Everyone has a favorite distro. Maybe it's Debian, or its many offshoots. Or perhaps one of the other giants: Fedora, Mandriva, Mepis, Gentoo, Slackware. There are some who prefer Unix, in the form of FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
While they have a favorite distro, they may also have a first distro, one that they no longer run, but have fond (and sometimes not so fond) memories of.
And even though I currently am in the Debian (and offspring) camp, I, too, have a first distro. It's not easy for me to write about, because of the memories, both pleasant and not.
Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Mepis, Gentoo, and Slackware are all amazing distros (I mention only the ones I have tried; PCLinuxOS, Freespire, and Open/FreeBSD are all excellent as well, I'm sure. And the *BSDs are not Linux).
I have tried all of the distros listed above, and while they are all excellent, I have found Debian (and derivatives) suits my own personal taste the best. Many will disagree, and quite rightly so. All the others have their own particular advantages.
If you have ever visited this site, then you may have noticed one glaring omission in my list: OpenSuse. OpenSuse was (long, long ago, when Satan hid dinosaur bones to confuse man)originally a derivative of Slackware, but has since adopted many features of the Red Hat package management system (rpm)and incorporated them into its own system, YaST.
Some say it is a distro suited to Power Users, which, if true, means we can all be Power Users. Oops, wrong diary. And if the dazzling array of choices has your head spinning, then this site has the answer.
OpenSuse was my entree into the open source world. And a rough entry it was; the combination of a broken YaST and Zenworks being a real pain in the neck, plus the fact that I was using an old computer not suited to Suse's size or speed, and it's a wonder that I'm still using Linux today.
Suse's installer is by far my favorite in terms of being able to customize every little thing right off the bat; though it's a liveDVD, it's fairly snappy and very informative on every thing you choose to install, with all the dependencies handled.
The standard install is around 2.5 Gigabytes, and when you toss in a bit of KDE here, a bit of eye candy there (I'm a GNOME fan), you end up topping out at a little more than three Gigabytes.
OpenSuse has a much more polished feel to it than, say, Ubuntu, which is not hard to understand since OpenSuse has a commercial counterpart, SLED.
Though it felt a bit bloated in 10.1, in 10.2 that problem seemed to disappear; it could also be because by the time I came back to Suse (from Ubuntu 6.06) I knew what to install and what to lay off.
Dapper Drake (Ubuntu 6.06) was nice, but it was Suse 10.2 that convinced me to buy a non-Apple computer (a Thinkpad) in order to run and play with Linux full-time.
Thinkpad owners would be well served to give Suse a try, as IBM/Lenovo have an arrangement with Novell; Suse recognized every single bit of hardware in my computer, including stuff I didn't know the origins of.
My initial experiences with Linux were definitely a mixed bag, but the support I received at the fine forums for Suse and Ubuntu helped me immensely when I was trying to figure something out; normally within a couple of hours of posting there were several responses to what I was looking for.
If you are using a computer for your livelihood, then there may be a couple of must have apps that have no Linux counterpart. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy some of the many open source apps available on all platforms.
If you're like me, and just want a computer to listen to music, email, watch vids and surf the net, then there really is no discernible difference, except for the fact that you can tweak and configure your setup to your heart's desire.
An interesting aside: yesterday I stumbled across this site; though the bandwidth is practically non-existent, this may be where open source computing is heading; imagine if Google, leveraging their massive servers, put this into action--customizable ISOs that you could then burn and install to your machine, knowing that all of the bits you needed were taken care of.
Add in their Web apps that allow you to do word processing, spread sheets, and so on, and we might see a serious dent in the dominance of commercial OSes as we have known for the past twenty years or so. An exciting prospect, to be sure.
Forget 'is Linux ready for the desktop?', and focus on 'are you ready for Linux?'. Linux has arrived, and it's only going to get easier from here on out.
Here is Suse running Beryl/Compiz on a Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM: