Hi All! I'm a new user to Linux and was wondering what distro I should download that is great for learning Linux, but closely resembles the easy transition from Windows. Got a ton of free time at work and would love to learn something useful during my spare time. Any help on what/where or how to start would be greatly appreciated.
;-) if you are very patient and love to and ready to accept numerous failure with IT life and love to get frustrated and adore pain (no pain no gain)? then the obvious choice is debian {stable,testing,sid,experimental +- numerous binary only or along with source apt repo}. consider to conquer the world? LFS/CBLFS/HLFS/CLFS/ALFS et al LFS variants, this will turn you into an IT saint with massive IT yo yo skills, your hardware will dance at your finger tips, A-Z/a-z/0-infinity is customized, packages to security, "do it yourself (bit**)" is the motto. you may soon dream to be a developer and have a day dream of yourname@kernel.org in near future (gods of free and open source). pull the source codes and start to foo and fu and foo and fu till your computer obeys your command and you conquer it. amen! dont want to pump and fry the fats inside cranium? try ubuntu or fedora, fedora and ubuntu can certainly help the geek in you out and you will be sidelined by the society. linux and society doesnt mix. conclusion: depends, the above mentioned are my suggestions, and your choice is the ultimate, if you like it, try it. else do what you feel like. your computer hardware, your money, your time, your internet, your devices, your life, your freedom, your preference and your choice.
Linux Mint (Which is based on Ubuntu) is very nice, it comes with Flash and other codecs pre installed