Ubuntu is the winner
because of it's noob friendlyness
Printable View
Ubuntu is the winner
because of it's noob friendlyness
Ubuntu 8.10 really has everything you need right now. I love it. Wine comes pre-installed, open office, latest gnome and kernel. X-Fi sound blaster drivers just came out, I love it all around. Debian does have Apache and sendmail, but home use, Ubuntu is best.
Debian's website is targeted at people experienced enough to install Sendmail or Wine or whatever if they want it. Ubuntu's is targeted at people like you. Install Ubuntu.
Note that Ubuntu is one of the Debian-based distros, so you're installing Debian either way. See this page, complete with pretty colors.
If you don't know what you're doing well enough to decide for yourself, Ubuntu is a good start.
Yes Ubuntu is based off Debain. The key difference being Ubuntu has tons of easy to find / get support and a regular release cycle.
If you want rock solid system that is tried and true and you don't care about up to date packages, go for Debian. All else get Ubuntu.
Heh...Debian isn't for "Linux newbies looking to throw something on their PC at home". Its been around forever (early 90s) and is really for advanced Linux users. I've been using Debian for almost 12 years and love it. Ubuntu is nice too, they're both for totally different crowds. Personally when I install Linux I prefer to start with the base OS - kernel, drivers, the standard GNU package, and thats about it (Last time I did this it was a ~128MB install) - then I add packages as I need them (apt-get is so nice).
Anyway it sounds like you're more interested in Ubuntu. Debian's website has been the exact same since the late 90's - I don't personally feel that having an old fashioned looking website says you don't care, especially considering Debian has one of the largest collection of package maintainers out of any Linux distribution (probably trumps Ubuntu also).
Do you guys run keyclone off of it? Do you do multiple screens?
Anyways, Ubuntu is really easy to pick up. Installing WINE and figuring out how to run exe's would be the trickiest part.
Gentoo - because I'm fucking hardcore.