[CentOS] Troubles for an non-IT beginner

[Les Mikesell]

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.
>
> 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.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
      lesmikesell at gmail.com