I want to try Linux...which distro do you suggest from a skinner's perspective and why?

depends on if you desperately want to use KDE3

for easy use i would recommend SuSE or Mandrake. difference: SuSE already has KDE3 in the latest version of their distro, but you can´t download an *.ISO of SuSE (somehow they manage to avoid the GPL > ). all the interesting window managers (especially Enlightenment and Sawfish) are included in both distros. btw: XMMS is compatible with both Winamp and Kjofol skins

I'm using Mandrake and Ximian (http://www.ximian.com) all updated using Ximian's Red Carpet. Ximian is skinable, look at -> http://www.ximian.com/devzone/projects/art/themes.html Never tried to skin it myself though.

mandrake is a great distro fro anyone who is new to *nix.

To be honest, as a skinner, and wrt GUI, your choice of window manager is more important than your distro.

recently, i tempted to install mandrake 8.2, and i deleted the Linux on my HD, due to corruption of Lilo. I observed that KDE3 are good (i not installed due to some problems, but KD2 are good). gNome (the other major graphical desktop) are better than KDE, in my opinion. Both graphical shells are good and customizable. I don't tempted to do any skin for Linux, for this reason i make another reason: it's easy to make skins for KDE-gNome-Nautilus, in comparation with Windows?

SuSE looked interesting when I was reading about it last night, except I couldn't figure out if both versions were free, and if not, what the price was.

I also checked out debian. Didn't get to Mandrake yet...have to check that out today.

Thanks all-

ps - (Moshi) Kjofol is my favorite player

I have had mandrake, suse linux, red hat, but the best one i think is suse linux, its increadeble easy to install, much better than mandrake, most people seem to like mandrake, but it is very buggy, i have had much trouble with the partitions mandrake makes, suse, fixes it all, and you get everything with it, all programs you can think of at once, the most secure one is slackware or debian but it is more complicated to install and get to work,
Vachon

as far as i know SuSE only offers some kind of demo for free. runs completely from the cd and does not write on your hd.

So far, in my Linux endeavors, I have ran Red Hat, Mandrake and Suse. For someone completely new, I would suggest Mandrake. It's free to download and the setup is very easy. I'm running Suse 8.0 now, but you have to buy it. It's a very nice distribution, but you may want to try one of the free distributions before you shell out money for it. Just to see if you will like it or not.

I was about to download debian, when I came across a little blurb about it not running with NTFS compatability...so no dual install on a win2k machine, eh? >