[Novash]

It may not be for you, but it was for me in the beggining.

I already went through 3 distros - Kurumin, Suse and Ubuntu, and the only reason I still have a Windows partition is to play some games that I couldn't (or didn't bother to) make work under Linux. I can tell you, the bar is very high to start. Ubuntu made it lower (and lower at each version) but it is still too high for mainstream.

And it need not be. The whole problem is always understanding the differences. If I pick that distro or that distro, what changes? What do I lose? What do I earn? Unable to find answers, one doesn't choose lest one chooses poorly.

Lisp implementations are the same.

Thank you for your answers. Allow me to add just two more. If one says Arc is not CL, but a whole new kind of Lisp that tries to solve some of those problems, what exactly are the differences? What does Arc advance as a Lisp standard?

[blue1]

1. choose your lisp dialect: do you want to learn CL, Scheme, Arc, ...?

2. randomly pick an implementation of your chosen lisp. It really makes no difference as a beginner. I speak from experience. You can always switch later in a painless way.

regarding CL, choose an open source implementation if you don't fear things like emacs. If you prefer a more polished IDE, choose a commercial implementation.

[Novash]

CL on Lispbox is what I have now. Which means I use (use being a overstatement) e-Macs with a Lisp extension.

[J_McQuade]

'emacs', please!

[mahmud]

SBCL + slime + emacs on linux and you should be fine. Use clbuild to download packages.

[igrekel]

I don't really like this analogy because you can more easily shared piece of useful software across Linux distributions than you can across lisp implementations.

True that the differences are limited to things outside the specs, but somehow my applications almost always stepped in these parts.

[Novash]

It is not a matter of software, but a matter of usability. Think of a Windows user only perspective. When installing a distro, you are confronted with the choice between X, KDE, Gnome, Compix, or whatever else Windows Manager is out there now, just to SHOW the Desktop. You haven't even started to use the OS and you must already make decisions about what to Window Manager to use. Most people don't even know what a Window Manager is. Now Google about them and all you will find are people that love their choice and diss all others and all of them seem wonderful in their eyes.

[igrekel]

I disagree, you can know quite a bit of lisp and still be caught.

There usually not a lot of development time to rework an application from one distro to the next. Also very rarely you'll need a package that is only available on another distribution. It is the case with CL implementations tough.