Les Mikesell wrote: > On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 5:36 AM, Parshwa Murdia <b330bkn at 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