[Gllug] Linux For Beginners

[Richard Turner]

> So, I'm looking for another distro to recommend.  This is for proper
> newbies - people who are intelligent but otherwise completely clue
free,
> and generally manualaphobic obviously.

I reckon that'd be SuSE, or possibly Mandrake.  The installs for these
are a piece of cake, and you'd want the user to understand that process
even if you're walking him/her through it.

SuSE particularly has excellent newbie-centric documentation and
defaults to KDE which, as the 'Debian' thread has already highlighted,
is nice and easy for the Windows escapee.  It also uses one of those
update-available applets on the panel, so the user won't have to
subscribe to a mailing-list and receive information about security
patches, that they won't understand, in order to know when his/her
system needs patching.  I'm not a SuSE user but I understand that unlike
Red Hat's update applet, SuSE's one doesn't require that the user either
complete a questionnaire regularly or pay a subscription to retrieve the
updates.

I used Mandrake for a while and that was also quite nice for a newbie.
Updates aren't as friendly though.

Red Hat 9 requires little to no learning these days (I suppose!) - Gnome
appears tot have reached a point where it behaves so similarly to
Windows any Windows user will feel right at home.

To be honest in my (limited) experience there's little to choose between
these three now - except that Red Hat is Gnome-centric and the others
are KDE-centric: is boils down to personal preference there.

Cheers,

Richard.
--
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug