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bigbear · Site Admin Joined: 26 Feb 2011 Posts: 36

First of all, I have a little series of questions I ask people before I give a recommendation as to what distro to use.

What type of user will be the main user(s)? not tech savvy, moderately tech savvy, highly tech savvy.

What environment will it be used in/as? Home/casual, business/smart terminal, server

What resources are available, hardware requirements? How much ram, hard drive space, usb bootable, does it have cd/dvd drive, etc?

Now, keep in mind that theoretically, any Linux distro can be used/modified to be used in any and all of these situations. However, in the interest of being efficient and productive, we will use those distros that are pre-configured toward "best use" conditions.

Home/Casual user: PCLinuxOS followed by Ubuntu (though reluctantly).

Home/Power user: opensuse, Slackware, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu. In that order.

Home/Server: Debian, opensuse, Ubuntu (as a last resort). In that order

Business/Casual user/Smart terminal: opensuse, Ubuntu. In that order.

Business/Power user: opensuse, debian, CentOS

Business/Server: Debian, CentOS, opensuse. In that order.

Now, on pretty much every Linux distribution you have a choice of Desktop Environments. These provide the interaction tools that make the appearance and overall user experience in terms of ease of use/productivity tools (wizards, etc...)

There are only 4 I am going to discuss:
KDE, Gnome, Xfce and none.

For the minimally tech savvy user, casual user and Windows refugee, there is KDE. It offers the most attractive "Windows-like" appearance and user friendly tools. However, it is also a resource hog for having all of those available. If you have at least 2 or 3 GB of ram or more available this will usually not be an issue.

For the moderately tech savvy and one not caring for the frills and toys of a "fullblown"" let me do that for you" Gnome is a decent choice. It uses less resources (1 to 2 gb of ram is usually sufficient for respectable speed, usability.) But stil lprovides enough "power tools" to make using the computer productive and not something to have to figure out. It's typical default appearance is often likened to the apple 2 bar appearance (one bar at the top and one at the bottom of the screen, though that can be rather easily modified by someone with average tech savvy ability).

Xfce is a minimalist DE that cuts back on the power tools and assumes you know what you are doing, thus being the least resource hog of the bunch. Definitely NOT for the Windows refugee or "casual" user.

Last, but not least, is no DE at all. That's right, running on the command line. This is the best setup for a server. No resources wasted on on un-necessary app activity behind the scenes. No GUI app back doors to exploit, etc...

So, based on the questions I asked at the top of this, answer them and use the previous discussion points I have given to make your choices. If you still aren't sure, go ahead and post the question here. I will give you my opinion, and that's all it is, my one own opinion and maybe some of the other folks here will give you their experience based opinions as well.

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