Recommend a Linux distribution for a relative newcomer? [closed]

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Which Linux Install Should You Start With

I do a fair bit of programming and web design, and since re-installing Parallels on my machine I thought I'd go ahead and load up a couple other systems for testing environments. OS X and Windows I'm fine with, but when it comes to Linux though, I'm a bit at a loss, as I know a couple buzzword builds that you always hear about, but I have no experience using it at all.

Under the circumstances, what distribution(s) of Linux would you recommend?

Answer 1

I'd recommend Ubuntu. Why? Well it's built on a nice Debian base, you get aptitude and apt-get which is pretty awesome for installing apps, and the community is pretty good.

Answer 2

If you want a learning experience I'd recommend Gentoo as an excellent distribution to teach you a lot of how Linux (can) work. Gentoo focuses on compiling every program as you want it (constrast need as it can take some time to get to actually being able to use) so that you end up with a copy of the program that is optimized to your CPU (i.e. AMD X2, Phenom, Core i7) rather than cpu classes (x86 and so on). You sacrifice portability of applications for full on optimization for your system. The help guides are second to none and I've always found the community helpful and full of knowledge.

Otherwise if you just want to use the thing then Ubuntu is probably better. With Gentoo you spend too much time keeping the damn thing up to date.

Answer 3

I have fairly recently started using ubuntu - which is the one your hear about all the time - for good reason I think.

Development is very active so you can get most things you need. It is fairly easy to find help when you have a problem.

Also Linux has this command prompt image which can be intimidating. I have found that as I have used it I use the command prompt more but I always have a fall-back of a fairly robust gui where necessary.

Answer 4

I'd also recommend Ubuntu, not only because it's very user friendly, but also because if it isn't user friendly enough, there's lots of other users to ask for help.

Answer 5

If you planning use linux as desctop OS 1. Ubuntu 2. Fedora

If only testing LAMP and web browsers like Firefox and etc... Maybe use some small linux distribution to use less RAM and HDD.

For example DamnSmallLinux use around 50 Mb on HDD, Ubintu - around 5 Gb

Answer 6

I would recommend starting with Ubuntu to get familiar with Linux.

If at some point, you decide that you really want to learn how linux/unix works under the hood, and how to do things independent of the gui -- I'd suggest slackware. Although I know and love Ubuntu now, I started on slackware in '96... and am glad that I did because many of the basics of working around /etc/ or manually using ifconfig apply to all the posix type systems-- linux, solaris, or *bsd, with relatively minor changes (which are what man-pages are for).

They may be a bit dated, but for general linux knowledge a great place to start is the HOWTOs from the The Linux Documentation Project.