What’s the best Linux distro for you? That really depends on personal preference and hardware. While the first might be the most desirable way to choose, in reality, it is the second that will narrow choices down at times. For example, my 2-year-old HP Pavilion laptop really seems to dislike Ubuntu (Karmic)and won’t get past the initial boot screen on the live CD, so even though I might be able to tweak the install to get it to cooperate, I’m not inclined to waste a lot of time trying it when there are so many other distros that don’t have this type of problem.

Many of the newer distros include the ability to test out the software on your hardware without actually being installed. This can be very helpful as it allows you to see what issues, if any, exist prior to committing your machine to the install process. With the laptop mentioned above, a Live CD version of LinuxMint previewed with no problems, so I felt confident that it would install properly and work well.