Ubuntu, Mint, or Puppy - Best distro for experienced Windows user, but Linux noob?

[Sinister_Diagram]

I must say that I feel Ubuntu or Puppy would be the best choice. Puppy Linux is easy to run and easy on your computer's ram/memory. My Mother has an old laptop computer with 256 ram and a 1.0ghz processor that I struggled to find an OS to run smoothly on it. I popped in a Puppy CD and it made that old laptop run as if it were brand new. I must admit that I had experienced some slight issues with Puppy when it comes to recognizing various wireless drivers - especially when those drivers are old. It took quite a bit of time for the wireless driver on the laptop I mentioned to run correctly every time.

On the other hand, Ubuntu will generally run perfectly right out of the box. I do find that I struggled to run the original desktop edition of Ubuntu (11.10) on my desktop computer that had 2.7ghz processor and 2GB of ram. With that aside, Ubuntu comes with a large variety of programs that you would find on a Windows-based system. From music/video players to office suites, the possibilities are quite limitless. If I am remembering correctly, Ubuntu was the first Linux distro that I began to use and I did not really struggle with usage. I wish you the best of luck as you begin your Linux journey!

[miks]

I think that the one thing not mentioned here is that each distribution has its own flavor, and can be customized in several ways. Grab a CDRW disk and download / burn a liveCD. Then boot it. Your now on a fully functioning graphical desktop without installing anything permanently onto your computer. If you like what you see, great! Download the next distribution and burn it onto the same disk (remembered to use a RW disk, right?) and try it. You'll find default things that you like and ones you don't like. Live with it for a day or so.

But I think for a total Linux noob, the best and most user friendly Linux distros are going to be Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based: Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Super OS to name a tiny few. Ubuntu is great, but Linux Mint has alot more working out of the box like Flash even though it's not hard to add things yourself , Linux Mint would be a good starting point.

[scotty]

I agree with miks you have nothing really to use by trying the Live CD approach, and generally the LivCDs will give you complete functionality without even installing. So you don't need to worry about not liking it. I agree again, start with Mint.