newbie Q: best distro to start out with?

[bobkoure]

Hoping that folks here might have experience with different distributions (and apologies in advance if this question is out of place here) - what is your favorite desktop distro? What about server distros?
I've tried Ubuntu and was fairly unimpressed - there are some parts designed to be easy and the rest is obscure (to change screen refresh rate you have to edit termcap, for example).
I've just loaded the CD distro of Knoppix and like it a lot.
So, given these two data points, is there a distro I'm going to like more?
Oh - I'll probably end up with vmware, so I can easily run things like nbp and photoshop (although maybe it's time to try the gimp again - didn't support cmyk the last time I did). I've alredy given ms their $$ - might as well run that code in a vmware partition.
Not trying to start a war - just looking for the best way to become an ex-windows user...

[DThor]

This really isn't a good place for this topic - apart from the focus being Newsbin, from your perspective you won't get enough good opinions(not enough linux users here to give a decent cross-section). You'll garner some "Ubuntu is awesome!", "Fedora 4 is the best!", and "SUSE rocks", which frankly isn't very educational(btw, any of those are fine for desktop).

In the end, there's things to recommend for many, many distros, and you'll get a lot of opinions all over the place. A good starting point is http://distrowatch.com/ and browse that. A little more information is here. The forums there are pretty good.

DT

[bobkoure]

A good starting point is http://distrowatch.com/ and browse that. A little more information is Links not allowed for unregistered users. The forums there are pretty good.

DT

This is exactly the info I was looking for - thanks!

[whyaduck]

http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

might give you some ideas...

[bobkoure]

Better yet(!)

Sorry to say this - but this was the right place to ask this question Image link not allowed for unregistered users
No religious tirades on RedHat being better/worse than Suse or Debian.

I've got a bittorrent going right now, getting the two-DVD Debian "sarge", BTW (actually, I left it going at work where they've got FIOS and nobody will be there over the weekend - might as well be a place other torrent requesters can get it, at least 'till Monday).

As a side issue, I went to a VmWare presentation a couple of months ago, and ended up with a complimentary copy of their "workstation" product - so I may be able to do some side-by-side comparisons.