Thank you to everyone for your suggestions! I had thanked you individually yesterday, but it looks like all the thank you's are gone now, and there is not "thank you" option in the thread anu longer either.

Oh, yes, it's probably second to mandriva
Just kidding, I didn't try opensuse, but it seems that only suse and mandriva take kde seriously (and, at least with mandriva, neither kde nor gnome is a second class citizen).
If you want a polished install, with lots of easy wizards that will help you but that won't interfere if you prefer to hand edit configuration files, give mandriva a try.

It's clear at the swirl, where the river begins.

The Art of Shell Warfare:

one way to become a shell-jedi is:
get to know the differences of the most common distros archlinux, debian, slackware and gentoo (others I wouldn't recommend).
decide YOUR way of linux.

there are rolling distros and point release distros, the rolling ones have no version like debian (ubuntu mint suse...). for those distros I mentioned you will find a huge community each and useful how-tos for installation. having a second computer for internet access and browsing how-tos while setting things up is sometimes very useful. also if you crash something and lock your inputs to your test environment you easily login with a remote computer (SSH) as long as it didn't die yet. download a live cd for a distro of your choice and start testing.

I have a pendrive linux for things I dont want to test on my installed OS, on the pendrive website you will also find some emulator-installs for your windows so you may try that if you got no second computer.

Starting your shell learning: basic stuff you should try and get to know first are "how do I install/remove programs", how do I search for files (man find), how do I use "man" (manual pages), which programs may I use in a shell environment to edit configs (I recommend vim{!=vi}) and of course basic commands like move copy delete change dir

another way is:
install arch slack or gentoo, your learning is finished the day you ssh to your machine from somewhere in the world open up your screen to check your mails IM and IRC. just kidding

by installing one of those distros you will find your path to become a shell jedi,
your only help is the community
your weapon is your keyboard (as long as you cant get mouse support working for your terminal)

if you already power up a linux installation but are using gnome or KDE:
if you want to do something and you would start up a GUI for, just find a way to do it on the shell, like searching a file, playback a video, listen to mp3/ogg, resize a picture, read email, view a pic, change a setting (be careful with the settings stuff if you are using suse, ubuntu, mint or something alike, there the settings are setup very different to what I am used to as shell jedi)
get to know the commands your shell is aware of

My two cents - firstly the most important thing is to know exactly what your priorities are with regard to usage and tie this in with hardware support.

There's no point in doing a full install only to find your sound card doesn't quite work properly when you're seriously into music and editing. For some this could be a deal-breaker, for others it might be irritating but not quite so important.

So, know what you want to do, and use a live-cd to try out various distros to find what best supports your h/w and needs without actually installing.

You might find some of the most popular distros don't actually support your h/w to your requirements. Or maybe they all do, but you prefer one flavour over another, e.g. the combination of software packaging system (apt, yum) and desktop environment (Gnome, Kde, Enlightenment, etc).

If you just want to dabble around and don't want to go too hardcore at first, I would suggest trying Ubuntu/Mint and Mandriva and see how they go, after that the world is your oyster.

This might take a while, but it's all part of the fun as far as I'm concerned, and it's wonderful that such choice exists.

Here's a short introduction to the command line (specifically the bash shell, the most common shell):
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Linux_F...s/Command_Line

They also have two reference books for commands:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_Unix/Commands
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Linux_Guide/Linux_commands

mmh says who? this thread is about "best way to learn" isnt it?
hardware support isnt an issue of distro as base it depends on your linux version (in this case linux is the kernel) and your pre configured set of modules, I didnt have H/W support for some of my netbook at first, needed to compile some modules, patch the kernel and so on.
If your hardware isnt supported it wont be supported by any Gnu/Linux (thats what the OS is called), if a distro does not support your hardware but another does, you need to find out what you need to do to have it working on your machine (learn...), nearly everything is replaceable by another piece or stack of software to meet your needs. For example I swap my audio stack of software from standard setup to a multiline studio setup when doing music stuff, the hardware and drivers remain the same but supported features differ. The soundserver in this case needs to support your hardware to make such a setup possible, but I could also set it up to use a generic 5.1 driver and it would work but without multiline features and without digital I/O. The same it is with other hardware, kernel support is needed and after that the stack of software you want to use needs to support it! If there is no install package available for your distro you are still able to compile it yourself from source.

http://www.linux-drivers.org/

I found the following tutorial on the command line in Linux. It's very clearly written, and step by step. If someone else new to Linux drops in on this thread, perhaps they also find it useful

http://linuxcommand.org/

Uh, yes, but compiling modules and patching kernels may be just a little beyond the OP right now. Or maybe not. My reading of it was that it is, yours obviously differs. Perhaps you might suggest Gentoo or Linux from Scratch, but I'll still stick with Ubuntu and the like for a complete beginner.

looks very well structured and done, without a too technical language!
personally I downloaded the offline version here at the top: http://linuxcommand.org/script_library.php
and the PDF (500 pages covering a lot of the linux command line) from this page: http://lcorg.blogspot.com/2009/11/li...draft-now.html
thx for the link