StarDestroyer.Net BBS

After some thinking, I've decided to give Linux another whirl. It's been awhile (since Mandrake 7 had first come out...), and I was wondering what the opinions on the latest Distributions was, which is the most stable, has the easiest learning curve, etc.

I'm going to be putting this on my desktop, cause the laptop I'm going to be getting is my take with me to work, goof around on, play games system. While the desktop will be for my important stuff, which will include a personal web server.

So...what's your opinions? Which is the best Distribution for the newish user? Mandrake? RedHat? Slackware?

I will greatly appreciate any opinions offered.

Debian: What I use. The learning curve is steep enough to you know, force you to learn, but shallow enough to be able to drag yourself up from the bottom with out too much trouble. Plus you've gotta love apt-get.
Slackware: Never used it but heard it's kinda difficult.
Gentoo: Again never used it but all the reviews I've read of it say that it's blazing fast (after a real long install. That's cause it's all custom compiled for your box) and that it's easy to install stuff with emerge, but it's a pain to learn and install.
Suse: Used it for a while. Ok I geuss. Very good looking Suse-ified GUI, Graphical Installer, all around polished. I don't care for YOU or YaST in general but some people enjoy them and you can always get apt on there if you want. Be careful though, It was always really unstable for me when I was using it. Uses RPMs though. Never liked RPMs myself.
Mandrake: I made an abortive attempt to use this once. I cocked it up. I've heard it's n00b friendly but still offers power users the stuff to do their thing. Or whatever. Mike Wong's OS of choice.
Lindows (linspire now I geuss): Generally best to avoid this. It's just debian with a bunch of useless crap bolted on.
Fedora Core: I've heard good things about this but I've never read an indepth review or used it myself so I can't really say much. Might bear looking into though.


Well that's all I can think up now.

Mandrake 10.1 is fairly user friendly. Fedora has the best installer (for noobs) but it is very limited (won't even play mp3s natively). If you want something very simple which gets you back on the curve of linux, Ubuntu is very easy to learn and I was rather impressed with it, but I decided Mandrake was better (because I can play around more with it). Xandros and Linspire cost money but I hear the transition is fairly easy.

I've been using Mandrake 10 for almost a year now. Prior to that I used Win22 Pro. I still use it to play some games and that's it. I've been building my own systems for a few years now and I would consider myself to be "power user."

I chose Mandrake after reading Wong's personal site and I have no complaints. It is easy to setup and install, worked with all of my hardware right out of the box. It took a few weeks to be become accustomed to the OS. Here is what I had to learn:
1) How to compile programs from source. I wasn't sure how to do this at first but once I read the INSTALL file for my first app it explained how to compile and install from source.
2) How to configure stuff. There are dozens of config tools installed with Mandrake right out of the box, and it takes a while to figure out which config tool does what. The config tools themselves are easy to use.
3) UNIX commands. A few years back I knew a little UNIX and it took me a little while to remember the command line options. Most of the time I use the GUI and you don't need to use the command line but in terms of power and speed no GUI can match the CLI.
4) URPMi. This is honestly the best thing since sliced bread here. Other distros have something similar like apt-get but basically you add some sources for packages and after that you just launch this program and you can browse hundreds of free software packages in dozens of categories. Everything from games to DVD authoring software to 3D solar system simulators to web browsers, video editing apps, sound editing suites, video playback codecs, and so on. Go to EasyURPMI if you get mandrake or any other RPM-based distro.

I use Linux for pretty much everything I did under Windows. I watch DVD's and internet videos like Red vs Blue and fan films. I burn CD's and DVD's. I edit video projects for film school. I use Open Office to accomplish everything I did in MS Office. I play games that are Linux native as well as plenty of others using Wine, and I even have an ATI card and games work pretty well now, though I still recommend getting an nVidia card.

I currently use Debian, though I have some ubuntu repositories in my sources.list file if I decide to upgrade to X.org (which doesn't currently don't work with my nVidia drivers).

Currently running GNOME 2.8

I mostly use the CLI, since it's faster and I can do many things in one window with console editors such as vim.

Started off with Caldera (yeah, now SCO, hehe)->Redhat->Linux from Scratch->Debian->Debian+Ubuntu->Debian.

The new Debian installer is actually pretty easy, but installs a number of things you don't need.

I know it's not Linux, but what are you people's opinions on FreeBSD?