I currently use windows xP, but i want to shift to Linux now, so could anyone suggest some flavor?

I need basic programming support, and software development stuff, plus all normal features i had in XP, music player, etc etc

Ubuntu 7.10 is great. Here are some features in Ubuntu:
1.All major programming languages like C, C++, Python etc. are supported. Anjuta IDE is free and can be downloaded from Add / Remove Programs.
2.The RhythmBox music player is equivalent to Windows Media Player.
3.Totem Movie Player supports all major video formats (you will automatically directed to download the supported codecs from Add / Remove Programs).
4.The OpenOffice.org office suite, which is very similar to Microsoft Office, is available by default.
5.Some other in built software are
Firefox - web browser
Evolution - email client
Gimp - image editor (like Adobe Photoshop)
Pidgin - instant messenger with support for Yahoo!, Windows Live, Gmail, MySpaceIM and many other protocols.
You can also download many more free software from Add/Remove Programs.

Ubuntu is completely free to use, and you can even order free CDs from Canonical!

http://ubuntu.com/

:)

You can use UNIX too

UBUNTU!!!!!!! All the way it is the best you will find and better then windows by far except for networking and everything is freeware.

UBUNTU is very user-friendly and easy to install

If this is your first outing with Linux, then I would suggest Linux Mint 4.0 as it is incredibly easy to use and has much of the software is preinstalled :

http://www.linuxmint.com/index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint

Enjoy.

Hi, I would really suggest u try Linux Mint 4.0. It is based on Ubuntu 7.10, but Linux Mint developers have added most codecs by default. They have improved features, stability, and themes for Linux Mint. For new users its excellent.

Welcome to Linux!

Personally I recomed klikit linux. It is very user friendly and the forum is super friendly and helpful. It has everything that windows does and then some. It is based off of Kubuntu as well so it is rock solid.

There are many desktop systems such as Mint, Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS which are very user friendly -- first timers in particular.

They are hard pressed for space. So in most cases, they don't have the programming tools, but the average home user's Internet, multimedia, 2D games and such are provided. Some even come with 3D desktop softwares in the default install.

So, try anyone of these if you can bear with a bit of work to install an IDE, compiler, debugger, binutils, libs ans so on and so forth.

Once you set up repos properly in Ubuntu, for instance, fire up Synaptic to search and install the programming tools.

any ubuntu based distro especialy linux mint is ideal for newbies I have been running linux mint (cassandra ) for several months now and love it it does more out of the box then xp does way more and there is less for the new commer to setup and configuer