My first time using Linux was through Fedora 6 at my university. First, I had no clue what I was doing but the GUI is simple and the help notes are great. This prompted me to install Fedora 6 on my extremely (almost decaying) laptop and it works very well.

Though it is still a battle to get the network card working correctly, my main reason for wanting to learn how to use an Linux OS was to use security tools at work and so far it is proofing quite the pay off.

I've heard good things about Ubuntu and might give that a whirl sometime doing the summer when I'm on vacation.

After a month of running only Ubuntu on my Laptop, I've realized two things:

(1) I remember why I love Linux so much
(2) I remember why I hate GNOME so much.

Time to install KDE.

I've been dual-booting K/ubuntu and WinXP for about a year and a half now. I think I may end up giving up on Linux for a while... my computer is too slow to run Kubuntu well, and I haaaaaate Gnome.

It's a shame. I'd really like to switch all the way over to Linux, but I can't do it until I have a new computer. Oh well.

I've been meaning to grab a spare box that I can dump a distro of Linux on to play with. Its been so long...the last distro that I used was LinuxPPC back in 2000.

I've been working with BSD style unicies for so long since then, it might take me a bit to get used to the Sys V style of Linux.

Why don't you try some other desktop environments, like xfce, blackbox, fluxbox - all of them pretty lightweight but you can always install some gnome/kde stuff.

I'm currently in love with xfce4, but still using the gnome file-roller application for archive browsing (I also use the xfce application xarchiver, which is also cool).

The only things that won't work properly (on my system):
- getting info from hardware sensors (I'd really like to know how to do this - but it doesn't seem to be an ACPI nor a SMBIOS problem)
- suspend to RAM / suspend to disk (s2r sometimes works, but often it results in a kernel panic on bootup - gonna have to debug this...)