Greeetings, Linuxoids! I have Red Hat 8 installed on my second drive. However, I am near to a complete novice, which means I (as of now, it will change!) have a pretty vague idea of shell commands etc. In this respect, my question is: what distro would you recommend for a novice? So that s/he does not get scared by the overwhelmity of information a Windows-world comer is not very familiar with. I've read that Red Hat 8/9 is not a bad idea, but that SuSe, for instance, is far more fast (in terms of application download times and such). On the other part, Red Hat's support for international languages (Cyrillic, in my case) is supposedly implemented better that SuSe's. All in all, I feel a bit flammoxed, and I don't want to make a mistake picking a wrong (i.e., too-hard-for-a-novice) disto and struggling with it trying to implement simple tasks. Thanks for your head-ups!

It's a difficult one to answer as it comes down to personal choice. Redhat, SuSE and Mandrake are probably the biggest players and are all worth considering. Knoppix is very popular too as it can run straight from CD with no need to install it. As well as trying loads of different distros, personally I started with redhat and suse (back in approx 1997), then used mandrake for quite a while and have now totally converted to slackware. It's taken me about 6 years to make up my mind! If you have the bandwidth (and the time!) I would suggest downloading a few and see which you prefer. Stick with redhat/mandrake/suse until you get to grips with GNU/linux and fall in love with something like debian or slack.

I personally like Suse. If you get the Professional it cost $80 but you get 1500 programs with it. It comes with 5-6 CD's and 1 DVD. Incase you have the DVD drive it makes it nice for those big installs. If you install what they call Almost everything it takes up about 10 Gig's of harddrive space but the setup if very Novice friendly.

3Dave, Charlie, Thank you for your replies. I've heard exactly the same story from one Russian Linux user: he started with RH, then switched to Slackware. Now he truly believes Slackware is best of the best. There is definitely something about that... As for me personally, I think I'll stick with either RH or SuSe for now. As for the bandwidth, I don't have one; I have a 32K dial-up connection :( I have a dedicated line at the office, which is not too much faster (besides, there is a big difference between downloading files and surfing the Net from home and from office ;)). Charlie, what can you say about SuSe's support for international languages? As I said previously, I am most interested in how the Cyrillic languages (Russian and such) are implemented, because I need to be able to switch from English to Russian.

The Linux Cyrillic HOWTO http://www.funet.fi/pub/culture/russian/html_pages/linux/Cyrillic-HOWTO.html SuSE has always had a pretty good record for european support (I think it started in Germany) but I am unsure about Russian. If you go and buy SuSE you certainly get value for money as it comes with some great documentation. I still refer back to my SuSE v5 manual every now and again! Another alternative would be for you to buy a decent book on linux that comes with a distro. If you get one printed in Russian then the distro it comes with should support it.