So to all of you who are interested in trying Linux or are interested in trying a new kind of Linux, I've started this thread. Here I and others, will write about the pros and cons of different Linux distributions. The goal of this thread is that anyone, new comer or novice user, can find the flavor of Linux that fits themselves the most.
Nearly all distros have a LiceCD or DVD. With it, you can just burn a disk and boot up Linux. When you take out the disk, your computer is the same (unless you edited something something on the drives!)
Remember, all Linux distros can virtually do the same things: Printing, editing photos, make servers, compile kernels etc. But some are more focused on a specific subject, therefore the community will also be focused on that subject.
Bionic Apple has also written Beginner's Guide, it goes through what Linux is, and in the end you install Ubuntu.



Ubuntu
Ubuntu is by far, the most popular Linux distro. Therefore it also got a big community that can help users. It's considered as one of the easiest Linux distros to use, at least for newcomers to Linux.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, and can install Debian packages (apps etc.).
New versions of Ubuntu are released twice a year, one in the spring and one in fall.



Pros
* Easy to use and install.
* Big community.
* Many guides.
* Debian apps can be installed on Ubuntu.

Cons
* If you want to learn more about the inner works of Linux, Ubuntu is not the best choice.



Linux Mint
Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and therefore it can use the same packages (apps etc.) as Ubuntu. Where Linux Mint differs is that it's build to run much better out of the box. Many additional wireless drivers, codecs and plug-ins are preinstalled. For example, Flash is already installed, so you can go browse YouTube without any installation.
Mint is also shipped with some additional tools called Mint tools to make it easier to configure and use the system.


Pros
* Easy to use and install.
* Many preinstalled codecs and plug-ins.
* Ubuntu guides can be used (to a certain extend) on Linux Mint.
* Debian and Ubuntu apps can be installed on Linux Mint

Cons
* If you want to learn more about the inner works of Linux, Linux Mint is not the best choice.
* Since it includes some proprietary codecs and drivers, it's not completely Open-Source.



Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux was originally released by MandrakeSoft as Mandrake Linux as an easy to use and powerful Linux distribution for both those new to Linux, and powerusers. When Mandrake was released in 1998, Linux was already well known for it's stability and power, but any use of it required such extensive technical knowledge that it had no hope of becoming a mainstream operating system. MandrakeSoft saw this as an opportunity to introduce a more user-friendly distribution than ever seen in the Linux community.

Pros:
* Extremely fast if your computer can handle KDE 4 or Gnome.
* Somewhat light (Approximately 650 Mb. That's better than Red Hat. Even Red Hat 9 from 2003 took up four times as much space)
* Very user friendly, while still being powerful
* Ships with Gnome or KDE4. Works flawlessly with Enlightenment, XFCE, or Fluxbox (These are the only alternatives I've tried on Mandriva.)
* Will boot on literally anything. I've run it in CLI on a computer with 512 K RAM and a pre-Pentium processor.
* Has a free version that's as good as the enterprise version, but misses a few non-essential programs that nobody uses.
* Uses RPMs, so pretty much any program will work on it.

Cons:
* Runs extremely slow if X is enabled on old hardware (I'm talking pre-2000 old. If you have this problem, you should be using Damn Small Linux or Puppy anyway)
* Doesn't work too well with JWM, although not much does.
* Default DE is KDE 4, this makes changing to a different DE or WM painful on first boot. I suggest using CLI to download another WM with urpmi before you do anything.

Notes:
* Slow package manager, but that's not a big issue.
* Has an enterprise version.
* Network install isn't an option.

Thanks to ButtsexV2, for the section about Mandriva.




Arch

Arch is an advanced distribution, and is similar in ways to Gentoo. It also has to be installed and built up from command line. It is famous for it's efficient package manager: "Pacman".
I installed this distribution because I was looking for a nice lightweight distribution that had customising capabilities and could look pleasing to the eyes. I was also looking for a way to become more familiar with a Linux system and be as close to the code as I could. Arch covered all of these perfectly for me, and more.

