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

[kerravonsen]

In my experience, Ubuntu is the most newbie-friendly; though I've heard good things about Suse, I've never tried it.
If you just want to try out a different distro to see how distros differ, RedHat (or CentOS or Fedora) would be a good one to try, since it's a major distro that isn't Debian-based.

On the other hand, if you feel brave enough to venture out of newbie territory, I would highly recommend GenToo; you learn heaps using it. But I think it's probably a bit too newbie-unfriendly for you at this point. GenToo is good for people who have been using Linux long enough to know exactly what they want from a distro; because GenToo is very configurable. The downside of that is that because it's a source-based distro, you spend a lot of time compiling things. So, much as I liked GenToo, I got sick of that after a while, and changed to another distro. But I still have fond feelings towards it.

[blnchflr]

I think GenToo is out of my league at this, point, too - I don't want it to be a battle to get to know a new distro and get everything working (like it was when I first installed Ubuntu). I'm thinking baby-steps is right for me - OpenSolaris is very similar to Ubuntu, because both use Gnome, and that was very comforting :oD

I will give CentOS a look, thanks!