Which ever distro you choose there will be a lot of things you must experiment with, including your GUI. I like iceVM but the top GUI's are gnome and KDE. KDE uses a lot of resources, and is probably the easiest to use coming from windows. My parents and brother use gnome which is very nice and not as heavy on resources as KDE but still heavier then iceVM which basically gives you a background and command prompt.  

That's just my .02 cents. But I suggest downloading distro's you think look nice and burning them to a cd-rw. This is a nice site with descriptions of each distro.

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"The most abundant element in the universe is
hydrogen, then second is stupidity."-Harlan Ellison
"What good fortune for our governments that the
people do not think."-Hitler

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i use Mandrake i have also used fedora i like both of them

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I second that.  I started out with Mandrake.  Now I use Fedora Core, because I prefer Gnome and that's what's on the computers in my universities CS Lab.  Both have intuitive graphical installers, and good hardware suppost.

If you're looking to dual boot with Windows, Mandrake comes with a swell disk partitioner that will resize your Windows partition and all that jazz -- all point and click.  Easy, peezy.  Wow, I'm starting to sound dumb.

Anyway, Suse is a good option to start with, too.  Like Mandrake, easy to use installer with KDE as the default desktop enviroment.  Still, I suggest Manrake to start with for anyone who has to ask "which distro" to choose.

All distros, as far as I know, come with everything you'll need for developement (unless you're looking to develop Visual Basic programs...).

Otherwise, if you think you're "beyond," these, I say skip the Slack and go for a BSD.

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To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

1) I feel it isn't nearly as difficult as some people make out. Usually what people mean by difficult is that it's less like Windows (e.g. less GUI apps for configuration etc.). Bear in mind I haven't got any substantial amount of experience with distros like SUSE so my advice here may not be entirely accurate.

2) Installing and removing software in Debian is such a breeze, you're much less likely to accidentally make a mess of things than if you're downloading source tarballs and compiling everything you install. Sure, there are advantages to doing things that way (ask a Gentoo user) but if you're a beginner then that's just unnecessary hassle. Learning how to use apt-get is very straightforward. And I am aware not all other distros make installing things difficult, but Debian's system is particularly excellent in my opinion.

3) It's free. And not just free as in beer.

4) It's very popular, which means plenty of support is at hand if/when things get hairy.

5) Starting with a distro like Debian will let you learn how to use a Linux system. If you choose an "easier" distro like Mandrake or SUSE then you'll probably find it harder to use other distros in the future if you need to (or decide to, but personally I'm a very satisfied Debian user and I have no real desire to migrate to another distribution)

6) It's not called the Universal Operating System for nothing :). In other words, you'll have no trouble getting language support for Russian and French.

If you're uncertain, head over to http://knoppix.net and consider downloading a copy of it to try it out. It's a Live CD distro (that is, you burn it to a CD and boot off the CD instead of your hard drive), based on Debian. You might even feel more comfortable doing a hdd install of Knoppix before moving on to Debian proper.

If you're interested in installing Debian then I suggest you take a look at this page: http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/cd-images/debian-weekly/

Try following the link near the bottom of the page to "Testing" (aka Sarge) CD images. Chances are you'll be wanting an i386 build, so navigate into that directory. Also, it's likely you'll only need the first CD image. that is, sarge-i386-1.iso. As far as I'm aware these CDs have the newer, slightly more user-friendly installation on them (the older one tends to receive a fair amount of criticism).

(Edited by Misero at 5:15 pm on Feb. 11, 2005)

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"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."

I did install synaptic to handle installing new packages and updating though, makes things much easier.