That wasn't actually supposed to sound baised, but it turned out like it. Still, it's a fantastic distribution for someone who is looking for something more advanced and configurable.

Pros:

Basically all of the same pros as Gentoo, it's also super fast if you want it to be.
The documentation is also fantastic, it guides you through everything perfectly.

* Doesn't come with a desktop environment/any GUI at all (See Cons).

Cons:

* Relatively complicated unless you know what you are doing (Also a pro if you are looking to gain knowledge of Linux).
* Pacman can sometimes not find the right dependancies, but this is fixable. It also may just be something to do with my mirror.
* Doesn't come with a desktop environment/any GUI at all (See Pros).

Thanks to nos217, for the section about Arch.



Gentoo
Gentoo is one of the most configurable distros that exist. The installation of Gentoo is not graphical and it involves compiling you own kernel. But don't fear, Gentoo has a great and very complete guide that walks you through all of the steps and in the end, you might get a highly optimised system (graphics are optional).
The nature of Gentoo is that all packages are compiled from source, and therefore you only install exactly what you need. You don't want network support? You think unicode is bloated? You think xterm is too slow? Gentoo is for you.

Pros
* Highly configurable.
* Can be extremely optimised.
* Nothing is installed unless you say so.
* Teaches you about how Linux is put together.
* Very big repository of packages that is frequently updated (Several times a week)
* Big community that can help you make the right choices.

Cons
* Hard to install without knowing how to use the shell.
* May seem like a configuration hell.
* It takes time to master optimisation.
* Gentoo is stable, but your likeliness to kill the system is higher. (Can be fixed in 99% of the cases)

Comming up: KDE vs. Gnome, Fedora and more!

Do you find something missing? A distro you want to write about? Is something outdated? PM me your changes or suggestions.

Tasks I want help with:
* Other kinds of Ubuntu
* Damn Small Linux
* Slackware
* openSUSE

For me, Ubuntu is the best

Linux Mint 7

www.LinuxMint.com

Mandriva Linux
Mandriva Linux was originally released by MandrakeSoft as Mandrake Linux as an easy to use and powerful Linux distribution for both those new to Linux, and powerusers. When Mandrake was released in 1998, Linux was already well known for it's stability and power, but any use of it required such extensive technical knowledge that it had no hope of becoming a mainstream operating system. MandrakeSoft saw this as an opportunity to introduce a more user-friendly distribution than ever seen in the Linux community.

Pros:
►Extremely fast if your computer can handle KDE 4 or Gnome.
►Somewhat light (Approximately 650 Mb. That's better than Red Hat. Even Red Hat 9 from 2003 took up four times as much space)
►Very user friendly, while still being powerful
►Ships with Gnome or KDE4. Works flawlessly with Enlightenment, XFCE, or Fluxbox (These are the only alternatives I've tried on Mandriva.)
►Will boot on literally anything. I've run it in CLI on a computer with 512 K RAM and a pre-Pentium processor.
►Has a free version that's as good as the enterprise version, but misses a few non-essential programs that nobody uses.
►Uses RPMs, so pretty much any program will work on it.

Cons:
►Runs extremely slow if X is enabled on old hardware (I'm talking pre-2000 old. If you have this problem, you should be using Damn Small Linux or Puppy anyway)
►Doesn't work too well with JWM, although not much does.
►Default DE is KDE 4, this makes changing to a different DE or WM painful on first boot. I suggest using CLI to download another WM with urpmi.
►Slow package manager, but that's not a big issue. More of a note than a con.
►Has an enterprise version.
►Network install isn't an option. Once again, more of a note than a con.

Edit: Will write one on Fedora, and maybe one on Damn Small Linux.

Edit again:
That line isn't meant to be included

Fixed!

Ughh, would everyone stop posting that everywhere.

