Best flavor of Linux for learning Linux?

ande0255

I recently obtained a beater laptop from a work auction, pretty ancient but definitely usable, but includes no OS. I thought about loading an OEM version of XP on there and using it as a softphone end device for CCNP Voice studies but I think I would rather load Linux on it as I have zero experience with Linux.

I looked around and there appears to be a ton of different flavors, a lot of them seem to be fairly GUI based which surprised me as I thought it was more command line with some GUI tools. Wondering what flavor would be best to learn how to work with that may be found in the enterprise world, or at least have the same architecture / feel as I might run into in the business environment.

Thanks!

aftereffector

If your enterprise environment uses Red Hat, I would recommend trying CentOS or Scientific Linux as they are closely related to enterprise Red Hat distributions.

DoubleNNs

My opinion - easiest to learn w/ would be Linux Mint. If you want something that similates busin.ss environments, go w/ CentOS.

I'm currently [slowly] learning Linux.

N2IT

I just recently installed Mint Linux Cinnamon on my daughters machine. It was a fun experience and more challenging than SUSE or UBUNTU IMO.

UnixGuy

My advice will sound politically incorrect, but I recommend Windows 7, run Virtual Box and then spin a CentOS VM and another Ubuntu VM. Get competent in CentOS it's used widely in corporate environments, and check Ubuntu now and then to see the differences.

Ok I sound hypocrite here because I run Ubuntu on my desktop, but I don't like Linux for Laptops/desktops (there I said it).

Bryzey

I'd go with ubuntu as a starting point.

Easy to install, good driver support, good community support sites/forums that are super active etc..

yzT

As long as you go for Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE, Fedora or CentOS, you will be ok. If you are interested in enterprise environment the most common is that you choose either Fedora or CentOS, as both are RPM-based which usually is what you're going to see at that environment.

The most user friendly of those distros I'd say is openSUSE, as you have all "advanced" management setup in a single panel called YaST2. However, it uses zypper which is ok but is not apt-get/aptitude or yum.

People tend to say Debian is not for newcomers. IMHO, that's bullshit. Nowadays using Debian, Ubuntu or Mint is the same.

In any case, the best way to learn is to make Linux your main OS. If you just put it on a secondary machine which you are going to use every now and then, you're not going to learn. You learn from the daily experience. This is why I don't agree with UnixGuy in the virtualization recommendation.

Once you are comfortable with Linux, then a W8.1 host with Linux guest would be the best, although I always end up going back to Linux host and Windows guest