Have had a few problems with Mandrake 7.2. Have got a copy of RH (5.2 onwards) and this strange 'live eval' version of Suse 7.1.

Since I will only be working on a standalone machine, and my interests are principly mucking around (not databasing, server hosting, anything big) and I will probably only ever network to 1 or 2 machines (both with Win on them) at most:

Which version of what is recommended?

p.s.
I don't mind having to 'tinker' with a system in order to get it working properly, as long as it doesn't involve anything that is _too_ taxing (like actual programming in c/c++/etc).

Cheers muchley.

if you just want a distro to mess around with and dont' care about a bunch of other stuff involved.....i would recommend either Slackware 7.1, Debian or maybe a later version of RedHat. But truly either Slackware or Debian top choices, they are usually harder to install than the others but truly the most robust.

i'm a newbie with alot of time on my hands due to a broken leg. i am supremely bored with tweaking windows, done it all so i decided to try linux.

i wanted e-mail, web browsing, office, and media players. plus a user friendly gui to help me orient myself, before i started learning.

redhat was good, and they throw in the kitchen sink, suse was noticeably slow on my system, slackware required too much configuration.

i'm using peanut linux, it is a complete linux, with the latest kde gui it comes with all the above.the name peanut is a turnoff isn't it. i downloaded the small iso, 87megs or so. and cause i don't have a cd burner, i extracted the files using iso buster.

made my linux ext2, and swap partitions using partition magic ahead of time. from the beginning of the install, to surfing the internet while listening to a cd was 25 minutes. you can add all the other obscure packages later.

i'm using it right now, it's at this address where there are alot of distributions,and it's all the same operating system, redhat, slackware, and suse aren't the end all.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/