Edited:

Arch

Arch is an advanced distribution, and is similar in ways to Gentoo. It also has to be installed and built up from command line. It is famous for it's efficient package manager: "Pacman".
I installed this distribution because I was looking for a nice lightweight distribution that had customising capabilities and could look pleasing to the eyes. I was also looking for a way to become more familiar with a Linux system and be as close to the code as I could. Arch covered all of these perfectly for me, and more.

That wasn't actually supposed to sound baised, but it turned out like it. Still, it's a fantastic distribution for someone who is looking for something more advanced and configurable.

Pros:

Basically all of the same pros as Gentoo, it's also super fast if you want it to be.
The documentation is also fantastic, it guides you through everything perfectly.

* Doesn't come with a desktop environment/any GUI at all (See Cons).

Cons:

* Relatively complicated unless you know what you are doing (Also a pro if you are looking to gain knowledge of Linux).
* Pacman can sometimes not find the right dependancies, but this is fixable. It also may just be something to do with my mirror.
* Doesn't come with a desktop environment/any GUI at all (See Pros).

Overall, a fantastic distribution. Definitely my favourite so far.

Fedora claims their community is larger.

According to Fedora's Stats they have 13,397,110 users.
And Fedora 8 still has the most users. (more than 7, 9, 10, and 11)

I'm too lazy to do a full Fedora thing, but here are some Pros and cons.
Pros:
Backed by Red Hat.
Super up to date. (at least when it's released )
Works the bugs out of unstable software which works its way down to other distros like Ubuntu.

Cons:
Really unstable (see super up to date)

I thought red hat was the most used??

On servers it is.
And Fedora is officially sponsored by Red Hat, and a lot of Red Hat employees work on it.

Like I said in the post above, Fedora claims to have more users than Ubuntu. But they keep much better statistics so it's hard to tell.

Wow, I might just install that distro to see what its like. I love being all the way up to date in the new software. Ubuntu never managed to do that for me.

Quick question, whats the difference between the DVD and CD Fedora.

I don't think the DVD has a live environment. It just goes straight to the installer; you don't get the desktop to play with. And it has a lot more stuff on it.

This, it is all correct.

I never really used Fedora. I went from Ubuntu -> Mint -> Debian -> Arch. I deel like it would be a downgrade if I went to fedora because of the effort I put into my Arch system.

Has anyone tried Foresight Linux? Looks like an interesting distribution.

That does look pretty nice. I'm going to try it out tonight.

Dling Foresight XFCE x64 dvd now.

Thanks for this, DLing x64 now.

Ubuntu ultimate edition
http://ultimateedition.info/

Suse is good but it's huge.

This should be Stickied

Thanks for the thanks :).

That website is ugly. I wouldn't want to get an OS that claims to be innovative and the 'ultimate' from a website that looks like something you'd see in the web archive.

What about Fedora.

Write about it and I will include it.

Eww what the hell?

I think I am going to give arch linux a shot. I heard you can customize almost everything to get a minimal install.

Don't forget about functionality as well. You get a great balance of both with Arch and Gentoo.

Go for it. It's really fast too.

Bump for justice.

Arch Linux is amazing. At first I was a bit scared of fucking shit up, and at first I failed to set up my X server. Once I finally got some more skills and finished my install ( Got X running, installed GNOME and customized everything to the bone ) it has been amazing. It's actually really easy once you have the knowledge. Installing it the second time was a breeze. It's way easier ( but not as user friendly ) to manage your system compared to other distros with rc.conf. Want ssh to start up on boot? Just add it to rc.conf, no problems! It also hasn't got devs whining about "AMAGAWD WE WONT PUT THIS IN REPOS IT'S NOT FREE SOFTWARE BAWWWW" like Ubuntu.

What? Ubuntu has tons of non-free stuff.
Arch doesn't even have the proprietary Ati driver anymore.

Well, maybe that's because ATI's Linux drivers suck so much ass they don't want to hurt their users.
The NVIDIA proprietary drivers are still in the repos.

Yeah, I think that was the reason. Catalyst does blow.

