...well thats what I'm trying to find anyway. Alright I'm looking to seriously start transitioning to Linux from Windows but I just cant seem to settle on a distro. I've used Mandrake and SuSE as well as a security version of Knoppix. However I've tried installing a few others, like Slackware and FreeBSD but never used them because I couldnt get X Windows running. What I'm looking for is a distro that has these main features: - Supports my hardware. (ATI Radeon 9000, Athlon XP 3200, nforce3 MB) - Has a lot of available software; specificly network tools. - Has an easy to customize interface. - Isnt a pain in the ass to intall. Another concern is that different *nix's use different installation processes and I really havnt been able to figure this one out. From ports to tgz, deb, rpm's?? yeah I'm a little lost. I've looked a little into fedora, and gentoo sounds cool, but it mentions NVIDIA suport but I didnt see ATI :( PLEASE!!! I need some advice! I know you guys have bette things to do then pick oput a distro for me, but maybe even a Distro Compairison chart or something? [depressed] *EDIT* Looks like fedora is x86 only :(

Comparision of Linux distributions. You might want to try Ubuntu, I found it pretty easy to use and it's the only time I ever got Linux's sound drivers to work. Also, FreeBSD a different OS.

Quote: Original post by Roboguy
Comparision of Linux distributions. You might want to try Ubuntu, I found it pretty easy to use and it's the only time I ever got Linux's sound drivers to work. Also, FreeBSD a different OS.

Thanks for the wiki link, that should come in handy. I was actually just reading about Ubuntu and it caught my interest. I know its based on Debian, but how is its software distributed? is it Deb files or group packages or what? Is it easy to install things? I tried instaling AIM on SuSE or something a while back and I had to type some long command into the console... would this be similar?

Oh, and yeah I know abotu what BSD is, I just include it in *nix's as "Non-Windows " :)

To install things you pick them from the list in synaptic, no console needed.

ad security: distros with higher level of security don't work well on desktops... It takes some work to get things working with security patches ala grsec/PaX,SELinux,etc.

ad gentoo: it is great distribution and I would greatly recommend it to you but you have to be prepared that it wasn't meant to be very userfriendly distribution. So if you don't known some shell basics you won't probably be able to install (there is no installer, you'll have to install distribution from livecd in shell). It maybe a little more complicated than other distros but it's very good distribution in which you can customize a lot of things that are impossible in binary distros...


ad ati: fglrx drivers are available on ATI web. But last time I tried them they weren't very stable..