Newbie Question about which Linux distro is good for my hardware

I

itb117

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Hello everyone,

I'm an absolute newbie and am seriously thinking about switching to Linux, but am unsure which distro is right for me (an aquaintance recommended PCLinuxOS).

I've currently got XP Pro on my PC... I've become fed-up with Microsoft and have been looking at alternatives. My hardware is as follows:

CPU: AMD Sempron 3200+
RAM 1Gb
M'board ALiveNF6G-DVI w Chipset NVidia NF-6100-430
Graphics: nForce/GeForce 6
HDD Cap 40Gb+ (whatever it takes)

Can anyone help?
 


With 1Gb of RAM you can use nearly any distro you want to. Try several. Look at Distrowatch http://distrowatch.com/. The table on the right "Page Hit Ranking" gives some idea of popularity. Try LiveCDs. They will run entirely from the CD-Rom and leave your Hard Drive untouched - as though they had never been there http://livecdlist.com/operating-system/linux (...Look for Desktop).

Try PCLinuxOS if you want. People tend to give advice about the distro they use. They might like it. You might not. One man's meat is another man's poison.

There are 3(?) basic types
1) The kind you build yourself e.g. Linux from Scratch, Slackware, Arch etc.
2) The kind based on Debian package management .debs e.g. Debian itself, Linux Mint, Ubuntu etc
2) The kind based on Redhat package management .rpms e.g PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Centos etc

As I said, try several. Find out what YOU like and don't necessarily follow "advice".
 
Might also help to know what your intended purpose would be.

Web Browsing? Gaming? Photo Editing? CAD Design? Word Processing? Home Network? VPN? Website management? etc. etc.

I currently run openSUSE, Ubuntu and Anti-X. openSUSE is on my main desktop and occasionally I switch up what I run on the other two machines just to check out what I like and see what is different and what is the same.

Ultimate Edition really looks good, I'm thinking of giving it a test run, it is a juiced up Ultimate Edition of Ubuntu.

I recently set up my wife with an Ubuntu laptop and she has been just fine in the transition from her Desktop with XP and her XP work computer.

I have had a lot of fun testing different distros.
 
I have an older low-spec PC as well (Intel Pentium 4 w/ 2 gb ram) and I am having great luck with lubuntu. It's really fast, no frills, and FAST. My PC boots in under 30 secs now. Also, lubuntu is based on ubuntu's underlying architecture, so there is plenty of documentation out there to get you through any problems, which will inevitably come up.

I have also recently used ubuntu 13.04 on my pc and the unity desktop is very slow. I really liked the feel of unity, but it was just a little slow and jerky on my PC.

I really agree with arochester as well. Try out a few different distros and see what you like.
 
Hey All,

Many thanks for the replies, they all made sense! So I've downloaded the latest ubuntu, mint and openSUSE. I'll be burning them tomorrow and downloading lubuntu and Ultimate Edition to try also.

I'm primarily interested in having 1 (or more) versions for home office stuff, graphics and multimedia (especially DVD Authoring).

I'm already a fan of GIMP... and so far (in XP) I've also done a lot of 3D work.

I'm definitely looking forward to this!
 
I have an older low-spec PC as well (Intel Pentium 4 w/ 2 gb ram) and I am having great luck with lubuntu. It's really fast, no frills, and FAST. My PC boots in under 30 secs now. Also, lubuntu is based on ubuntu's underlying architecture, so there is plenty of documentation out there to get you through any problems, which will inevitably come up.

I have also recently used ubuntu 13.04 on my pc and the unity desktop is very slow. I really liked the feel of unity, but it was just a little slow and jerky on my PC.

I have Ubuntu 13.04 running on a PIII w/512MB Ram and have no problems with Unity, nice and smooth, maybe the Graphics Card, I run an nVidia GeForce 2.
 
SLW210, I am using the on board graphics on my pc. I think it's the Intel 910 chip set. I've tried a few of the PCI graphics cards that I was able to find (they are ridiculously priced for how under-powered they are) and the results weren't noticeably better.
 
I used lubuntu on my samsung netbook with 1.5ghz intel atom + 1gb ram.
It works fine and can open lightweight apps fine. But cannot really handle resource intensive tasks like playing youtube videos or opening openoffice.org
would slow down.
 
Download ultimate edition lite. Main version would not work. To start with use lubuntu. When you think you know about the softwares you want switch to Debian . its the best for low resources.

Sent from my Nexus 4
 

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