warlordtifa :
so i have been wanting to learn linux (really im just bored and want something new) my question is what one to go with i see there are a few out there. was thinking about backtrack but it seems like its no longer available and it seems kail is the new one to go with ? am i wrong on this or is google just pointing me in the wrong way ? also is kail good to go with or should i be looking at something else? thanks for any info or links to info that i can read up on as well...
I'd recommend a popular distribution running from a live USB stick or DVD, such as Ubuntu or Kubuntu. You boot from the DVD or USB stick and the OS runs, so you can play with it without messing with whatever underlying Windows installation you have on your hard drive. The big-name distributions are pretty polished and very likely to Just Work the way they're supposed to, which is ideal for somebody who is new to the OS. I started out with putting Debian Potato on a laptop about a dozen years ago. This was back when Debian used boot floppies, multiple CD-ROMs, and dselect to do the installation. You had to manually configure XF86config and type in startx to get the window manager to start. That was NOT a good choice for a neophyte for a lot of reasons, particularly one with only dial-up internet (and a winmodem too!) and one computer. There were a lot of things I didn't know and couldn't just go look up so I got stuck a LOT. I would have been thrilled if live CDs were around in those days! I did eventually manage to learn the innards of the OS but I knew a few folks at the college who were old UNIX guys who helped to get me unstuck.
Performance from a live CD/DVD/USB stick is actually very good as long as you have enough RAM in your system. ("Plenty" generally means 4 GB or more today.) The contents of the CD/DVD/USB stick today usually get cached in RAM and things load very snappily since RAM is much faster than any other kind of storage in your computer. That didn't used to be the case as you'd click on something and get a lag as the CD drive spun up, seeked, and then your menu/program started. Also most systems didn't have a lot of RAM. You'd run a 600-something MB live CD on a machine with 256 or 512 MB of RAM so there wasn't enough to even cache the whole CD, let alone do so and be able to have any RAM left over for anything else.
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