I'd probably recommend Debian due to ease of use and stability. I mostly use Arch (which is more geared towards advanced users), but Debian is my second choice. If you want an easier out-of-box experience than Ubuntu, try Mint.
Linux Mint. Slackware. Or jump to the other side and test out FreeBSD / NetBSD / OpenBSD ... I prefer NetBSD and OpenBSD. Slackware was the first distro I used. It's less "Windows user friendly" but if you can learn, it's not a bad distro. Some people these days are calling it outdated and such, I call it stable. Gentoo is fun if you want to "learn how to install and use gentoo." But I would recommend you do it on a fast system or a system which you won't need to use for awhile because compiling everything from source can take awhile.
Ubuntu is solid, I have a few Ubuntu servers setup at work that perform various security tasks. Few problems at all and it's easy to use/'manage. Linux distros seem to come and go and it's easy to get caught up in the "what's the latest and greatest" flavor.
I like using Mint Linux just because it has a little more polish and choice on which GUI to use. It's based on Ubuntu.
I don't really like Ubuntu very much lately. Its kind of buggy and sucks out of the box. If you want something that's full featured and user friendly, Mint is a lot better than Ubuntu at this point. I use a couple of older boxes to help with turking, and there's a lot of really good minimalist distros that are great for that. Personally I prefer doing a Ubuntu minimal install from scratch and then just adding lxde and fluxbox window manager. I've always found fluxbox to work the best for me on boxes with low resources, and its super fast. I talked to bluewanders about this one day and he says that he much prefers arch linux to everything. I haven't gotten around to trying it yet, but he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do, so I take his word for it that its good, although I think it requires more knowledge to use than a lot of distros.
Title: Answer a survey about truth and knowledge Requester: Intuition Project [AMW5S7YI79V8] (TO) Description: Answer a survey about whether somebody knows or not Reward: $0.40 Qualifications: HIT approval rate (%) is not less than 95, Location is US Link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=279O8JIA0RYN0M3LNBD0BBMP11P05Y [size=-2]Powered by non-amazonian script monkeys [/size]
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/accept?...BNTZHyOI5A52ilPl98=&/accept.x=51&/accept.y=10 This took about 5 mins. $0.50 Good TO
Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk, The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Jul 27, 2013. Your HIT activity for this week: - Number of HITs submitted: 690 Approvals and payments that occurred this week: - Number of HITs approved: 640 - Number of HITs rejected: 0 - Bonus reward earned: $4.07 - HIT reward earned: $87.86 - Total Amount earned this week: $91.93
Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk, The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Jul 27, 2013. Your HIT activity for this week: - Number of HITs submitted: 1,006 Approvals and payments that occurred this week: - Number of HITs approved: 944 - Number of HITs rejected: 2 - Bonus reward earned: $0.20 - HIT reward earned: $91.91 - Total Amount earned this week: $92.11
Title: Novel Psychology Surveys! 15-minute surveys as part of a new research program. Requester: Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington [A2RQV6OANC6KCW] (TO) Description: Complete one 15-18 minute survey drawn from a pool involving personality, attitudes, scenarios and verbal challenges. You can only complete the HIT with this title once: repeat workers ill not be compensated the second or subsequent times. Reward: $0.60 Qualifications: HIT approval rate (%) is not less than 85, Location is US Link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=2FUCOO2GMMEGHPEGI1D6NAB30JR77U [size=-2]Powered by non-amazonian script monkeys [/size] 10 minutes, a little long for the pay but it's Sunday.
The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Jul 27, 2013. Your HIT activity for this week: - Number of HITs submitted: 159 Approvals and payments that occurred this week: - Number of HITs approved: 144 - Number of HITs rejected: 1 - Bonus reward earned: $0.50 - HIT reward earned: $47.70 - Total Amount earned this week: $48.20 Got a $1.50 survey rejected for not getting all the test questions correct?? Whatever!!
Your HIT activity for this week: - Number of HITs submitted: 1,369 Approvals and payments that occurred this week: - Number of HITs approved: 1,292 - Number of HITs rejected: 1 - Bonus reward earned: $124.97 - HIT reward earned: $173.28 - Total Amount earned this week: $298.25
The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Jul 27, 2013. Your HIT activity for this week: - Number of HITs submitted: 119 Approvals and payments that occurred this week: - Number of HITs approved: 125 - Number of HITs rejected: 1 - Bonus reward earned: $2.85 - HIT reward earned: $54.97 - Total Amount earned this week: $57.82 Slow week, pretty busy either at work or screwing off outdoors. The mrs got a job that starts mid August so turking won't be so critical anymore.
week 2 of turking: Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk, The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Jul 27, 2013. Your HIT activity for this week: - Number of HITs submitted: 1,059 Approvals and payments that occurred this week: - Number of HITs approved: 888 - Number of HITs rejected: 1 - Bonus reward earned: $2.40 - HIT reward earned: $158.69 - Total Amount earned this week: $161.09
Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk, The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Jul 27, 2013. Your HIT activity for this week: - Number of HITs submitted: 241 Approvals and payments that occurred this week: - Number of HITs approved: 245 - Number of HITs rejected: 1 - HIT reward earned: $63.75 - Total Amount earned this week: $63.75 Not bad, first rejection ever though. Busy week at work last week, so less time available for AMT.
gentoo! you might throw your computer out the window a few times, but if it survives, you'll know literally every single thing that's on your system, and learn quite a bit about how operating systems work from the ground up. if that's your thing...