On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Beartooth <beartooth at comcast.net> wrote: > > She's far more likely to outlive me than I her; so I want to > install something requiring a lot less maintenance on her machine, so > that she'll have it and be used to it, years ahead of need. > > I'm thinking CentOS 6, whenever it's ready, is probably my best > choice. Any thoughts? (And yes, I do mean what my .sig says.) > Hello, Beartooth. I have given this a lot of thought over the last few months. You certainly can't leave her on Fedora. That turns over too fast. On a server or in a public lab, I run Centos or RHEL. This is a Centos list, and I don't want to inspire a big distro flame war, but here's an opinion. If you are serious that you may die and leave your wife with an OS she can't manage, you might think about installing the LTS version of Ubuntu. The Ubuntu email list folks are more helpful to non-experts. The distro team is more energetic about making device drivers work, even if you happen to own the "wrong" hardware (proprietary drivers for Nvidia video, MP3 encoding, etc). They are somewhat like Macintosh in attitude. "If we can't package it up for you to click on, it is not worth doing." That's not the way experts need it, but for somebody who is just using the system, it may be about right. On the other hand, if I have a really serious problem, something wrong in the kernel, I'd much rather seek help in the Fedora list. There are more true experts floating about in there. I suppose that once you install the OS, the trouble due to automatic updates from either Ubuntu LTS or Centos/RedHat will be about the same. The trouble will come when she either has to get a new computer or make a major distribution update, eg from Centos 5.5 to Centos 6.0. If she needs to find Linux help, my *guess* is that she will be more likely to find a teenager who has used Ubuntu than the others. She'd have the same trouble with Windows, the only difference there is that it is easier to find/hire geeks to help on a Windows system. pj -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas