which linux distro should I get?

Question

somewhat old PC, window manager doesn't really matter, though I seem to find XFCE distasteful.
2.26 Celeron
on board videa (yeah yeah, I know) so eye-candy isn't something I'm looking for, but a decent and smooth interface would be nice
256 RAM

basically, I don't have an internet connection to the PC i'm going to use this on, and I need:
to be able to listen and watch videos out of the box
plugins (flash, etc etc) too
and hopefully, have WINE installed already.

as I'm probably gonna have to dual boot for a few weeks, also need an easy to use installer. I know what to do around here already, but DreamLinux just wasn't very helpful one time...

Answer 1

Well, Ubuntu is the 'default' choice of distros these days because the community is huge and because it has a great deal of software that attempts to make using linux easier. But its also a heavyweight distro which I don't recomend for older machines.



My distro of choice is Arch Linux. However it does not hold your hand at every step during installation. That said, the installer is not hard to use. These three wiki pages will give you every bit of info you need to get Arch up and running. Trust me, you will be VERY satisfied with this distro once you are running it. Arch's performance beats Ubuntu hands down. The purpose of Arch is to be fast, lightweight and flexible. This is basically polar opposite of Ubuntu. Every desktop environment and window manager you've ever heard of and about 30 or 40 you've never heard of are available on the Arch ftp repositories. If you don't like XFCE, try out gnome, kde, enlightenment, fluxbox, openbox, compiz-fusion etc etc. For movies, I reccomend mplayer, xine, or vlc. The flashplugin works for firefox, opera, and konqueror. Wine is available too, of course. Even though they aren't installed 'out of the box', all you need to do is type is something like:



pacman -S xorg nvidia kde firefox flashplugin mplayer mplayer-plugin wine codecs



To me thats pretty easy ;)



http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Beginners_Guide

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Post_Installation_Tips



Read those.

Answer 2

There are 2 that i like: Debian and Kubuntu. Debian has hundreds of help courses (applications and utilities). Kubuntu is an off-shoot of Debian and has exchange into known on account that's a "plug and play" replace for living house windows. It merely works with out any flaws.

Answer 3

ubuntu based distros