my first linux experience was in phat linux which went on top of windows (i only tried it as it was ~300mb) but didn't do much in it

my first serious attempt was mandrake 7.2 but i kept having problems with CDROM drive (wouldn't let me look at it no matter what i did)

abit later i managed to get mandrake 8 which worked mostly fine but then i kept f00kering things up (uninstalling glibc... a kernel dependency... is one of the little things i managed to do)

ive used slack8 on a 486 which i networked to dualboot xp/mdk box, i got it working in XP so i could ssh from xp to the slack8 box to surf the net through the xp box, but i couldn't get anything working in mdk (not even being able to ping it)

i then tried mdk8.2 but didn't enjoy it, abit too n00b for me , at my 3rd LUG (linux user group) meeting i got a brand new SUSE8 box set (courtesy of SUSE giving the LUG a copy) and i got to be the first to try it, ive had it on over a month but have only gone into it periodically due to being busy with school and now its the hols and im playin alot of games which i need win for

SUSE8 has a nice install and is easy to use and configure so i would definately recommend it... though i used the box set which is 7CDs/1 DVD (i used the dvd), as i said i haven't used it much but i will get around to it soon (i hope!)

hope this helps