Debian / YDL/ or Suse????

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I was going to suggest Knoppix which is what Morphix is based off of. The great thing about Knoppix and Morphix is that you don't need to commit a partition to install Linux. Your hard drive is untouched as everything runs off the CD. It's a great way to get your feet wet if you're just starting out with Linux.

Once you're comfortable with the basics and are willing to at least dual-boot, I would suggest Gentoo. Not only does it have a great package management system that rivals Debian's APT, but you can completely customize it to your heart's content. The only drawback is that everything is built on the fly from source tarballs, which means if you have a slow system big packages can take days. On the other hand, there's nothing more satisfying than a wildly tweaked-out and hacked kernel.

Debian still has a place in my servers. There's nothing more rock-solid than the Debian stable tree.

Unless you're looking for a business desktop, I'd stay away from RedHat and even Mandrake. Installation is easy enough for any Linux newbie, but the end result is lacking for any Amigan and the RPM package management system (even Mandrake's URPMI) can leave you frustrated.

[thing_from_space]

So morphix or knoppix?

I'd have to go with Knoppix. Everything on one CD. Morphix looks pretty cool being modular and all, but it's a serious departure from the simplicity of Knoppix.

Another "live" CD that hasn't been mentioned yet is Gentoo. Though not as refined as Knoppix, they do offer live CDs of UT2003 (demo) and America's Army. Hell, a little tweaking and maybe a UAE version can be done.

[thing_from_space]

By the way, a good lowdown of ALL the linux distros can be found at Distro Watch.

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MrZammler wrote:
Debian has a lot of old software in it's stable release.

Actually, Debian "Stable" is a more of a reference distro than an end-user gaming platform. It is, however, perfect when stability is essential like in file, web, or mail  servers. I've had Debian stable running for almost a year straight with not even a slightest hint of a crash or hiccup.

The "Unstable" tree is probably a little more stable than the name might suggest. I'd even say it's a little more stable than many of the odd distros i've tried. It does have quite a bit of up-to-date packages and it's perfectly suitable for the home desktop.

"Testing" is the middle road between "Stable" and "Unstable". There's nothing really exciting in it since it's the  testing platform for packages coming out of unstable for the next Stable release.

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mdma wrote:
Knoppix gives you the choice of KDE or nothing.

This is incorrect. If you read the manual/README, you'll see the boot parameters allow you to choose between a number of window managers.

mdma wrote:
I don't see the point in KDE at all.  If you want to use a Windows clone, why not just use windows and add CygWin for the UNIX layer?  You get the best of both worlds then.

You've been bashing Windows for way too long. Take a breather and stop finding negatives in the world. If a WM "borrows" from the GUI of the world's dominating OS, then so be it. There's actually some merit to the way Windows looks and feels.

KDE is actually a well designed and solid desktop. Just because it "looks" like Windows doesn't mean you should immediately dismiss it.

mdma wrote:
If you want a UNIX clone, then use something like XFCE4/WindowMaker on top of Debian Linux/FreeBSD5.1. As an amiga user, you also feel a lot more at home with this kind of setup too.

Neither of these would be a good experiance for a first time Linux user. Too much of it depends on heavy shell use and editing .config files. KDE and Gnome are both excellent as novice desktops.