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« on: February 28, 2012, 09:52 PM »
I am with you 100% 40hz. I have dabbled in several different distros, use CentOS at work (now moving to RedHat Enterprise, because they are forcing the issue), use Mint Linux Debian Edition with xfce at home, set up others on Ubuntu, etc., etc....
By far, Mint is my choice, especially for the Debian editions...They just work (is this a Mac commercial?). Once you get started you can dig as far as you want to on any distro, so learning on Gentoo or Slackware seems counterintuitive to me. Sure you fight through it because you HAVE to, but if you want to learn it from the ground up, do it with the fallback to something you can find instead of frustrating yourself out of Linux all together. Many find learning through that frustration not worth the effort, especially when they need/want to get stuff done.
I have gone more the other way though. As much as I like linux, especially Debian version of Mint, I am leaning far more heavily toward Windows, since I keep finding many of the apps I want or need are there. Sure there are similar apps in Linux for the most part, but their quality varies far more and the learning curve FOR EACH APP is far higher (in general). The server side is different (it is generally always high regardless of platform), but for the desktop, I just keep coming back to Windows. AND...the apps that are for the desktop that are good and supported in Linux are generally available for Windows anyway; but that is just me. I like most all OS's (not a big fan of System-Z) on the technical level, so I am fairly agnostic there. Of course there is that corporate side of things - but in the end it is, as the saying goes, ALL ABOUT THE APPS.