On Thursday 24 September 2009 17:29:18 cornel panceac wrote:
Yes - and for those suggesting ubuntu as better for a non-technical user I think the real question is whether the user will do any of their own changes (like adding new programs) and updates. If they do, ubuntu is probably a good choice. If they will ask you to do it for them, then it would be the system that you are most comfortable with maintaining.
+1
Exactly. Ubuntu would be totally unfamiliar to me, and the idea of being called in when she is 'up a tree' because something needs fixing doesn't bear thinking about. As long as she is with an rpm distro I can cope. If she is with Mandriva, Fedora or CentOS they are familiar. The main problem with the first two is the 6-month cycle.
maybe the distro is not that important, and more interesting is the answer to the question "what is the typical user doing with it's computer?"
in this regard, i'd start at mauriat miranda's fedora checklist, and add to it depending on user's needs.
( actually, when fc6 ended it's life, i wanted to switch one friend's notebook to centos 5. unfortunately, the (new,hp) printer didn't worked, after it was bought because the lexmark mfp didn't worked, and after it worked fine on fc6. so the notebook ended in fedora 9. )
Now that has set me thinking. She has a Brother mfp. It works under Mandriva, so I just took it for granted that it would work in CentOS, but that may not be so. Hmm. Some research needed.
Anne