[kwlug-disc] What's the best desktop distribution?

[unsolicited]

On the one hand, for you, Ubuntu / Kubuntu. Khalid says it better than I.

On the other hand, I'd wait for John's comment. If he says so, then 
Fedora/CentOS. Why? Because from your past messages, you not only have 
your own (internal) users, you have, at times, both external 
providers, and hired resources - John may be able to comment on the 
larger business world. And why go through two learning curves. 
Fedora/CentOS (RedHat) may be more familiar in the business 
environment than K/Ubuntu (Debian). (For all I know.)

kde is kde. gnome is gnome. Distro doesn't matter.

I think the decider between these two would be: If you're 
using/familiar with RPM, Fedora/CentOS. If you're not, don't go there 
- Ubuntu / Kubuntu.

Pop in a live cd, put it on a usb stick (persistence), load it within 
you're current distro, check it out. e.g. wubi comes in the root 
directory of live CD's, and will create a virtual hard drive within 
your Windows installation. Aside from, perhaps, a little slowness, 
you'd never know the difference from a 'real' install.

I certainly wish you luck and very smooth sailing in your quest.

If you're in need of a laptop (perhaps need is too strong a word?), 
acquiring one and putting the new distro on it may be no bad way to 
transition.

Or, you've been hinting at the need for another server at the house as 
a backup / local, you could familiarize and stage a new distro that 
way. It doesn't need to be all or nothing. At first. (samba is samba, 
nfs is nfs, apache is apache, asterisk is asterisk.)

Insurance Squared Inc. wrote, On 02/01/2010 1:57 PM:
> It's 2010.  You're starting fresh, with no preconceptions, and picking a 
> distro for your home or office desktop.
> 
> What distro would you pick?
> I'm using Mandriva, but I do so because my ISP Mandrake on my webserver 
> back 10+ years ago and I've stuck with it ever since.  But I keep 
> hearing about all these other distros.