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Originally Posted by Aignam
In my experience, Red Hat's Fedora is the best choice for your first time with Linux.
More information at http://fedora.redhat.com/. |
I second that, I've used Fedore Core 2 a few times and like it very much. My server uses RedHat 9.0 which also was a great O/S, but its old software now. RedHat 9 and FC 1&2 come with a gui-install mode; also it comes with multiple setup-options; like workstation, server, home, laptop, etc...
All the other distro's are just as great too; I know a friend that uses Mandrake 9 for his server, I've used knoppix as a boot-from-CD linux (great if you wanna use linux at school or similar places). I always thought that SuSE had some $$$ involved, but I guess there's a way to download it.
From my experience RedHat has been the best for me; as for programs like a browser and chat client, most of it comes with the whole Redhat package. For other software, usually it'll take a bit of work to find a program, but 9 times out of 10 its better than the microsoft counter-part. Sure linux is a tad harder to use, but its worth it. If you still need windows you can always install a windows emulator, or wine (which oddly stands for: Wine Is Not an Emulator). If you have an extra hard drive partition, or just a bunch of free space, you can install redhat onto the same drive that has windows, making it a dual boot system. It uses the GRUB Boot loader, which prompts you which O/S you want to use during startup.