Will you recommend fedora to a newcomer?

[David G. Miller]

For me the answer depends more on the newcomer.  Absolutely critical 
would be finding out what aps they currently use under Windows and how 
important it is to them that they can run these aps.  Lots of questions 
about how acceptable it is to have a functional equivalent (e.g., the 
GIMP vs. Photoshop).

If they're technically proficient and especially if they're interested 
in "bleeding edge" but have just never used Linux then, yes, I'd point 
them at Fedora. Depending on how technically proficient they are, I may 
point them at the (current - 1) release of Fedora Core instead just so I 
know they won't run into too many problems.  Someone less technical and 
who just wants an alternative to Windoze I'd point at RHEL workstation, 
Mandrivia, SuSE, etc.  That is, a reasonably priced, finished 
distribution that has full support for at least a little while.

I think the original posting in this thread specifically mentioned 
laptops which are their own can of worms due to hardware compatibility 
issues.  As an example, if somebody really needs WiFi for their laptop 
and the wireless NIC isn't supported either natively or with ndiswrapper 
then no distro is going to work for them.  Same for accelerated video 
and lots of other hardware issues that only seem to come up with laptops.

Cheers,
Dave

-- 
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce