Any advice on which operating system is the best for beginners. I tired Debian but then heard it was too complex. This seems true. I am thinking about Gnome or Red Hat?

gnome isnt the operating system, its a "desktop environment," meaning that it controls what you see and how you interact with the operating system. the two biggest ones are gnome and kde, and you can choose between them as you like. be advised that red hat is not free, although fedora core is and its basically the same thing. this is something you want to research a bit, so go here and poke around awhile. for a beginner, ubuntu is hard to beat. if you happen to like kde better than gnome, look at kubuntu.

Just to clarify, Gnome is a window manager, not a distribution. It sits on top of Red Hat or Debian or Gentoo or what have you.

I have not tried all that many flavors, but I also was looking for something user friendly, and have been most impressed with Suse. In particular, installing common software is a snap with their YaST utility. A lot of people rave about Ubuntu, but IMO it's not ready for prime time, and does not support KDE, which I greatly prefer to Gnome as a window manager.

EDIT: kubuntu does support KDE, but last I checked was not stable or well supported.

agreed on suse, i like it too, but the deb package format puts ubuntu in front for me. btw, ive used kubuntu fairly extensively and ive never had any trouble with it. ive found it to be just as rock solid as ubuntu.

and another recommendation. ive found pcbsd to be excellent. its not "linux," but its quite close. it has a graphical install system, which is quite a bit nicer than ubuntu/kubuntu's. it also has a graphical install system for individual applications, meaning that you can download and install things on pcbsd just as you would on windows or os x. the drawback of this is that they have their own format and the selection is limited. ive heard that pcbsd supports the freebsd ports system, which has many more packages available as long as youre willing to go through the command line. as soon as i figure out how it works it will probably take over as my favourite non windows/os x operating system.

If you want to try Linux but don't want to actually install anything, give KNOPPIX a try. download an .iso image, burn it to a CD, then boot from it.


It will give you a good feel of what linux has to offer (knoppix is based on the Debian distro), and has a ton of software pre-installed on the image.

Ubuntu would be my vote. I tired various distros for the last few years and Ubuntu was the one which got me to stop switching from one to the other.

Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Suse all have Live CDs. Use those to figure out which is right for you without having to install them. Live CDs can be annoyingly slow, though, so you might want to test drive an actual installation for a while.