After about a month of hopping from distro to distro, i realize that it is about time i settle down on one distro. I started with Fedora, although I didn't like the gnome so i switched to openSUSE and KDE which I love so much more. But now, I have it down to three to choose from (Live disks saved me , Pardus, openSUSE and Linux Mint 10 KDE. My problem is, I really don't know what to look for in a Distro. I am a beginner although i want something I can advance with. My only other thing is that i am attached to the Opera Browser, so that has to be able to work. Any ideas? What should I look for in each one? Have i missed a distro?
Thanks, and if this is in the wrong place, feel free to move it.

Opera is in Pardus's repos but you should be able to get it for any distro. It's hard to recommend a distro if you aren't sure what you're looking for. PCLinuxOS is a popular beginner-friendly distro as well.

Thanks. To me (and I could be wrong) PC linux OS tries to be too much like windows. I am really leaning towards Pardus. I guess what I'm truely looking for is something that works, but isn't necessarily farmiliar. I really enjoy learning all the new things with computers, especially the command line. The one thing I don't like about openSUSE is the KDE manager, I would like the internet to log in when I turn on the computer, which Pardus appears to do.
Thanks for the reply.

IMO, PCLinusOS seems to be right up with what you are looking for. I'm interested to know what you mean by "tries to be too much like windows" and how that turned you off to it.
Btw, you can install and use KDE on Fedora as well (there's even a fedora KDE liveCD/install CD).
Without more criteria it is hard to give a recommendation. Any of those distros may well fill what you are looking for. The command-line is there at your disposal, you can customize to your heart's content, you can poke around and learn about all of the nuances of linux, etc. It may be that you need to just pick one and run with it for a while, then a couple of weeks or months later evaluate if it fit what you wanted or if one of the others might fit better.
Another distro recommendation would be Mepis (built on debian, focusing on KDE), but it is in many ways similar to PCLinuxOS, so I suspect that whatever turned you off to PCLOS would probably also turn you off to Mepis.

I have used PCLinuxOS a great deal and I don't feel myself that it looks or feels like Windows at all. (Actually, I do remember that their last KDE 3 release, PCLinuxOS 2009, had Vista-like window decoration by default - this was easy to change! ) I would recommend it strongly, not least as it is very easy to maintain (e.g. just one repository to worry about!). Just keep a regular eye on the web page and forum, because important announcements relating to updates and updating are posted there now and again.

For me, the main drawback of PCLinuxOS is that you cannot install or run old KDE 3 applications on it. In my case I depend upon Quanta Plus, a very good web coding app that (tragically ...) has never been ported to KDE 4, and has not been installable on PCLinuxOS for over a year now. I also use the Creox sound processor for electric guitar, which is also now an unmaintained KDE 3 package. KDE 3 apps are not a problem on either Linux Mint or SUSE, however. Mint and SUSE are both superb distros. For me, Mint edges it because of the ease with which you can install a vast range of packages from its Debian/Ubuntu base. I use it in both its KDE and Gnome flavours.

I have not used Pardus but I hear good things about it. I don't think that its software repositories are quite as large and varied as those of the other distros mentioned here, so if you depend upon anything at all specialised or 'unusual' it might be worth checking that it is available on their website/forum.

I guess the fact that everything is even shows me that there really is no best one, lol. I went back to openSUSE because I found that it fit me the best. Pardus didn't have the software, or the support team i needed, although it is definitely something I will go back to in the future. Mint worked well too, although I found it to be a little sluggish on my PC> I also tried out PClinuxOS, although the test didn't last long because the screen size was off and there was no way for me to fix it. Thanks for all of the help.

The more time you spend with different distros the more you realise that there is no 'best one'. It is a very complex ecosystem - different distros are shaped by their ancestry, by their developers' approaches, and sometimes by their relationship with other 'meta-distros' such as Debian/Ubuntu.

PClinuxOS, SUSE and Linux Mint are all outstanding in different ways. As I said, it's the size of the repositories that ultimately inclined me towards Mint, as well as the friendly community. For quality assurance it would probably be PCLOS. For a superb, polished implementation of the KDE desktop it would probably be SUSE.

jdh313 wrote:I also tried out PClinuxOS, although the test didn't last long because the screen size was off and there was no way for me to fix it.

I bet there will be a way to fix it! Did you ask for help with this on their forums? There are some very helpful people there, and they will want to help you sort it out.

Arch

If you want to learn Linux then Gentoo is the one.
It has a steep learning curve but you'll know a lot more about Linux than by using "point and click" distro's.
Gerard.