The easiest one by far is Ubuntu, especially with the available "Windows installer" (aka. Wubi) which makes the OS easier to install than many Windows applications.

Download the ~500k Wubi application, run it and choose your settings on the only setup screen it shows, click install and wait until it tells you to reboot.

By this point it has automagically created an image file with the size of your choosing, downloaded the ISO file for the Ubuntu version you chose (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu...), installed the OS to the image file, made basic settings depending on your choices in Wubi, and set up the Windows boot loader to give you the additional choice of "Ubuntu" which boots Ubuntu from the image file. No bothersome partitioning, and easily uninstalled from within Windows.

+1. This netbook came with hellish Linpus Lite MeeGo that drives me nuts. Planning to install XP/7 and then as you suggested Wubi Ubuntu onto it.

Heh, I did the opposite, trashing Windows 7 Starter (but not before making a restore USB drive), then installing Ubuntu as the only OS.

My main laptop runs 7 Ultimate and a Wubi-installed Ubuntu though. Upgrades to newer kernels have been flaky in the past couple of versions (10.04 and 10.10, or maybe 9.10 and 10.04), requiring me to reinstall Ubuntu, but upgrading to 11.04 and all current updates since has been smooth.

I did have problems with my netbook though, Ubuntu's custom kernel didn't like the combination of my WLAN chip and my WPA protected network, so I had to connect through ethernet and get a fixed kernel (I don't remember if I still run it or if it's been fixed in the main repository yet). This didn't happen either with my main laptop or the work "toy" netbook, so I have no idea if it'll happen to you.

Okay, I borked my Kubuntu installation so decided to give Linux Mint 11 64-bit a try

Downloaded it and burnt to DVD, then installed

I must say, *incredibly easy* installation. It even detected my borked Kunbuntu installation and offered to wipe and install Mint over it, upgrade it to Mint, or the usual default options

It looks lovely. Crisp, clean, and no problems so far

Everything is detected correctly

I'm using it now :D

Your welcome! I tried FreeBSD back with their 4.1 Release but it wasn't very good for the desktop. Now though they have much better hardware and software support. Wish I would have went back to it earlier.

I..after Winlolz 7 once AGAIN decided not to boot, I took the decision to trash that stupid OS and instead use Linux as primary/only OS (It was already in use as a secondary one).
In this regard, I jumped on a LOT of distros in my seek of the perfect one (Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Chakra, Debian, came back to the favourite Fedora, Arch).
The absolute, final result? Slackware 13.37 (x86_64)
I must admit that I was doubtful at first, but now that's installed, I'm not going to leave it. EVER.
First of all, it does a great job into teaching you *nix (And, man, the Slackbook is awesome!).
I though I was a fairly advanced linux user.. but truth is, I was not; slacky has teached me more things in a week (Including setting up multilibs, recompiling the kernel etc) than Kubuntu, Fedora and Chakra combined in 6 months.
Finally, IT IS completely customizable, moreso than Arch!
And, to be honest, I find Slackbuilds + installpkg to be far more fun/useful than apt-get and pacman..

Lastly, I found the distro to be extremely user friendly (thanks to the documents) and stupid simple. Try it, and enjoy it.

I've always been interesting in trying Slackware but just never got around to it. I've personally only tried a few Linux distros starting with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Red Hat. Eventually as I became more familiar with the day to day use I took the plunge into Arch and Gentoo. I currently have Gentoo on my old laptop running Awesome WM which is nice because it allows for the old hardware to run faster than anything I've ever had on it. My main desktop has two drives, one for Arch and one for Win7 which I use mostly for gaming. On Arch I use KDE or Awesome depending on what mood I'm in. Also, for anyone looking to go into Linux completely on their home comp I've found that Oracle's VirtualBox is incredibly useful. I can run my office programs, visual studio, etc. like a dream along side all my development tools on Linux without having to reboot!

I'm a linux wannabe. Occasionally I fire up the latest version of Ubuntu and after hours of duct taping the roughly 20% of the games I own to work (the other 80% won't) I get frustrated and install Windows again.

Linux is making great strides in making both nostalgic and newer games playable, but I fear it won't be in my lifetime that it becomes an even swap without having to toss a chunk of my collection. (or giving up various features in a game by game feature loss).

It is about time I try again, I think I skipped the last Ubuntu distro. My heart is there, but my games aren't :(

So many Archers. Or perhaps I'm just seeing what I like.

@ OP
You're probably aware of this, but it won't hurt: Games that work in DOSBox and ScummVM work on any platform supported by those. A number of source ports is available, as well as a few Linux binaries. For everything else, Wine. See also http://www.gog.com/en/mix/great_gog_games_that_works_on_linux.

I run Puppy Linux, but not PupEEE Linux, and not on netbook (don't have one). I am using Lucid Puppy, haven't tried Wary Puppy.

I use Slackware on systems I can't use *BSD on.

While GNU/Linux is a good UNIX-like operating system, it is not 100% POSIX compliant. Many if not all the extensions (a la GNU) are not part of the UNIX specifications. In my opinion it is not the best operating system to learn UNIX.

Sir!
I still have my 701 working/running as a ...err... experiments machine :P
I don't know about PupEEE, but the Aurora Project looks promising! Uhm.. aren't the POSIX the system calls used in the *NIX systems?
I'm no expert, but I've been quite curious about the BSD systems, lately..
..except I've heard horrible things about hardware support.
That they're more conservative than the Debian mantainers.
And they hate the Gnu/Linux community.

Again, I'm no expert, so please say if I'm wrong : /

I'd actually disagree, Linux Mint is actually Ubuntu with sane defaults, I find it helps newbies far more and any fix on the Ubuntu forums will likely apply (if it's even needed).

I don't mind Ubuntu too much but they are all over the place with the direction they're trying to go and not all of it is good. They also don't take constructive criticism well.



On another note, now that I've looked into Arch Linux, no way in hell I'd ever use that distro, no package signing and they don't give a shit. This is terribly important, their distro uses tarballs, you'd have no way to know if you'd gotten a poisoned one from a mirror.

I agree with you on the Mint front. I always recommend it to anyone wanting to get started with a Linux operating system. I also agree about the direction Ubuntu has been taking as of late as I'm not a huge fan of the cosmetic changes that have occurred in Natty with the new Unity desktop. Then again, to each their own because as I mentioned earlier, I typically like to use a tiling window manager like dwm or AwesomeWM.

On the Arch front, I've been using it for years, upgrading thousands of packages from many different mirrors and never had any issues what so ever. Your point is well taken however because with Arch, system security and stability is based around the idea that the administrator of the system isn't an idiot and knows what they are doing. For instance, only specify mirrors that are trusted and up to date if you're worried about it. Pay very close attention to the changes of updated packages and be wary of all the packages updating in a -Syu system update. Hell, compile it from source if you are nervous about using a package manager. I like Arch because you can make it what you want it to be for the most part and it's specifically great for both new and very old hardware and it has arguably one of the most knowledgeable Linux communities based around it. That said I know it isn't for everyone, which is why there are so many distributions around in the first place.