Anne Wilson wrote:
I'm thinking of giving CentOS to a non-tech user for her new desktop. He needs are small. She has been used to Mozilla for both mail and browsing, so equivalents there are not a problem. She needs grip and lame, for her mp3s - again no problem.
Desktop, non-techie - use Ubuntu instead.
<snip> A few comments: let me note that ESR uses ubuntu. I, on the other hand, don't. A few years ago, I was on a contract in the middle of bloody nowhere in western NC, and wound up in a motel room by the month that had only wireless, so I had to go out and buy a wireless card for my tower. I was also upgrading from RH9, and wasn't going to pay for RHEL, and my opinion of fedora at the time, as well as several other folks opinion, including Eric's, was that it was bleeding edge, rather than leading edge. I also didn't know about CentOS.
So I tried live CDs of ubuntu and SuSE. ubuntu couldn't figure out what to do with my wireless card, while SuSE thought about it for 30 sec, and a window popped up, telling me I had a new wireless card, and would I like to configure it. I eventually upgraded to opensuse 10.3
Just in the month, I went up to CentOS 5.3. Now, there was one major problem: it could figure wirelesss, but unlike my year+ old opensuse, it didn't know WPA, and I went through days of grief until I got that going... so beware of that (and I'm *very* unhappy that it is such a song and dance to get that working... but I don't have time, with a new job, to spend time writing something that will do it all).
The other thing is that ubuntu does some things I consider odd, and puts some things in odd places (say, not having your web stuff under /var/www, etc).
So, pick your poison. <g>
mark