Well, after my PC is reminding me that my beta copy of windows is expiring in a few days, and since it wont let me upgrade, I decided to move back to Linux. Too many problems with Vista.

But what to choose?
I have used
Suse
Red Hat
Mandriva

All were good in there own way. I was looking for something to take advantage of my 64bit, and one which might be able to run my PC software and games (though a few of them are also for Linux) mainly BF2, WoW, CS2, etc. Plus which will have a lot of extra bundled stuff. Any recommendations? Still leaning toward Mandriva again.

I have to admit to not being a gamer (unless you count almost not graduating HS and college due to various versions of Civilization)...so I cannot help much there...but I think you may run into issues with a 64bit version of linux and WINE or Cedega...but not sure.

Personally, I'm really on a Ubuntu kick. I have admitted before that I hated it for the longest time, but the more I use it, the more I love it. If you are a power user you might enjoy Kubuntu better simply b/c the KDE desktop is more confgurable than Gnome.

What I like about Ubuntu:
Package management - I've grown to love Apt-get and Synaptic... there are a few packages that dont work as well as compiling or getting the offical (Azureus is one) but for the most part it just works... you search synaptic for something like "gimp", it finds it, all of its dependancies and installs them...boom its in your Graphics Applications menu (btw gimp sucks).

Speed - I have two boxes that are EXACTLY the same, one running Suse 10.2 the other running Ubuntu, the Ubuntu box smokes the Suse box...its not even close

UI - I like their baby-sh_t theme...it grew on me...very clean

Ethos - I like what they are trying to do... free, open source software for everyone. Its an idea that really appeals to me for some reason.

Thats my recommendation - Ubuntu!

Well, I dont know


Sorry, Im too new to it myself. Im going to get one of those Ubuntu on a USB and give it a try. In the meantime I am trying to standardize on RH Enterprise. Our IT people at work said they are trying to standardize on RHE for servers and Fedora Core (which is free as opposed to RHE5) for desktops and notebooks. I was really posting to primarily suggest you consider Fedora. I have it on a notebook and am trying to use it in comparison with RHE5 on another notebook. Fedora seems worth considering.

We switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu about a year ago and have been very very happy with it.

I'd second FC as another good desktop distro. Hey- it wouldn't be very open source of me if I pushed only Ubuntu

FC6 has made great progress on the desktop and they have some good networking tools for things like joining a windows (or Samba) domain, etc. Its a little bigger and as a result a tad slower, but not in a serious way.

I cannot see running RHEL for anything other than a server...and even then I think I'd chose CentOS (which is a totally Open Source but 100% compatible version of RHEL).

Ill read into Ubuntu
I now use RH for my dedicated server, but really for nothing else. Mandriva looks nice with all the built in stuff.

Just out of curiosity, do you now, or do you plan to do any HDR work under linux?

not sure. Probably. Typing this in Ubuntu. got my triple monitor setup working too Just need to start copying over my stuff from my Vista setup

Triple monitor?!?!? WOW!
I've got dual monitors under OS X and then my 3rd is Ubuntu using synergy...but 3 under linux? thats a feat to be commended! Have you tried Desktop Effects? The people demand a picture of this workspace!

This surfaced on Digg a few days ago...haven't tried it myself since my workflow is mostly Aperture still (HDR newbie): http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/12/06/2115258

see, when I got the triple monitor working, now I cant use for instance that desktop effects or open up terminal. I gotta fix that this weekend when I get some time.

Well, I would go for Mandriva 2007. An awesome distribution in my opinion.

Solaris is free as well.

I am a huge fan of Centos which is a free, byte for byte compatible version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

We switched our servers to Ubuntu and have been happy. No payee RedHat fees which got more expensive, and solid distribution. It's also nice going with the most popular linux in terms of tapping into a larger user community.