Linux flavor help......

Mon, 23 Dec 2002 21:18:37 -0500

On Mon, 23 Dec 2002 18:00:19 -0800 (PST) Tuxgroupie <tuxgroupie@yahoo.com>
wrote:
> Greetings All, 
> I'm still somewhat a newbie to the Linux world
> but I'm moving forward rapidly. I am currently
> establishing a Linux box at home for some
> serious training. I would very much like to
> hear some opinions from users as to what a good
> "flavor" for me to start out with would be. I
> hear pros and cons about them all. I have
> narrowed it down to Red Hat, SuSe or Mandrake.
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>  Thanks in advance.

Oh, I forgot the GUI thing...

Linux has choice when it comes to your window desktop.  The two most popular
are GNOME and KDE but there are many others.  Most distros provide both of
these and sometimes others but tend to "promote" one by default.

redhat defaults to GNOME.  However, in the latest version 8.0 they tweaked the
appearance and behavior to make GNOME work almost like KDE and KDE work almost
like GNOME.  An attempt to eliminate confusion and if it works for you, great!

mandrake is based on redhat but had traditionally provided the KDE interface
instead of GNOME.

SUSE has always defaulted to KDE.

Perhaps this is all just noise to you if you don't know the difference between
the windows desktops.  That's OK.  Pick one and use it, or install both GNOME
and KDE and switch back and forth at will.  Personally, I like KDE but GNOME
has some nice apps too.  To muddy the water even more, you can run GNOME apps
under KDE and vice versa if you want to use the extra resources.

To clear the water, if you don't know what you want yet, pick one and start
using it.  Either will work fine for you as you start out.  Don't worry.  Be
happy.  PLUG is here.

Alan