I found an article today right on blogspot.com while searching and thought some of y'all might be interested. After you read it, come back to the rest of this blog for my thoughts.
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/12/best-linux-distribution-of-them-all.html
I think he does a fairly good job of diagnosing the issues, though I disagree on parts, but they are taste differences, not content differences.
For example, if a person really can't figure out how to install an MP3 player, or the security-enabled DVD playing software, such as MPlayer (I prefer VLC or Ogle for DVDs), then paying a bit for Linspire, etc. might be a good idea, but personally, I recommend one of the good offshoots of the deb or rpm trees that can be downloaded free of charge.
He's right about Slackware, which is what I learned on. I didn't know any better back then, so learning on it gave me a base on which to build.
Okay, so what do I think is the best distribution? For smallness, you can't beat DSL (he called it by the real name), which I use from my flash drive when I need Linux on a windows machine; I can run it without rebooting and it runs right in a window on the MS machine. I've run it on everything from Win98 to Vista without any problems. Oh, and if you really like it (it lacks major functionality for productivity, like an office suite that reads docx, etc.) you can install it on your computer and make it the native OS.
For a solid desktop distribution, you can't beat either PCLinuxOS (also called PCLOS) or Linux Mint. PCLOS is an rpm-based distribution and Linux Mint is a deb-based distribution. They both contain everything you need to be productive within about an hour. Installing any windows OS, after Win98se, takes up to 3 or 4 hours, unless you don't have any productivity software to install, then you are somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5 hours. But what good would that PC be?
One caveat on PCLOS. The main developer who has driven this fine distribution has been out of circulation for over a year, and the last solid release was version 2007. His qualified supporters and co-programmers, however, have released a beta version that will become PCLinuxOS 2009.
Linux Mint is about to release v6 which is in beta right now.
In our home, we have a Fedora server, which is our web server for http://ourldsfamily.com and all the sites linked from that page, and our email server, spam filter, virus scanner, subordinate firewall and file and print server. It also hosts over 5300 email addresses in about 105 email groups. It doesn't store the emails for those addresses, other than the archives, but does a good job of passing as many as 500 emails a minute through cyberspace.
We have a firewall/gateway PC running CentOS v5 as an embedded part of SmoothWall, a free firewall product that meets our needs perfectly.
We have several PCs running PCLinuxOS v2007, and several others running Linux Mint, including the Acer Aspire 5520 laptop I'm using right now which came with Vista Home, which just plain didn't do what I needed after hours of configuring and installing additional software, but that's me.
Okay, we do have one PC that dual-boots between XP and Linux Mint. Not my idea. I have a couple kids that just can't seem to break bad habits. There's a very old PC running Win98, too. It may not last the weekend, however, which I've been saying for about 20 weekends now. It's an early pentium with 64MB of Ram and a 40GB disk.
If you decide to install any type of Linux, ask me about it and I'll do what I can to help, within reason. I have to feed my family, too.
Oh, and here's a link to a page explaining the pronunciation of Linux:
http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/
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Karl Pearson
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"To mess up your Linux PC, you have to really work at it;
to mess up a microsoft PC you just have to work on it."
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