It has been about a year and a half since I first began playing with Linux. I have downloaded and tried just about every distro I could find, but I kept crawling back to Windows with my tail between my legs. All that ended about six months ago because something just kept pulling me back to Linux......I just couldn't stay away.

I finally came to the realization that Linux was not Windows and that I needed to stop treating it as if it were. Needless to say, my attitude change has done the trick. I reinstalled Mandrake 9.0, and have never looked back. As of this morning, my Windows partition has been formatted and is now my /home directory.

I always told myself that before I switched completely to Linux, I would need to be able to do every thing that I was able to do in Windows. I'm happy to say that I'm doing everything and MORE with Mandrake 9.1 (switched from 9.0 about 4 months ago).

I know some of you might say that Mandrake is a newbie distro and if I really want to learn Linux I should install something like Slackware, Gentoo, etc. Rest assured, I do plan to try more difficult distros, but for the time being I think I'll just take a while to relish what seems like a huge weight lifted from my shoulders.

i mounted my windows drive as /free-space, large samba public directory.

I don't think there's any dishonor in sticking with an "easy" distro--for MANY reasons, a lot of people just don't have the time or inclination to become Linux adepts, but still feel for ethical or practical reasons they need to abandon MS Windows. I'm one of them. At age 63, I don't want to spend that much of my remaining life beating my head against technical walls, even with the help of a good forum like LinuxQuestions. Mandrake 9.1 (and succeeding releases) should do OK for me.

what did you do about cd-rw? do you have that working on your system? how? i haven't gotten cd-rw working nicely yet...

Did you try K3B yet? (http://k3b.sourceforge.net/

it is as far as i know the best CD burning software available. can do CD-RW, and is easy to setup.

In fact, I haven't tried that one yet...

I got the cd burner to burn iso9660 cdr's but not cdrw's. I'll try your suggestion!

I still use Redhat, even though I don't consider myself a newbie anymore. I don't believe in switching distros at the drop of a hat just because one becomes to 'advanced' for the distro he/she is currently using. Rather than switch, I just update my system--not from rpms, but from source tarballs. If I don't like the way Redhat does it's startup, I change the startup scripts, not the whole system. Although I will say that if I ever get another system (a laptop or something), and I have to install from scratch, I will install Slack.

Wise words from an obviously wise gentleman.

I haven't seen it too much on this forum, but have seen people on other forums who use "newbie distros" get flamed as badly as Windows users. I just don't understand the elitist-type attitude of some Linux users.

I often ask the same question on different forums to help increase the amount of ideas and suggestions to help me solve problems. I'll never forget when I got flamed by FIVE different people because I am running Mandrake. All the responses basically said the same thing: "Get a real distro and then come back and ask your question". I never even responded to any of them.

I wish they could understand the viewpoint of the gentleman above. Some of us just want to abandon Microsoft with a minimum of difficulty and fuss, and that's where distros like Mandrake really shine.

That's one thing Linux has going against it. The entire elitism and fanaticism aspect. I've used redhat for some time, until I learned how things work. I use gentoo now, but I would never recommend to anyone that they switch unless they are prefectly confortable.
It's a pain, and if you don't like it you need to go back to your old distro and still loose most of your settings and programs. The people who flame are just as bad as the people who shove windows down your throat. It will make others hate Linux.
That's why this forum is good. It provides a place for people to ask questions, and to just browse and discover new things.

A lot of people aren't using Linux to learn about computers, or for programming. Many are using it as a standard desktop OS, which is great. That's what we want to encourage. Making it difficult won't help anyone.

I want to add another "success" note to this thread. I thought I would NEVER get a firewall operating under Linux. Iptables is such a complex subject that I despaired of understanding the first thing about it. Yet it seemed necessary to understand Iptables in order to make the firewall work!

Then just today I searched a while on LinuxQuestions and, buried within a thread I found a suggestion to try the Guarddog interface. In about an hour's time I had a firewall going that got a perfect "stealth" rating on Gibson Research's tests!

This is the place I come first when I have no idea what to do. Users here have saved my hide many times.

What most people seem to be considering an easy distro is to me the more complex.


I use RedHat and Slack and I have used Mandrake and a few others.

In my opinion Slack is easier because it's more GNU/Linux without having to know more distro specific information. Although it is changing somewhat in the newer releases.

If you mean easier to install, well I'm way past that after the first hour.

Well, the old saying, "Different strokes for different folks" probably applies here as in so many cases. I think the reason it doesn't go "Different distros..." is just because it doesn't rhyme as well.

I started Linux with Slack8.1. Now I'm trying to get a test kernel working with 9.0. I ended up just making my Windows C:/E: into / and my D:/F:/ into /home.

All I can say is:
Thank God for backup computers when things go bad, such as now, when my computer won't use any drivers, basically....