Originally Posted by
mad_jock
please try it again. But I can completely understand why you don't want to go near it. But at least you will have a plan for if it all goes pete tong.
Personally I like fedora but there are more user friendly versions out there.
Fedora was the only one of the several flavours that I tried that I'd bother with again, based on experience then. Ubuntu wouldn't let me do stuff I wanted to do (and decided to change itself to Kubuntu for some reason). Some of the others had a pretty awful GUI (or none). Slackware appealed to the geek in me in the early days, but I think that's long extinct now anyway.
They were all a pain in the neck to network - I had to mess with long strings of samba stuff, some of which worked and some didn't.
And then the graphics card died. The new card worked "just like that" with Windows, and threw up all sorts of error messages in Linux. That was the end of the Linux experiment for me.
I do keep a Knoppix CD for unscrambling damaged Windows installations. A friend of mine (now retired, but until recently a Professor at London University) had a load of research stuff on his PC; the PC went on the blink, and he found that his regular "offline" backups hadn't been working correctly. Knoppix saved the day. That is a very useful tool!
I tried several versions of "Linux bootable sticks" last year. None would sway me away from Windows 7.