Please help me choose a distro

[Morla Phlint]

Ok, I'll keep reading at the forums and in the internet until my laptop is delivered and see what comes out. 

Thank you all for your responses 

@TheBlunderbuss: Awesome site, thank you! 

greetings
morla

EDIT: And what about Freespire? It says it's based on Ubuntu. Does this mean that I would likely have problems with it running Planeshift  ?
It seems that the greates problem will be the ATI drivers...

EDIT 2: I see now it's actually based on Debian...

[Mordraugion]

personally for a newcomer I suggest sticking to Suse, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS or Mandriva with my vote going firmly on openSuse

I have installed openSuse on more than a dozen laptops now with no real problems

[monktbd]

The ones I know best are Mandriva and Ubuntu.

Difficult to say which one is more userfriendly.
If you want a good preselection of software on just one cdrom then go for Ubuntu. Ubuntu also has a very good and vast user community and an extensive wiki where you can easily find help. I also prefer debs in combination with apt-get/synpatic for installation to rpms/urpmi.
Mandriva has a nice control panel though where you can easily configure (almost) everything you want. When coming from Windows I think that is a bit more intuitive than Ubuntu with the tools a bit more scattered.

Also I think that the sudo concept of Ubuntu is a bit more Windows like (and of course clearly OS X like) than the usualy Linux way of using root.

Also I prefer Gnome but would not be able to really recommend it over KDE because it is much too much personal liking than anything else. Gnome is a bit less cluttered with Features than KDE, something I prefer, but Gnome also tends to give you less - sometimes basic - configuration options even if you want to. I still use Gnome though.

[Morla Phlint]

Thank you all!

I think I will give OpenSUSE a go.  But my laptop still hasn't arrived (weekend in Germany is really holiday  ), so I have time to keep thinking. I have already burnt two CDs: one for Kubuntu and now one for OpenSUSE and don't feel like burning a third one...  I have downloaded Kubuntu, OpenSUSE and Freespire, installed InfraRecorder and BitComet today just in order to get my Linux ready for the laptop  I'm crazy!

greetings
morla

[Elvicat]

you could always use cd-rw's to test, that don't waste any extra cd's

[bilbous]

Another thing you might want to do is download various distributions live cds and try them out before you decide anything. A live cd is a bootable operating system on a cd. It does not need to touch your hard drive at all and many of them let you install on the hard drive from the live desktop.

Freespire is the freeware version that was grudgingly allowed by Linspire which began life as Lindows on the Walmart cheapo computers. They were sued by Microsoft over the name Lindows and only allowed the free version because of pressure from the Linux community and a threat of litigation for violating the GPL under which most of the software is licensed. The have made a lot of licensing deals for software and drivers and you can expect the hard sell from their package management system as they (Linspire) really want you to buy their stuff. I looked at it once and never again. I think they used some odd file system too but do not recall very well.

[kaiserbert]

My own Opinion is, if you are a lazy Person you should stay at Windows.
Linux is only for People which like to spend time for their Computers.

I am personally using Debian, and like it very much,
but i am interested technically and do all things for my Laptop by my self.

bye Bert

[Waylander]

Go for Gentoo, it's easily the most newbie friendly.

*runs off snickering*

[bilbous]

I am having a problem with opensuse because the Suse display configurator Sax2 does not want to play with the nvidia proprietary driver and vice versa. consequently the game would chug to a halt. It may be I did not know what I was doing but I have dealt with this kind of thing for some years with other systems and should have been able to figure it out.

[Mordraugion]

did you install the nvidia drivers using yast/zypper? I did and have no probs with 10.2 perhaps this link will help

[Velh Krome]

I agree, (K)ubuntu is propably the best system for beginners. Even if their attitude is, in my eyes, doubtable.

Suse.. hm, to me its the Windows among Linux-distros. Suse I gave a try in version 8.2 and those days it was a pain. But this was some years ago.

Nowadays there is only one valid distribution to me: Sidux. Pure Debian Unstable! Its everything, other than unstable and user-unfriendly. Great community, always willing to help you out when in need.

[bilbous]

yes I did the easy way, guess I'll have to try the hard way if I ever seem to care, I only really need one working os per machine, this one has at least three the other has at least two. Oddly enough every time I loaded the game in that suse I got the message bar that performance is better in 16 or 24 bit color so maybe I just needed to tweak the xorg.conf file some more. Part of the problem could have been I did all the updates as part of the install before I got to the desktop and enabling 3d acceleration, it defaults to the open source driver, I think. Anyway by the time I got to futzing with the x driver my kernel had changed. I'll probably have to compile it from the drivers on the nvidia site. Strange that Suse has drivers packaged by nvidia and I had more trouble with it than the other distros where all I had to do was install a third party repository. I have had trouble with those before though so it is likely one of those things where you need to find the right time window or you will have a problem.

[Mordraugion]

Suse.. hm, to me its the Windows among Linux-distros. Suse I gave a try in version 8.2 and those days it was a pain. But this was some years ago.

Despite your qualification it is a trifle unfair to base your opinion of suse on a release 8 versions ago a bit like comparing Win3.11 and Vista

@Bilbous
Honestly all I did after installing opensuse with the default nvidia drivers  was add ftp://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/10.2/ into yast as an installation source and run yast software update it configured 3d and everything didn't have to touch sax2 at all

[bilbous]

Well as you might suppose I haven't spent a lot of time on it, and the problem I am having might be 10.3 specific as the easy way said click this link which was suppose to add the nvidia specific source, they had a different set of instructions for 10.2 and older.