recommend me a linux / Unix Distro

[Addanc]

SuSE no brainer installation, excellent hardware support. Download community version for nowt.

[Jabberwocky]

puppy linux - that way you can throw it away after seeing the sorry mess that is linux.

[cojak]

I'm writing this on my laptop with Mepis 3.4-3 installed. You can get it free from http://www.mepis.com/

Mandrake was a pig, ignoring a lot of drivers and and failing my eth0. Installing Mepis was completely pain free and encouraged me to 'get under the bonnet' as it's so easy to reinstall if I cack it up.

Linux Format magazine has Mepis and OpenSolaris on it's May cover DVD.

[NoddY]

The only civilised free operating system is FreeBSD.

Clear delimitation between the kernel, the base functions of the operating system (the 'world') and applications (ports/packages).

Continuously upgradable via CVS, and rebuilt to the latest and greatest version via a few command lines.

You can optimise your kernel, compile binaries against specific architecture.

Runs X just like any linux does, runs a linux app with emulation (but why bother, everything is ported to it anyway).

Ports system means no fannying around with dependancies.

It really is free in the wider sense - you can add to it and commercialise it, unlike Linux, in which GNU stipulates anything spawned from a GPL must be under the GPL itself.

Kiss goodbye to How-Tos: Documentation top notch and centralised : http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ooks/handbook/

Support fora and mailing lists attitude free and not a spotty American/German teenager in sight "whatever ...sucks man.."

I could go on....

[NoddY]

Har har idealist view. Ports suck - especially when you get a broken one as a dependency that won't build (happens quite regularly). Not only that have you tried to build open office from ports? There is not enough time in the world. Oh and the recent "lets bump the version number up randomly with no major feature changes".

....
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/366

Do you really sit though a compile of Openoffice?

Ports are only half of the application management story. For things like Openoffice you would use packages instead. Dependancies can be fixed easily with pkgdb or (more likely) updating your ports tree.