>>   Not all distros are equally easy to use. And Red Hat in particular is
>> more or less obsolete now (since they stopped developing it).
> 
> The red-hat distros were also primarily targetting the server market. 
> "Fedora" was the home user market, which they kind of gave up on.
> 
>>   Most people consider OpenSUSE and Ubuntu to be the user-friendliest.
>> Personally I only have experience of the former.
> 
> Ubuntu isn't bad, but OpenSuSE is easier to learn IMO.  I'd start with 
> OpenSuSE if you can, and Ubuntu after that if OpenSuSE doesn't easily 
> support your hardware and all.

I choose which distro to use based mainly on how pretty the installer 
and the default desktop are. Arbitrary and shallow, but I have no idea 
what else to base the choice on.

I tried Ubuntu, and while it was quite easy to set up, I dislike the 
drab shade of brown. OpenSUSE is a lush shade of green, however.

(Similarly, uninstall OpenSUSE 7 and install OpenSUSE 8. Now the 
graphics look a different, but... is that the only difference??)

One somewhat annoying thing is that most distros will automatically 
install multiple gigabytes of "stuff", most of which I have no interest 
in. Sure, you could *try* to uninstall it all, but you still have to 
wait for it to install in the first place. *Some* distros give you a 
"minimal text install" option or similar, and if so I usually start from 
there. However...

...package management. Doesn't really exist on Windows. You just install 
something, and either it works or it tells you it can't find XYZ and you 
should install that first. On Linux, dependency management is insane 
sometimes.

I don't have any specific, repeatable examples. But, from memory, I once 
had a KDE desktop, and I just wanted to install gnumeric (because 
KSpread was rubbish). Watch as the dependency resolver decides I need to 
download and install every GNOME library known to man - including the 
GNOME sound system (something beginning with e?) In fact, I recall it 
was something like KDE was using one kernel API for audio, and GNOME 
wanted to use a completely different one, and it starts getting *really* 
interesting...

I guess Windows is pretty monolithic. You install "Windows", and you 
have a sound API, a graphics API, a window manager, a user shell, etc. 
On Linux, these are all seperate bits, and there are several 
[incompatible] options for each. /dev can be static files, or one of 
several automatic device creator modules. There are at least 2 seperate 
kernel sound APIs. The text-mode portion of the system can be direct VGA 
text mode or some mannar of framebuffer or some other thing. The 
graphics system will usually be X11, but there are often multiple 
drivers that will drive your particular graphics hardware (with 
differing flaws and limitations). Then of course there's KDE or GNOME 
(or FluxBox or Enlightenment or OneNote or twm or ...) And then there 
are widget toolkits. And then... are you bored yet?

Software written against "Windows" expects one set of APIs. (Or maybe a 
few, if it supports several versions of Windows.) Software written 
against "Linux"? Maybe it supports one random combinations of libraries. 
Maybe there's a build option? Good luck getting it to work. On Linux you 
*need* automated dependency management if you expect anything to work!

Also... Debian's dselect thing is a horrid, horrid tool! >_<

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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