Re: N900 user wants to explore linux on his desktop...
 

Please leave your RPM DEB religion discussion elsewhere!

This topic is not about how secure a distro is. Thank you for the side note that people using .deb based installation environments need to be careful!

As I stated in my previous post, if this is about learning and getting experience with GNU/linux any installation from scratch no matter if ArchLinux Slackware or Debian

I do not recommend others and especially not Suse Redhat or Fedora where the first two are pay for open source are and their open projects aren't recommendable either. And yes I used to have Suse at somewhere 6.x and Fedora from 2-5 and Ubuntu9(for 1 day).
Now I run pure debian since etch has become testing on all machines, I have had a closer look at several distris for netbooks and PCs for the last 2 years and was one of the first who managed to have all functions of his sammy netbook working with debian-testing as far as google knew that time.

Re: N900 user wants to explore linux on his desktop...
 

Thank you for your opinion... I was hoping for a more stimulating response from 'pink floyd'

Re: N900 user wants to explore linux on his desktop...
 

This is a funny comment.

This thread isn't about security, but it IS about

--your repeating a point you already made

--whether a distro is theoretically for pay.

I think a newbie should normally start with the EASIEST distro. Consensus and my own experience tell me that the easiest isn't Arch or Slack or Deb.

Re: N900 user wants to explore linux on his desktop...
 

As matter of fact the easiest way is most of the time the least experiencing way you can go. Easy has no learning curve at all btw...

Glad to make you laugh again!

Re: N900 user wants to explore linux on his desktop...
 

Actually, I've found that going Ubuntu has been the least frustrating experience. It's one thing to have a learning curve, but it's another thing to be an actively frustrating experience due to having an incredibly steep curve.

Things are definitely better across the board these days, but Ubuntu has done a great job in getting things to work decently well out of the box that you aren't spending more time fixing problems than exploring and learning the system.

Re: N900 user wants to explore linux on his desktop...
 

Well, I'm using gentoo from several years now and I know perfectly what you are sayng ;-) . But I must say this too: I learned much more things with this distro than installing others like mandriva (mandrake at that time), red hat, slack and debian. I tried all of them before but only with gentoo I was fine.
Maybe today things are not the same, but if you are patient gentoo can still give you "something different"
And it is not so difficult like it may seem.

Re: N900 user wants to explore linux on his desktop...
 

That is true, but gentoo has changed in perspective of "good practice" in the latest upstream has been committed without further review of code. That's not only for some packages but also not in general. One of my more experienced friends turned their back to gentoo because of this.
Two other friends started their exp. with gentoo as well and actualy they learned their way around in gentoo and on the console quiet well, as in I can start programs, compile my own packages and know how to start/stop services but that's about it! For any more detailed questions they needed help as they know how to copy/paste CLI-commands but have no idea what to do in the backyard or how to connect wifi without their gnome tools. They came up with questions I had a laugh on after they "used" gentoo for about 2 years already.

My brother had some limited experience with root-servers running debian, he knew his way around in webservices, apache and mysql but that's about it. He asked me for a distri to start with and he chose Slackware without me recommending, the first 2 weeks were frustrating not only because of slack (have forced him to use fvwm). After those weeks and several hours on the phone to debug his wifi setup (which had nothing to do with slack we noticed later) he was proof of concept.

If you like to get to know how a GNU is behaving you need to go low-level and start from scratch, but this includes to spend a lot of time with a machine. If you like to ride a GNU but don't want to know details at first you should go for the least painful windows like setup. In that case I would recommend linuxMint (derived debian/ubuntu and was the best out-of-the-box experience passing my pendrive yet).