which linux distribution is best when starting out

admin

I'm no authority on the subject, but it really doesnt matter what distro of Linux you learn - when you get to know it they are all mostly the same - e.g. they all use KDE or Gnome desktop manager and mostly the same tools.

My advice being a newbie in Linux myself is to play with Mandrake, Redhat or Suse to learn the thing - they are the most easy ones and you can most easily find tutorials and manuals for these versions.

In the corporate environment they use all flavors of linux and enterprise versions as well as FreeBSD, Open BSD and HP Unix.

If you learn the "lingo" the distro really matters little...

To begin you can also try a boot-from-cd distro like Knoppix - no install required (find via google).

/OIV