Linux distro recs?

[blnchflr]

I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS since May last year, and while I'm extremely happy with it, I would like to become more Linux-savvy.

I'm looking for another newbie-friendly/newbie-semi-friendly distro to dual-boot with Ubuntu, to see what the differences are, etc. - any recs?

(P.S. I've been giving OpenSolaris - I know it's not Linux - a couple of goes over the last weeks, but in the end, I just could not get it to play nice with Ubuntu, so I gave it up. Very shiny OS, though!)

Comments

[catness]

If you'd like to become more Linux-savvy, why look for yet another newbie-friendly distro? ;)

I also vote for Gentoo, it's my favourite (though the previous commenter is right, it requires some learning and understanding what you're doing).

A lot of our users are quite happy with SuSE, it's rather similar to Ubuntu from the user-friendliness point of view.

[blnchflr]

Because I still know very little, and getting to know Ubuntu and getting everything to work was a battle, and I don't want to have to go through that battle with every new OS.

I will give SuSE (=openSUSE, I assume?) a look, thank you!

[catness]

Actually, being an educational organization, we are able to use the commercial version (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). I hope that OpenSUSE is not much different!