[vox] linux recommendation

[David T. Harris]

--- Bob Scofield <scofield at omsoft.com> wrote:

> On Saturday 03 March 2007 13:10, Peter Jay Salzman
> wrote:
> > I want to buy my mom a computer.  Don't care bout
> OSS principles, the
> > "right" way of doing things, or any of that.  What
> I *do* care about is:
> >
> > 1. Brainless install on my part.  Everything "just
> works".
> > 2. No tinkering necessary once it's installed.
> > 3. Easiest to use.
> > 4. Seamless integration with things like wine.
> >
> > A distro that caters to people who don't know
> anything about computers, but
> > more importantly, who don't WANT to know anything
> about computers other
> > than word processing, reading email, browsing,
> running stepmania, and
> > various other mundane tasks.
> >
> > What distro best suits my needs?
> 
> I predict that a lot of people here might recommend
> Kubuntu, which I may 
> download this evening for my laptop.  In fact I
> specifically predict that Rod 
> Roark and Bill Kendrick will recommend it.  I use
> Debian testing for my 
> desktop.  But the distro that I have always thought
> was the easiest, and the 
> one that does not seem to have problems is SuSE.  It
> seems from Distro Watch 
> that a lot of people are using it.  And some Linux
> users dislike SuSE for the 
> reason that it reminds them of Widows, so that might
> be a reason for your mom 
> to use it.  (And you yourself used to be a big SuSE
> fan, remember?)
> 
> I started out on Gnome, and used it again about two
> years ago.  I really like 
> KDE better.  I don't see how KDE is hard to use. 
> Your mom could do it.  I 
> *love* the K-Dictionary sitting in the task bar.
> 

If she's coming from a Windows world, I'd recommend
KDE as your Window Manager since it's the most similar
to M$'s explorer.exe shell which has been used since
Windows 95.  

As far as the actual installation - I'd go with Ubuntu
(never tried Kubuntu because I haven't used KDE since
Rehat 7.3) - it's easy to install and will pick up
most of the funky hardware out there.  The only
downside to Ubuntu (that I know of - I haven't played
with it extensively) is the whole you need to use sudo
for everything an admin wants to do (you in this case)
because there is no root account by default. You have
to set one up if you want one, which is supposedly not
that big a deal.  Yet, since more than likely your Mom
won't want to be installing a bunch of things this
probably wouldn't effect her.

I know one guy really advocates PCLinuxOS and has
heard great things about it.  It's supposedly based
off of Mandrake/Mandriva.  Might be worth a look.









 
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