Looking to Linux, any suggestions?

[ClosetFanBoy]

well im looking to give linux a try. i farted around with a-linux (i think they have the cool lizard on their site) having probs making a bootable cd etc. anyways im looking at this stuff and getting confused (yes ive become a slave to windows) so, in short, what is the lets say, noobie friendly, easy installable, gamer friendly linux os out there? sticking to the dual boot idea. many thx.

[neo86]

For gaming... stick to Windows. If you're going to put the effort into getting Linux to work with most games you'll have to invest in Transgaming's monthly fee to download their Cedega software that allows you to "emulate" DirectX in Linux. If you have an ATi card don't even bother really. Their drivers, though working for the most part, are quite slow compared to Windows drivers. You should try Ubuntu for a start. I hear it's very n00b friendly.

[uOpt]

I don't recommend planning to use Wine, Winex or Cedega.

Either you are happy with what games you can get Linux native binaries for or you should forget about it.

As for distributions, by now I pretty much only recommend Fedora. They came a long way since the worse versions and now restrain themself from fiddling too much. If they fire the guy maintaining the xterm package I'd be all set.

[Banko]

If it is your first time I would recommend Fedora as well. I started off with Red Hat 9 like 2 or 3 years ago, then moved on to Debian, then Slackware, and my now favorite distrobution has to be Gentoo nothing is better then the portage system, the tweaking you can get with it and the overall speed.

[ClosetFanBoy]

gentoo is a part of fedora? or something totally different?

[Banko]

gentoo is a part of fedora? or something totally different?
Umm Gentoo is a complete different distro. The only that relates to Fedora is Red Hat 9 because Fedora Release 1 is really Red Hat 10.

[siorai]

Right now I'm running Ubuntu 5.10 and Cedega 5.0. The only game I've tried so far (just installed Ubuntu this weekend) is City of Villains and it works pretty much well perfectly. I can't see any difference visually or performance-wise between Windows and Linux. I think that before people start saying that you should just forget about gaming in Linux with Cedega, they should actually try it.

[supra]

Dedicated Slackware user here for years. Fairly easy to install & easy to use.

[NightFire]

For newb friendly, I'd recommend SimplyMEPIS. Pretty complete package there.

[seeker010]

ubuntu or mandriva. fedora core is good too, I use it, but I don't find it as noob friendly as the other two.

never really got into the whole gentoo thing myself

[JonathanM]

I just jumped aboard the linux bandwagon aswell. With the recommendations here and from some friends I choose the ubuntu distro.

Liking it so far... but I have much to learn. Time to read up on the forums. :)

[siorai]

The Ubuntu forums are awesome. Very helpful people on there and tons of HowTo's for pretty much well everything. Even if you do have a problem, it shouldn't be too much of a problem getting it sorted out.

[joltcola]

There are tons of linux flavors out there, and multiple websites that review them. I would google for those, as it helped in the direction that I went. Many have live cd's out there for you to try, so you don't have to deal with a full install. Also, there is great support out there for having the option of Win or Linux at boot up with no problem. Which should give you all the options in the world. If something doesn't work right with linux, just hop over to WinXP and play what you want, untill you can get things squared away. Just make sure you know what you are trying to accomplish. Many people feel they need to make a switch over to linux, but not sure what they are trying to do.

My only suggestion, make sure you back up important files. No reason to get caught with your pants down. I also picked up a linux book at a local store to answer the more technical questions.

-- jolt

[supra]

I just jumped aboard the linux bandwagon aswell. With the recommendations here and from some friends I choose the ubuntu distro.

Liking it so far... but I have much to learn. Time to read up on the forums. :)

Im with http://linuxcult.com/forum

alias: xerverkillah

nice friendly place for help or gernal chat :D

http://linuxquestions.org is good too

[a12ctic]

as always i recommend ubuntu, its fast and prety bugless and easy for noobies... also its a .deb based distro with bleeding edge stuff... Been using debian (and debian based distros) sence 1999...