First, I wouldn't be so worried about upgrades. I presently use the latest release of Kubuntu--and it has updates nearly every day, since Linux and the thousands of projects change rapidly. Most of those changes are actually improvements, and the functionality continues to improve through the efforts of tens of thousands of developers.
Also, if you set up the distribution you select with a separate /home partition, upgrading becomes extremely simple.
As for distributions--there are some who don't have major upgrade schedules--but they generally have continuous updates.
If you are like most newcomers, you will tend to want a distribution at first that is easy to use in moving from Windows. Later, as your knowledge matures, most folks want to branch out a little and try new versions.
Many on this list seem drawn to Mint. I think another one that a newcomer may like is called Simply Mepis, which has just released a major new version.
Much depends, too, upon what hardware you will be running it on. If it's an older box with comparatively fewer hardware resources, you may prefer a lightweight distribution that will run optimally on it. By contrast, if you have a newer machine with plenty of RAM, you may be perfectly happy with one of the more elaborate ones.
Fortunately, since most distributions today come in Live CD variants, you can try a few out easily enough and choose what appeals to you the most.
The majority of Linux users will be partial to the distribution they are presently using--"ease of use" is largely a matter of what you are used to, after all.
Personally, I created an extra partition when I set up my machine that I can use for the root filesystem of a second distribution. That way, I can experiment without nuking the primary one I use most often. One of my projects today, in fact, is to try yet another one--but it is an early development version of a new distro called Bodhi that uses the Enlightenment window manager--but it is far from feature complete, so I would not want to have it as my only distribution.
Assuming a relatively recent machine, to me your first choice should be the primary windowing system you want to use. The "big two" are Gnome and KDE, but there are some appealing options such as LXDE and XFCE, for example.
Although it has a six-month major release cycle, the various Ubuntu variants have some advantages for new Linux users, I believe. These include not only the official Cononical versions but also Ubuntu-based ones such as Mint and quite a few others.
Finally, although major versions do upgrade in the Ubuntu universe, there is no reason you must upgrade each time if you choose not to. I know several people who use their "Long Term Support" versions and only do a major version upgrade when a new LTS variant comes out.
David
--- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com, "rkzbos" <jackrossini@...> wrote:
>
> I am interested in learning and running Linux on my PC, but their are many choices to choose from when if comes to which Linux version or Distro to get.
>
> To help narrow it down to my needs, I need a Linux OS for general use and that it doesn't causes me to up grade every 6 months.
> Can someone help explain to me or find information about the differences of the Linux Distros.
>
> rkzbos
>
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