KDE-Forum.org

Asking questions like this usually leads to difficult and confusing answers, because everyone has their favourite distro which they will promote. But I'll give you my opinions for what it's worth:

A recent poll on a kde website (kde-apps.org I think) ended up with the result of SuSE being considered the best KDE setup from any distro. I use SuSE Proffessional 9.1 myself, and have been very happy.

Another distro I have been very impressed with is the latest version of Xandros. It's as close to a drop in replacement for Windows XP as I have seen, which is a big plus if that's what you are after.

I would suggest a strategy of downloading four or five of the most popular distros that are recommended, possibly as a "live cd" (that's a CD that will boot up the Linux operating system without having to copy anything to your harddrive -- most distros will make a live cd version available for download) and trying them out over a few weeks. Take it slowly, and decide, ultimately, based on your own testing and your own experiences.

For reference, try www.distrowatch.com. They have a list of the most popular distros on the far right of the home page. Pick the top 5 or 10 (note: not all of them are KDE based distros) and give them a try.

Cheers,

L.

I personally use Mandrake Linux. If you want easy management, I'd recommend a RedHat based distro such as Mandrake or Fedora. Debian is also nice, as it has an excellent package manager, but its drawback is that official packages for Debian are rarely released, so one has to find unofficial packages, but I recommend Debian based distros (like Knoppix) anyway.

I can imagine you're intimidated by the Linux OS, I was anyway when I 1st installed SuSE 9.2. The KDE desktop doesn't do much for me visually, I'm not a fan of these bold icons using workshop tools imaginary, but that can be adjusted it seems. Maybe I should look at Gnome. For a small business effectiveness is paramount, so I would get a distro with handbook included(I didn't, with a lot of silly problems as a result). They sell SuSe in the shops here(green box with CD's + handbook) for 69 Euro(students)/89 Euro(everybody else). I want to check out Fedora Red Hat too but 1st priority is mastering SuSE-not even my e-mail is working properly because of some firewall settings(I think). User friendliness still has to match the admittedly great software tec concept combined with the GNU Open Source principle. It just seems sometimes that I switched the Gates bugbear for a Linus one, because learning new applications goes ' ouch'!