Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 5:36 AM, Parshwa Murdia b330bkn@gmail.com wrote:
I personally would recommend Ubuntu LTS for family members. CentOS is geared for technical people.
<snip>
Ubuntu's focus is usability - that is, making the distribution easy to install and use. Fedora may not admit it, but its real purpose is to be a testbed for Red Hat development with usability coming in a distant second. CentOS would likely only be used as a desktop OS by people who also run servers and like everything to be the same. They
I agree with Mike. I run CentOS at home... and at work, overwhelmingly. I have Ubuntu on a netbook, because there's an Ubuntu remix specifically for netbooks. I have issues with Ubuntu (I dislike the frequency of updates, esp. of kernels), but I think if I ever get my fiancee on Linux, I'll give her Ubuntu, as well. <snip>
Whatever you choose, be sure to set up some way to back up at least your locally created files onto different media. This serves 2 purposes: hard drives have short, random-length lives and regardless of the distribution you start with, you will eventually want to replace it or do a major version update that will wipe out your disks.
Which is why I *ALWAYS* have /home on at least a seperate partition.
mark