[sclug] What distro?

[Neil Haughton]

Slight twist to this question - my Dad (86) who has fought a fight with 
Windows 98 since, well about 1998 I guess, has had enough and is about 
to take the Linux plunge.  The question is which distro would be most 
suitable?  Ubuntu is quite popular out there (South Africa) in the Linux 
world, for obvious reasons I suppose, but I wonder if Gnome might be a 
little too strange after the W98 interface. He only needs email, 
(currently Outlook Express), a diary thing (currently Lotus Organised 
from Lotus Smartsuite), a word-processor and spreadsheet (currently 
Wordpad and I'm not sure what for the spreadsheet - probably Lotus 123), 
and something well integrated to view images (jpg etc). Decent screen 
savers, wallpapers, sound to work out of the box, and so on. The bells 
and whistles to work painlessly, in other words, and it must be robust.

Other candidates are Mepis (impressive, like Ubuntu but with KDE 3.5 
instead and nicely polished) and maybe the biggies such as Mandriva or 
Suse10, but at times I've found Mandriva quite fragile around the edges.

What are your opinions about this?

Neil.