Hi YoYoBabyYo,
You need to realize that asking the things you did is like asking someone about religion. Really. Few who have had a go-round in a thread want to repeat the experience. Don't try this in the Anandtech OS forum!
I am not a linux guru, and I don't ever plan to be. If I were to attempt it, I doubt if I had the talents required. Which are: an encyclopedic and infallible memory. However I have the advantage that when I started with computers, all there was was a command line, DOS that is, which was a tremendously stripped down unix parallel, missing a lot. (basic was the parallel to c, if you are wondering.)
>I want to learn how to use Linux, and does anybody have any recommendations on which distro to start with?
Fedora Core, now at 5. Why? It is probably the best organized, while being 100% open, yet popular. Being "open" is your protection against being coralled or trapped into what a company (such as MS or Red Hat or Novell or Apple) wants to allow you. "Open" does not mean 100% cost free, but it does mean the price is not driven up by government enforced monopolies, which is what copyright and patent are. Intellectual property is not real property, it is a legal construct invented by lawyers to bamboozle the public and rake in larger quantities of cash for their clients.
>I heard that Mandrake was easy, but I kept getting a kernel panic whenever it booted, so I gave up on that.
I believe the most common cause is resolved by turning ACPI OFF on the command line when you boot the install CD. You have to take it from there. I don't remember the exact words. It succeeded on one computer. All others did not need it. ACPI is buggy in some BIOSes because Windows does not use a lot of it, and linux may use something Windows doesn't. You can also turn off ACPI when you install XP if you need to.
>I tried SuSE 9.3, but I still do not know how to use any basic Unix commands to get around.
But when people say they want to learn linux, this seems to be what they mean: Memorize a *bleep*load of commands with "switches," and the multifarious locations and arcane names of configuration files. A nicely designed GUI should make almost all that superfluous, while still accessible. But linux desktops are nowhere close as yet. The reason is that linux/unix is designed by programmers, for programmers, so that they can program. They turn every "interface" into some kind of programming, be it the command line or the GUI.
>I heard nice things about Fedora Core and Ubuntu, and probably will try those.
Sure.
>Is there anything similar to Mac OSX?
I think there must be something out there that has the general look. But Mac OS X is a customized unix with a diverged code lineage before linux. It is up to Apple to decide what of their additions and revisons they will allow to be used freely. Recall that Apple pursued a lawsuit against MS Windows for years and years, and only settled when Apple was on the ropes and could not afford the expense, and in fact got bailed-out by MS. Apple normally crushes small competitors with legal machinery that small outfits can't afford to defend against. It is typical for Apple, and less for MS, to take the essence of something good from someone else, proprietarize it, and assert total legal right of ownership.
>Are there any benefits over one another between Gnome and KDE?
KDE desktops I have used seem to have more extensive and capable choices on the menus. Since this is what I would rather use the GUI for, rather than a command line, I like that. OTOH Red Hat seems to believe Gnome, though plain, is more stable, less buggy.
In general, you should differentiate between linux/unix and the user interface/programs. The interesting concept of unix was to write everytiing basic, including the OS kernal, in a "system programming language" which is "c" for unix. ("c" is in fact written in itself. lol.) Then, after you get a c compiler running for a particular CPU, you can compile all programs to run on the CPU. OSes suffiently conformant to this are considerd unixes (POSIX). The source code for "open" programs written for unix therefore can be made to run on any CPU for which a unix exists. You just get the "open" source code and compile it. GUIs, like the desktops KDE and Gnome, or command line shells like sh, are just programs that run on unix. GUI's of course require specialized graphic hardware beyond what a command line does. PCs just provide a conviently specific hardware to make use of, as does a Mac. But it is not necessarily true that hardware that has a non-open driver, such as an XP driver, will run from unix, unless and until a unix program (driver) is written for it. A lot of hardware has linux drivers, a lot does not.