about linux, help me get started please

[Mr. Chambers]

i am interested in messing around with linux.. i have screen shots of some of your guys's desktops.. and they look very like windows, and a whole lot better... i have heard that it is not so good for gaming or anything like that.. but believe this is more of a driver issue than performance right? anyway.. which distribution is the best (easiest, most compatible, versatile, etc) of all of them.. there is a crapload of different ones.. i work at a local staples and have access to a couple different ones.. i think mandrake is one of them not sure though.. are there any good sites to goto for help or starting info? thx for the help!

 

[Samurai_Punch]

Haha... Staples... funny... i was in there the other day, and several people asked me if i worked there

I know at the staples around here they have Mandrake 8.1 (which isn't the newest 8.2 is), RedHat7.2, and FreeBSD 4.2 i believe.

I personally prefer Mandrake as my distro, i've used RH since 5.2, 7.0 and 7.1 abit. One of the things that i think mandrake does do better than RH are the user config wizards and tools... They're rather integrated all together, and there isn't a bunch of searching for programs to configure your box, as with my experience w/ RH there was alot of using obscure commands and such... Mandrake IMHO is a good newbie freindly distro... Wasn't Mandrake's slogan or something like "making redhat better, than redhat" a year or two ago?

Otherwise Mandrake and RedHat are very much similar, under the hood, Mandrake prefers KDE for the WM while RH opts for GNOME... but both distros have both and a handfull of others as well to choose... it's just a matter of preference.

Although SuSe is coming out w/ a new release later this month i believe which looks quite good

 

[XWRed1]

i have heard that it is not so good for gaming or anything like that.. but believe this is more of a driver issue than performance right?

Yea, its a driver and software title issue. I get about 10% more fps than I do in Winxp on the same box (XP has since been removed), and Nvidia releases killer drivers, lately ahead of the Windows ones.

Nvidia is the only real option for serious gaming under Linux. Unfortunately, the single biggest porting house went under in January due to lackluster sales, so new titles are scarce. Only big ones I can think of off the top of my head are Serious Sam and Doom 3. You can have success playing non-lame games in Wine, I play Warcraft3, Halflife, and Jedi Knight without any problems and excellent performance myself, but your mileage may vary.