(Not Ultima Related) What Unix would you recommend?

[Beni]

As mentioned above, this post is not Ultima related. I was just wondering, since I think that there are quite a "few" people out there using and working with Unix that they might help me out with making a decision.

Well, I was planning on getting a version of Unix ("Linux") installed on my system since I don't actually have much experience with it and would like to change that, if you understand what I mean But - there comes the clue - *which* one? There's quite a lot of different types of Unix-Based OS's out there and I have absolutely no idea which one to take. If there's any one out there that might be able to help me out with that, I'd appreciate it.

I'm not really a hard-core gamer but I do things like emulation, regular gaming, home-office stuff, 3D and Internet etc. I'd love to learn some programming too, so... well... don't know what else to say? I'm more than just the average home computer user, that's for sure...

[fliptw]

Well, to be techincally correct, Unix != Linux.

try knoppix first. its a debian-based distro that runs entirely off the cd, no need to install onto the hard disk.

[nadir]

fliptw is right.
Linux is not Unix, because only OSs derived from AT&T's source code have the right to be called that.

If you want a *real* Unix, you can get Solaris 9 for x86 from Sun.
If you want Linux, there are many distros, depending on what you want (and depending on the package management features you prefer).

RPM-based:
RedHat is the de-facto standard in the enterprise world, and while it is more of a server OS, it's desktop side has been getting a lot of polish lately (>=8.0)
Mandrake is a good all-round system
Suse is also very good.

DEB-based
Debian is a bit more suited to experts (and is my Linux of choice), and has the best package management system around.
Knoppix is a bootable CD-ROM which is great for trying it out before installing it in its own partition.

TGZ-based
Slackware is very flexible, but it's package management is non existent, just a bunch of tar files and a few scripts

Source-based
Gentoo, quite hardcore as it downloads sources to your system and compiles everything optimized for your box. WJP's and Darke's favourite.
LFS is.... well... Linux From Scratch, for the real hacker in you

[countzero]

Use any distro of linux you like with kernel 2.4 (2.4.20 is recommended)
[i use slackware at home and redhat at the servers in the work..]
Use redhat if you don't have time to setup everything alone
or slackware if you want to go deep in linux administration

[drcode]

... or Gentoo if you want to go really deep in linux administration and have a fast machine:-) Took my K6/500 about 40 hours just to compile KDE!

[Beni]

Okay guys! Will consider that, thanks for your help.