Damn Small Linux

Also known as DSL, this is the distro you want when your piece of ./sh is older than yourself. So yeah, with the low-end requirements being 486DX you really won't have any problems in any PC you find that has been made in the past decade.

As the live-cd distro is less than 50mb, you can fit it in just about everywhere, especially the 50mb card-CD:s. Don't get me wrong, 50mb is filled with apps, like 3 web browsers and nice games.
Cost like 1$ a pop, and are the size of CC:s, so burn one and keep in the wallet. Just like a condom, but you probably will get to use it.

You can also install it into the HDD, run it from USB, floppy+network installation, and some fancy frugal installation (I remember that it was cloning the image to the card, so it will be like a live-cd, so you can't fuck it up) to a CF card in a Ide adapter. Those adapters cost 3-5$ including worldwide shipping, just ask from me if interested. Completely silent system with old PC:s, as they won't need active cooling, and the PSU is the only noise generator. Probably next you can install it to your toaster via bread.

Modules are also nice, you can just select from a menu and press a button, and it loads the application that you dowloaded. In a live-cd it's nice that you don't have to install stuff, you can drop the modules to some floppy/usb stick and load them from there.

Pros
*It works in just about any PC
*Fast as hell
*Can be used even if you don't know a lot about what's going on under the hood

Cons
*Not pretty (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/images/dsl-4.2.x2.jpg ugh, but as I watch the apps I don't care)
*Not that much software via the modules (Almost all popular ones tho)


Conclusion: For low end PC:s and as the Live-distro that you carry around.

What would make it pretty would be if you installed a minimalist theme or something.

I know how you feel. I'd rather not get a distribution from a website that's hardly informative, that uses the name of a different distribution..

We don't even know what's it on about. As far as we know (and I can tell) it's just Ubuntu with a different theme and some more software. There're also some spin-offs.. I don't see the purpose in a "Gamers Edition", seeing it just contains some pre installed games for Linux.


Currently, I'm giving Arch Linux a whirl - but I'm a bit stuck with getting it to work with my network.

Yes, I tried messing around with them and all, but fluxbox or the other managers (Like Windowmaker) will never become as pretty as KDE or Gnome.

But it really isn't a con to me, but seeing as you other guys fap over 4D Desktop cubes defying the laws of nature...

<3 window maker. Makes me think I'm running a proprietary UNIX again :D

:P Me myself currently running windows xp with the original pre xp gray theme. It's minimalistic so I'd rahter use that haha

Good for hacking... I'm a white hat by the way don't get scared lol

I almost spat out my coke reading that.

I'm a Red Hat.

kids these days

Linux Mint 7 rocks my socks.

Good article. Definitely want to try some more of these out. =D

Why is this not stickied?

This.

It might be a better idea if we make a new thread that is a "portal" (bunch o' links) to all of these guides. Then we can sticky that instead of the Beginner's Guide and this guide. It would prevent future clutter in the sticky section as we would just add a link to the portal everytime a new important thread came along.

Also, we need to moderate ourselves. Right now lazyV is the only with sticky power, so unless we ask and wait, nothing is going to happen.

That's a really good idea. You could PM LazyV.

Ubuntu 9.04, this specific distro changed my mind about Linux. I tried 8.04 and it fucked up to no end and was in no way easy to use. 9.04 fixed all the problems I was having, and made me not totally hate Linux anymore. It also taught me HL2 won't run on an emulator on a computer from 2002 with 512MB of RAM and some hardware problem with either the MoBo or CPU.

WINE is not an emulator. :)

I have always liked ubuntu, just tried using gnome-do with docky, amazing!

Up until 9.04, I completely hated ubuntu. I gave 9.04 a try and loved it for a short while. But then back to Debian with me.

heh sorry no.
it emulates a windows system so yeah it's an emulator.

Not really.

