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What are the MAJOR linux players?

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housetier:
Josh, get what your friends have. They'll be the ones helping you get started, so you will want to have a distro they are familiar with. It does not matter so much which distro you have, as it matters how good the support/help is.

Ask the next linux or *bsd user what they use and if they would help you get started. Be prepared for disappointment...

f0dder:
Deozaan: hot-swap of motherboards and CPUs obviously require special hardware components. I'm not if there's x86 solutions that allow hot-swap of mobo or CPU, but hot-swap of pci-x (and prolly pci-e) should be possible - but obviously requires support both from the motherboard and the device. Hot-swap of harddrives is the same. PSU hotswap is possible as well.

But once we're talking memory, cpu or motherboard, things become messy, and I don't know much about that stuff. One of my friends was talking about hotswapping CPUs on a big server, but I'm not sure whether that was one of the high-end x86/Opteron thingies, or some special HP/SUN/whatever iron.

Carol Haynes:
I presume hot swapability would only work on a distributed system where you can shut down parts of the system and keep things going elsewhere. You can't hot swap a motherboard and keep stuff running if it is the only motherboard in the system!!!

Lashiec:
This thread could prove useful for you when it comes to choosing a distro, Zaine and Gothi[c] posts are quite interesting, and that PolishLinux site is excellent.

Armando:
Josh, get what your friends have. They'll be the ones helping you get started, so you will want to have a distro they are familiar with. It does not matter so much which distro you have, as it matters how good the support/help is.

Ask the next Linux or *bsd user what they use and if they would help you get started. Be prepared for disappointment...
-housetier (November 25, 2007, 06:40 AM)
--- End quote ---

I understand the logic behind that advice, but IMO choosing a well supported distro, with strictly scheduled releases, a strong user base, a good package management and current hardware detection is even better than going with what friends choose. For instance, most of my Linux friends use Debian, CentOS or Slackware variants. But they're all programmers, run servers, etc.

So I decided to run Ubuntu, the most popular distro at the moment, and found all the support I needed on the web. Anyway, most Linux distributions are close enough so that an expert cans help a "newbie" with problems (regardless of the distribution).

One thing to really check before trying one of the major distros is hardware compatibility (video card, Wifi, printer, scanner, ...). Live CDs can be handy for that. They give an idea, but even if problems arise, these can sometimes be solved after installation (and most live CDs can be intalled to the HD — there are some exceptions, like Suse DVDs).

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