranny of the OS. if you use it for a while and find that you want something more, you could upgrade to a more "unixy" distro like Slack or Debian, which are far more configurable but assume you have more knowledge about the system.

You can "get serious" with linux in any distribution, because the underlying system is the same, they all have the linux kernel, they all have XFree86, etc... As far as ease of use, you have it now MDK is by far the easiest distro to run and use, suse has YAST, which is fairly cool, but nothing really to ditch your current distro for. RH is basically the most stable out of those three, because, they will keep slightly older versions of packages and apply bugfixes to them. They also run AC kernels for every release. I think that you should stick with mandrake, and if you want to learn more about linux, I would suggest reading a book on it and possibly tinkering with settings, perhaps recompiling your kernel(make sure that kernel-sources is installed) because by default mandrake will give you a lot of kernel options that you don''t need at all, and will have everything as modules.

I''m on Mandrake 9.1 right now, and it''s definitely pretty easy. I tried Gentoo, but it gave me problems on one of my systems, so I''m waiting till the final 1.4 release to try it again. I also liked Slackware alot too, and a Slackware based distro called Vector. If you want a nuts and bolts linux distro, go with Gentoo or Slackware, but be warned, they are definitely not as user friendly (though Vector wasn''t bad at all).

The only major distro I haven''t tried is Debian, and it already left a bad taste in my mouth after having some problems with dselect and tasksel. I''ll probably give it another try eventually when I have some more time. If you''re worried about security, I don''t think Mandrake is all that bad...however, being one of the most popular distros, it probably does have a higher risk of someone finding some kind of exploit. Even though linux is linux, many distros modify the kernel with their own patches and they build RPM''s for their own distros...so who knows what might happen. That''s why Slackware is kind of nice with a very simple .tgz "package" management system (I guess you could almost call Slackware a source based distro).

I''m fairly new to Linux, but I do know that not all kernels are exactly identical. Though they are compiled from the same code, and therefore provide the same functionality, they may be compiled into different machine code. Most distros, including RedHat, are compiled for 386 processors for compatibility reasons, but the kernel in Mandrake is compiled with Pentium optimizations (or so I''ve read). Currently I''m dual-booting RH8 and Win98FE, but if I started over, I''d choose Mandrake for this reason.