Okay so instead of making another "Hurr I'm new to Linux help me!" thread to clog this place up I will ask here. I want to install Mandriva but the .iso is exactly 4 MB too big to use on a CD so I have been trying to make a flash drive that can be used to install it. The problem I am having is that I can simply not find a good tutorial on how to do so. The article on the Mandriva wiki was too vague. I was trying it from Windows though. If it would be easier I can just do it off MCNLive which I am running off a flash drive atm.

For a bootable USB drive, use Unetbootin. Getting your PC to boot off USB might be a bit tricky; depends on how old it is.

But for the CD, most cd burning apps can do overburn.

Why would they make a distro 4 MB too big? Why not just shave 4 MB off somewhere? Seems exceptionally stupid to me.

Wine Is Not an Emulator, WINE. Wine is basically the Windows APIs reverse engineered to run on linux so that Windows programs which think they're calling Windows APIs on Windows are actually calling Wine APIs on linux/BSD/OSX. It doesn't emulate Windows in the way an emulator like VMware does.

I like Sabayon or Mint.

Yeah I was FFFFFFUUUUUUUUU-ing for a little while. And yeah I can boot off the USB, this computer is new and all pimped out, the cd drive is just from the stone age because I never bothered to upgrade. I'll look into overburning though, and unetbootin.

I use ubuntu because it seems easier to use to me, while not being so simple it's frustrating.

but I'm always open to trying different ones.

Alright so Linux is running all up in here. How do I get ratings to work? The panel to use them doesn't show up.

What do you mean? What ratings?

Nevermind I got it. I meant the ratings of posts.

I like Fedora and Ubuntu, Red hat is okay meh, I don;t mind Linux I just dislike most of the fanbase surrounding it, most the "It is open source, free and better than windows!" If those were true Microsoft would be bankrupt

you're most likely going to get flamed for that, but I have to agree. while it would be nice to have one free os, I still get tired of the "open source philosophy" types.

but I still get mad when people sell ubuntu at hamfests for $10 each.

Alright new issue.

I installed it to my hard drive and such, but whenever I boot it goes through its nice wall of text then stops at "Waiting for root' or something like that, then times out after one minute and then says the message "Kernel panic: attempting to terminate" or something like that. Does this have anything to do with mount points because that was really the only thing in the installation process that I didn't understand. I have a 133 GB partition with root mounted on it and 12 GB partition for /tmp.

Did your install disk just not work?

Edited:

I always just give the entire partition to /.

Fedora and Red Hat are basically the same thing. Fedora is just the test bed for Red Hat. What is now Fedora 11 will be RHEL 6.

I don't mind If I get flamed I would love to hear the counterpoints, I just would like to set things straight there maybe a secret to Linux that I don't know. I mean installing flash for average users is hard to none WAIT I downloaded flash.deb it isn't running why?! if the distros were more unified it would help improve the overall experience but linux isn't suppose to be unified

Edited:

Yeah I am Using Fedora 10 right now, I heard they were about the same only fedora was a tiny bit more user friendly, probably should try red hat as I need to get a Cert in it

Everything seems to work on the second try for this. I did the exact same thing with the installer and it worked this time. Not that I am complaining.

I don't think you can get the real Red Hat for free; you have to buy their support. But you can try CentOS, which is a community version of Red Hat, the only difference is that they had to take all the Red Hat logos and stuff out.

Well you see that's the thing ;D. It wouldn't improve the whole experience. It would change it, which on an opinion basis may improve it for some people, but worsen it for others. A lot of people like their setup to be unique, unlike on Windows where everything is pretty much the same for everyone.

for college students it is pretty much free

bash doesn't count kiddie

it's an emulator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/emulator
ho dam

It doesn't emulate a system as a whole, it wraps portions in software and hands them off.

i want to put linux on my laptop. Which distro do you find generally boots quickest?

The most minimal ones. Arch, Gentoo etc. But they are more complicated to set up.

Arch and Gentoo are compicated yeah, so I'd recommend Puppy if you want an easy fast system. I've got no intentions of running it on my desktop PC, but it sure is a good lightweight os. The iso is about 100MB.