Steven's handy desktop Linux guide

[zridling]

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols provides a nice guide toward Linux choices. It's short, so I copied most of it over.

[attach]

[jgpaiva]

Defining fedora as being "on the cutting edge of technology" is a giant understatement. What the author really means is "fedora frequently ships unstable software which will get you into trouble".
Unfortunately, not every user can tell that being "on the cutting edge of technology" will involve suffering with your pc every day.
I think it's this kind of guides that make the linux newbies make a wrong turn right at the beginning. You can't just give half of the information, if you're trying to help anyone that doesn't know enough to read what isn't written.

I also have a few doubts about fedora's community being better than ubuntu's (which isn't mentioned at all).

[urlwolf]

I followed up the MEPIS recommendation, but the reviews I found were lukewarm...

[hpearce]

I don't know why so many people like Ubuntu, when I tested out 4 distros, it came in last. For one thing, it is totally ugly and feels like it belongs in the windows 3.1 era or something.

I highly recomment Linux Mint for beginners. A write up recently appeared. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-mint-your-best-choice-for-a-desktop-linux-os/

[cjseymour]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I have used both Ubuntu and Mint, and while I prefer the aesthetics of Mint I still use the Ubuntu 64 bit edition which allows me to use more RAM in order to run VMWare to access my office for remote support.  64 bit Mint is usually a step behind the Ubuntu release schedule.  Regardless, it is great to see more people trying out Linux these days.
~Chris

[Innuendo]

More articles/guides like this are needed. It's hard for someone who is curious about Linux and wants to try it out, but knows hardly anything about the OS to choose what distro to use.

What distro one chooses plays a major role in what kind of user experience the user will have & it's easy for beginners to get lost in the techie details and distinctions of each distro when they go to choose which one to run. It seems to be the first decision one must make on the road to Linux is also one of the hardest for the newbies to make.