2009-02-01, 12:10 AM
It was a pretty good intro, and interesting to hear from another "silver surfer"!
Good to hear you've been experimental and tried things out, including different distros. From what I've heard, Mandrake/Mandriva used to be simple home distros to try out, Ubuntu seems to have taken that crown, and Fedora/CentOS are also worth trying, although they're more aimed at the server arena.
If you didn't like Gnome on Ubuntu, try switching to KDE - look at Gnome as the Vista desktop and KDE as the "Classic Windows 2000" desktop. That's not a true comparison, just that they're differing desktops and not tied to a particular OS, so it should be possible to switch desktops but retain the underlying OS.
Also: http://list.driverguide.com/list/LINUX/com...2329/index.html