I generally say start with ubuntu first. Why? Fedora doesn't get everything ported to it automatically. Its depressing that ubuntu is the figurehead, but then again I'm in ubuntu right now. Get used to how ubuntu works, then try some other DE's, then go to fedora if you still have interest after a year.
Do that, you'll be fine.
i personally think ubuntu or linux mint would be a great start, easy to install and use and so on...i started with red hat before fedora and liked it...the only problem that i ever ran into (and someone smarter can tell you why this happened) is that at one point after upgrading to one of the fedora cores i was unable to then use that disk for windows until formatting it with gparted...that said, im sure it happens with other oses too and again i am unsure why that is the case but it happened and annoyed me so if you run into a situation where you want to change your os but cant seem to install on what appears to be a good drive then format with gparted and try again
with all that in mind, i havent used anything except ubuntu or mint since 2010 or so and therefore im biased but theyre both easy as hell....i just reformatted and old dell inspiron 1525 and put mint on it because it ran so much quicker than win10 would and gave it to a friend and hes been doing well with it so far
Ubuntu if you are a daily Linux driver / normal user
Fedora if you want to spice it up a bit and have some very unique feature + applications.
CentOS if you want to have a pretty much enterprise grade Linux os and you want to host web servers or maybe practice for Red Hat Certs etc.
This seems suspect.
Nice!
Some communities such as Linux Lite, Mint and Ubuntu are geared more towards beginners, so they are not only much more tolerant of noob-type questions, they expect them. Other Linux distributions are decidedly not geared towards beginners and the folks in those communities expect that you will have done your homework and made an effort to read and understand the available documentation, before asking rookie questions. Plenty of Linux communities, Arch immediately comes to mind, fall into this later category. So, since we clearly have our own fair share of "elitist jerks" in our midst, I don't see any compelling reason for us to go out of our way to badmouth our BSD cousins. While I have never seen anything other than professionalism on the BSD forums, some Linux forums, frankly, exhibit a shocking resemblance to reddit.
I have a novel suggestion. Let's try being nice to each other.
Good for you. Make sure to stay away from the FreeNAS, pfSense, and OpenBSD forums.
This is also what profs in college expect of their students; to have read the material before blindly asking questions.
A lot of the time; I had questions that were answered from just reading the man pages.
we could go round and round [and frequently do] about distros, and i often think well, what's the point of replying again and again to threads asking about them. but as somebody already pointed out, there are places where you CAN ask, but mostly likely will get a single reply with nothing more than either RTFM, or a link to the manual itself. here we can imagine lots of heads peering up from their kernal optimisations in disdain for whatever pleb asked how to install this or which button does that. and the only way to keep from scoffing into one's wine chalice every time that happens is to keep answering the questions in a polite way.
i would even argue that for newer users, the distro is pretty irrelevant next to the DE. that's how you interface with your machine. that's how you use your software, and that's the first thing i recommend. channels like Linux Scoop are best in the way that there's no in depth analysis, there's just music and someone having a click about the desktop. that's it. then someone can decide what system they need for their needs.
I agree with the RHEL suggestion of Fedora but I would recommend CentOS 7 over Fedora as it is a more stable release and is commonly used for virtualization, you can do PCI-E Pass-through with Proxmox out of the box quite easily and you can do this as well with CentOS. On both you can install whichever GUI you want. Distro doesn't really matter once you are setup into an environment, what matters is the tools such as package managers and deployment automation options the distro supports. The nice thing about CentOS is you can kickstart the installations with a file and PXE to automatically complete the installation for you with no effort required. Things such as Stacki use this to allow you to deploy and redeploy many machines quickly.