"Out of the box" means that you don't need to do anything for something to work. That is, for example, that you don't need to install drivers for the graphics card to work properly (or the sound card or whatever...)

And for your Laptop, it's pretty similar to mine and everything works out of the box with Archlinux :)

I would suggest you using some user friendly distro, like Opensuse, Fedora, Mint or Ubuntu (search the forums for this. My personal recommendations is to use Opensuse)

Regards

Most of the better popular distributions have "hardware compatibility lists" or pages where you can look up your hardware or see if it's on the list of hardware that is trouble-free on that particular distro.

PCLinuxOS is one of those newbie-friendly distros that is supposedly among the best for folks coming from Windows - but it was so troublesome on my Dell Dimension that I had to abandon it! Mepis, however, equally newbie-friendly, was far less troublesome on the same machine. I keep going back to Xubuntu long-term-support (LTS) editions, though, because of their elegant simplicity (I'm mildly autistic so simplicity and stability are especially important for me) and rock-solid stability and Xubuntu runs flawlessly "out of the box" on my modest hand-me-down 'puter. In my opinion, the Xfce desktop interface is far easier for Linux newcomers than any of the others.

Check hardware compatibility first!! Ubu/Xubu/Kubu/Lubu and Edubuntu all share the same hardware compatibility (see the "Ubuntu Certified Hardware" list). Mepis has a Wiki page that tells you how (in Windows) to identify your hardware and check it against their list. Here's the one for OpenSuse.

Two other li'l "rules" I have about choosing a Linux distro:

1. - Choose a distro and you're also choosing it's software repository. You should install software only from your distro's repositories, so consider that when choosing a distro! Do some Googling on this... you'll find that Ubuntu and it's siblings have hyoooooge, ginormous, vast, awesomely spectacular repositories compared to alot of others. Debian too. Mepis too. Suse as well. Fedora also. PCLinuxOS not so much. Etc etc.

2. - Choose a distro and you're also choosing a community to turn to for help, to contrinute to when you can help, to identify with and make some new "Linux friends" with. Linux is soooo much easier and so much more fun when you participate in the community! This, in my opinion, is where Ubuntu shines so brightly. I've visited and participated in quite a few other distros' forums and communities while I was trying out their distro and, all I can say is, some are awesome and some are just plain mean. Take a little time to explore a distro's forums and community links.

Hope that helps,
Robin

MartialArtist21 wrote:

Ok thank you very much for the reply and explaining the term "out of the box" for me =). Found it funny though you used the term right after explanation haha. Um may I ask though why you recommend that particular distro? I ask because people have different reasons but the main one I hear the most about is Ubuntu as being a starter.Oh and since I am asking I figure I will say that I want to learn how to make websites, how to code and program. Haven't decided where to go from there though. Maybe I will find out while I learn =).

For different questions better open different posts.

As for the distro suggestion... search in the forums, this has been discussed widely on throughfully ;)

Regards

you can check,

http://www.wikihow.com/Choose-Your-First-Linux-Distribution

and if you want more information about distros , you can use,

distrowatch.com

http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/choosinglinux.shtml