[This is my first post here, and if it's incorrectly placed, I'm sorry. I read the stickies, but after going through the distro section, felt this would be best posted here.]

I'm going to be installing my first distro soon, and can't decide whether to go with Chakra or Sabayon. I'm choosing not to go with a simple distro, like Ubuntu or Mint, because I want this to be more of a learning experience. I've mulled over the decision with an experienced Linux user and he has no opinion of one over the other. Is it basically a 50/50 crap-shoot for my needs, or does one build suit me more? Thanks, any help or input is appreciated.

I'm not sure how you got it down to those two choices----they are quite different.

Ubuntu or Mint-----SIMPLE??? Not in my book---these are distros that try to do all things for all people---and to work "out of the box"----this means that they will have many things that you might not want or need. Arch (the basis for Chakra) is simple......

All rambling aside, my answer is: "Install both and try them."

---------- Post added 06-13-12 at 04:25 AM ----------

I'm not sure how you got it down to those two choices----they are quite different.

Ubuntu or Mint-----SIMPLE??? Not in my book---these are distros that try to do all things for all people---and to work "out of the box"----this means that they will have many things that you might not want or need. Arch (the basis for Chakra) is simple......

All rambling aside, my answer is: "Install both and try them."

I was thinking about doing this, I might as well give it a shot.

Never tried Sabayon but when I have tried Chakra it as always been a bit buggy.

Don't limit yourself to those two choices. Do some distrohopping. Try as many different distros as you want for a few days (or whatever) each, then settle for the one that suits you best.

Yeah, I see what you mean, I was just narrowing down my choices so I could just *start*. Another distro that interested me a lot is Debian, but I've been hearing of a lot of security flaws in it on a general tech forum I frequent, is there any grounds to that claim?

I use Sabayon as my lazy man install and love it.

It will throw alot at you very quickly and dont really recommend it for beginners.
Honestly any distro will get you started in learning the cli. They all use the same core GNU programs and for the most part the same kernel.

If I was you I might want to look at any of the major player such as Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Mint, Mandrake/Mageia or X Distro that has an easy install and a large userbase for support.


Then you can use KVM/Virtualbox and start hopping distros till you find one that really fits you if you so choose.

Best words of advice is to keep you /home on a separate partition so when you do the hop to the next distro its an easy migration or have a few extra HD's with space to backup what you want.

Just my 2 cents

have you looked at the reviews here at lq? that might give you an idea.

my experience has been very similar to nixblog. I had nothing but issues with chakra and haven't't tried sabayon yet.

like pixellany points out; the word simple is a tricky one to use to describe a gnu/Linux distribution. it can mean everything just works out of the box with no configuring.
or it can mean everything is vanilla with packages installed where and how the developers intended it to be. this is a simplified description.

as brianl says, distro hopping is great, and if you don't do it you will miss out on appreciating a lot of things. but since you do need to start somewhere, I can see where your coming from.

I don't know why you've chosen them two, but I personally don't like chakra. its based on arch which aims to be simple as in my second description above and chakra takes it a butches the philosophy with there 'bundles'. I think I'm the only one to create a review for chakra here at lq. I don't know about sabayon.

some people think throwing someone in the deep end is the best way to learn. I disagree and think you should slowly move up.
I recommend mepis generally to noobs. if you have Intel integrated graphics then perhaps opensuse. mepis has some issues with integrated graphics. I currently use opensuse and while I'm not a booby it makes a good noob to advance everyone product.

That's a good choice you will learn a lot.
It's not that hard to get a running system.