The latest issue of Linux Format magazine has a very nice article on how to pick the best distro. This is a subject rife with controversy, but they do a very nice job of remaining bias free and objective. By listing a wide variety of user types, you can pick your area and see what they recommend.
I do have a couple of nits to pick with it though:
- While Ubuntu has its strengths (the biggest of which is the vast and active user community), I think its choice of GNOME as its default desktop is a mistake. GNOME is quirky and quite different from Windows and offers up too many gratuitous changes from the "norm" for it to be a newbie friend face. KDE is much more "normal" in that respect.
- I also disagree with the admittedly tepid recommendation to use the 64bit version of a distro. Again, just enough annoyances with not enough payback to discourage a newbie.
That being said, I enjoyed reading it and am itching to try a new distro. Still perfectly happy with my openSUSE, but I have a free 40gb partition just begging for some play time:) I did use their recommendation for Qimo as a "family friendly" distro and installed it on my daughters' computers, as WinXP was behaving very badly. They have really enjoyed the pre-installed games and creativity software. I just wish there was better support for it besides comments on a blog post. And I think it should pre-install Flash support, as that is the other big destination for the girls, Flash web games.
Now maybe try Fedora 10, which was included on a recent Linux Format DVD? Or Mandriva? or....
How to choose the best Linux distro for you | TuxRadar
