Best Linux Distro for a home user

There is none; be conent if you find the distribution that is best for you.

Probably any of the major distributions will work well for you.

That's a little light be today's standards. OTOH, my OS-2 system is a rinky-dink P120 with only 128 MiB of memory.

Well, I never thought of windoze as providing ease, but it's certainly not diificult to add and remove applications from SuSE.

Most of them come with a variety of mail, graphics and word processing software. I don't know of any that mimics Outlook, and if I found one I wouldn't use it; lookout has too many security problems to be safely imitated.

OpenOffice should be able to handle most or your excell and word files if they don't contain macros. Some of the other applications may be able to handle them as well.

That depends on the distribution and hardware. The SuSE install was pretty straightforward on newer machines, but I had to do some fiddling on my older machine becauswe there was no driver for the ELSA WINNER 2000PRO-X.

Several distributions have licenses that allow you to copy and give away the entire CD or DVD. Several have FTP sites where you can freely download ISO images of the install disks. If you want dead trees1 or support then you will have to pay for them, however, there is a lot of free machine-readable documentation and you can always ask questions in the comp.os.linux.* news groups for free.

Look over the howto documents at The Linux Documentation Project (TLDP).

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