What is the best brand of Linux to use for a newbie to the Linux system?

I would recommend Mandrake, Redhat or Lycoris as distros easy to install and get started with linux. If you find that linux suits your needs and you like it enough to make a more permanent switch I would look at a distro that is either more up to date or better tested like Gentoo or Debian. Both distros have advanced package management features that make installing/upgrading software much easier than you will find with the other RPM based distros I mentioned at the beginning but are somewhat more involved to install. Gentoo is more current in its offerings whereas Debian is a bit behind but better tested. FWIW, I used Mandrake for a week before switching to gentoo permanently.

I used Mandrake and SuSE before changing to RedHat. One reason is that there are so many books on Redhat (at least where I live). Second, it seems to be easier for a "newbie" to use. Before you choose a distro (brand), I recommend checking compatability with all of your hardware, so your not pulling your hair out later. You can go to redhat.com, mandrake.com and so on, just look for the Hardware link.

I use both Redhat & SUSE. I would say SUSE 7.3 or 8.0 I would say SUSE is very stable and a lot easier to use than RedHat, because most of the configuration is done through YAST, which is a pretty well done GUI configurator program. Also (with SUSE) adding new S/W from the distro is done through a data base which will tell you on which CD is what you want. To my knowledge no such thing on RedHat --> much harder. No distribution is perfect, but so far I prefer SUSE. For the books I am not satisfied with any of the ones comming with the distributions: hastly written almost never up to date. In my view RedHAt, SUSE, etc... should only document (better!) what is typical to their distribution (utilities, scripts etc...), rather than covering poorly what many Linux books do very well(O'REilly's books and Michael Koefler's, other's). Andre G-

I did use Mandrake for a while (about 3 months), but then got infuriated when wanting to install new packages/RPM's etc. I wanted to install the Debian package manager system, apt, but had many problems. Finally got it onto my machine along with lots of other dependencies (extra packages I needed to run apt) only to find that it didn't work properly anyway! I bit the bullet and installed Debian which, yes, is harder to install, but in the end, its a much better distro IN MY OPINION (no flamewar please! :) ), just for the package management alone. However, I would recommend Mandrake definately as a starter distro as it is very easy to install and has all the features a new user to Linux would need! Clydefrog