Have been working on my university's Solaris machines for years now. So i have a basic understanding of Unix. Lately I was thinking of putting a distribution on my Windows box and was wondering if any of you had any suggestions for an ol' CS undergrad like me. I was looking at SUSE or Gentoo or Ubuntu. Any and all suggestions are appreciated. ------------------

I never tried SUSE, but I have used gentoo quite a lot, and I find it to be the typical "next generation" distro. Debian on the other hand (Ubuntu is based on Debian so I assume they have more or less the same pros/cons) is the safe, stable and well tested distro. Debian is what I use these days myself. They are very picky about what goes into the distro, and very thorough about everything. Its almost scary :D
These days you get pretty much any software package for debian (through their apt-get manager) probably becouse their distro has been the most popular for years now. (I dare to say that without beeing a hardcore expert). If you cant find it using their stable package database, you will probably find it under the unstable one. Talking about packet managers, gentoo uses portage, which originally is developed by BSD I think. It is a great packet manager, but I still think Debians apt-get is a nodge better. One advantage with the portage package manager that comes with gentoo is that every package installed on your system is compiled locally. This takes a lot of time compared to Debian's manager which downloads and install pre-compiled software. It also ensure that all the software on your system is streamlined for your hardware ^^
Installing the base gentoo system is not as easy as installing a base debian/ubuntu system, but with your experience it wont be a problem. Infact, following the installation procedure that follows gentoo, is quite a trip. I learned a lot about how to "bootstrap" your own linux from scratch doing that.

For simplicity I suggest Debian/Ubuntu.
For a streamlined system, with lots of extra kernel patches merged in atomatically, and so on... Gentoo is it.

If you are going to set up a server system, there is other alternatives, but for a desktop system, I think you are looking at the most interresting ones.

I have very little experience with other distros like slackware. Would be interresting to hear some oppinions about that.
Personally I would rule out RedHat. They used to be top nodge a few years ago, early support for new hardware, tons of available software. But these days, their package manager (rpm) is falling behind, and you get debian packages for pretty much everything now.

Be aware that Im not one of the "heavy" guys, so thats just my humble impression of the current state of distros.

What's your primary interest for using Linux?

I really do not like SuSe, I'd recommend RedHat/Fedora over it.
I use Gentoo (and I build a lot of custom/specialized systems).

I'm mostly a software engineer. My interests in CS are along the lines of Security and some game development.

My primary interest? haha, to get away from windows. lol :D

thanks for the info pulpfist. I've been looking at Gentoo alot and am likin what i see but I'm gonna look into Debian in a few minutes.

Thanks for the replies guys, much appreciated.

You would probably enjoy one of the not-so-dumbed-down distros, since you seem to already know the basics of working with a unix system. Debian testing or unstable seems like the right choice for you. Slackware might be worth a try too. It is known for its robustness and security through simplicity.

If you want a UNIX system, rather than Linux, you could try a BSD, such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD, very much top of the list in terms of security and stability, although little more difficult to make games using 3d hardware unless you have an Nvidia graphics card.

no *nix user groups in your school? My CS dept had 2, one that was all about FOSS software, and one that was hardcore into OpenBSD. I joined the first group and found it's a better experience than trying something on your own.

I've never used SuSE, but I used RedHat from version 5.1 up through Fedora Core 2. I used Gentoo for awhile when I got an Athlon64 because they were the first to have 64-bit AMD version. Gentoo ended up being an enormous pain in the ass, and I think the only reason to use it is because you have a lot of time to waste and like to tinker with stuff, or because you want to get a little more experience with how the whole distro is put together. Whoever tells you "it runs faster because it's compiled for your computer!" is full of shit--it's not noticeably faster, but it's noticeably and aggravatingly slower to update your system since it has to compile everything. :)

I finally quit Gentoo because I didn't update my system for a long, long time.. and when I finally did try to update it, it failed. There was some sort of a dependency circle that couldn't be fulfilled because something needed to be built with newest tool "foo", and foo couldn't be built without the latest "bar", and bar couldn't be built without whatever was depending upon the latest foo. If you use a binary package system like RPM or dpkg or whatever, this isn't an issue. On Gentoo, you really do need to update frequently. You can't really make a script that automatically updates your system regularly because sometimes Gentoo needs user input while it's doing the update (which really sucks).

I'm sure some Gentoo fanboys are going to flame me for that, but I'm just posting my experience.

I'm using Ubuntu now, and I totally dig it. It's like Debian but is a little more up-to-date and always has the latest Gnome stuff (which is what I love.. if you're into KDE, maybe check out Kubuntu.. I don't know anything about it). The packaging system is better than RPM from what I can tell (and obviously better than Gentoo's).

I've thoroughly enjoyed using (K)Ubuntu on my desktop at home. I've tried Mandrake (good distro, I believe it is subscription-based now), Fedora (excellent distro, a little heavy on the install, and RPM dependencies suck), and Redhat (see Fedora). I highly recommend (K)Ubuntu, if only for the apt-repository feature.

Solaris 10 is now available free of charge, so why not try something your familiar with?

If you really want to try linux, all distros are very similar, the differences are minor. Ive tried Ubuntu, and wasnt really a big fan, its a bit too simplistic, and there are no configuration options during install, its like Windows, it installs the default config, then its up to you after that to install Apache, mySQL etc. God knows what it installs by default, i didnt really play with it much.

I was a fan of mandrake, but I went on the website looking for the new distro, and the free download version was very well hidden, and the description wasnt too appealing, it seems like most features have been cut out of it. So i went with Ubuntu instead.

I have now replaced Ubuntu with Fedora Core 4, which appears very nice, but ive only had it on 2 days, and havent had chance to try it.

I would say Ubuntu is probably good for beginners or desktop machines, while Fedora for a server.