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.
Oh I see. But at least work could be done in Fedora too like without going into the technical details at least multimedia could be used, secured bank transactions could be done, prints can be taken and all this I guess without going into the core details we could do but only the knowledge of installation (GUI only) is required.
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 all assemble approximately the same set of upstream packages, though, so it is possible to make them all do the same things with varying amounts of work in finding current packages that might be missing in the base distribution.
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.