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What's the best "user friendly" linux distro?


Kieth
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"User friendly' is not enough, there are many distribution properly configured topic. Describe what you do and what you expect. Mint is good but very good CD is Mandriva-Linux-One-Xfce4. If you choose Mandriva Linux here get professional help .... Lex

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Before settling with Mandriva I did try a couple of other distros which at the time were just as challenging as I had never installed Linux. That was way back with Mandrake 10 I think. However I found the most user friendly in terms of what you suggest was and still is Mandriva 2008.1. That is going to take some beating. This of course is just my opinion. :D

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I was thinking of a person that just uses the computer around the house writing e-mails and letters, surfing on the Internet, keeping track of his pictures, playing games, making "homemade" videos, watching films, trying new programs, etc.
Even then, they may not like how one distribution presents itself (theme, software installer, default desktop environment, menu's, available software, etc.). I guess I'm trying to give a realistic answer, where a personal opinion is being requested :)
As I mentioned, it was just a curiosity question.
It's a question that someone always asks from time to time. Sometimes it results in flamewars between distro-zealots, sometimes not.
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With this post, I was just "fishing" for information. As I mentioned in my first post, I have always used Mandriva. In fact, I've been a member of this board since 2002, and was a member of the MUB board before this one started. The reason I'm member #584 is because when they started this board, I was traveling for work. I actually do not have any intentions of changing, unless things get really, really bad with Mandriva. I like Mandriva, probably mostly because I'm so use to it. For me, the saying "You can't teach an old dog new tricks", is true! The question about a user-friendly distro just came to my mind when I read what Adam said on another post: Adam's Leaving

It's possible the company is going to retrench around corporate / OEM work. In which case most of what I do becomes superfluous. Of course, that's potentially bad news for Mandriva-as-a-general-purpose-end-user-distribution; it will come to rely ever more heavily on volunteer contributions as the paid staff work only on things that benefit OEM / corporate products.

 

The answers are interesting, and I appreciate them.

 

Kieth

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  • 2 weeks later...

Of what i have tried gOS and Mandriva are the most user friendly, and ill try opensuse soon. I would be a full time user since WoW and everything runs, but i am too dependant on apple DRM MPEG4 and M4P (protected) just today silly me after knowing i need to avoid itunes i just bought Pearl Harbor for $9.99 on itunes :wall: don't know why i didn't go pick it up at hollywood video, but itunes just is soo convenient and easy as long as you don't tell itunes you don't want to use it anymore (then apple makes sure switching to something else is a living hell)

 

Anyways back to point, Mandriva i would say is the best overall, i turned away many times from 2009, but i always come running back despite kde4 issues and im not really that happy with gnome.I will give opensuse a shot again when 11.1 servers aren't needing traffic duty.I would say after mandriva ubuntu based distros are great, gOS, mint, ubuntu itself is ok, its just not my distro though.Fedora is by far the most annoying (its amazing the creator of the rpm, red hat, makes such a crappy hellish packaging system in fedora that would make people think .rpm distro sucks period if they didn't try mandriva, i don't know what mandriva did to make their RPM outshine the creator's own, but it "just works"), and slackware based distros are the more harder.

Edited by iceyintel
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just today silly me after knowing i need to avoid itunes i just bought Pearl Harbor for $9.99 on itunes :wall:
:lol2:

 

Fedora is by far the most annoying (its amazing the creator of the rpm, red hat, makes such a crappy hellish packaging system in fedora that would make people think .rpm distro sucks.
Most annoying like "boring" or most annoying like "doesn't work"? :huh: If you meant boring then I'd say yes and no. In my case, Fedora has been pretty stable for a bleeding edge distro and thus some kinda "boring" as there rarely breaks anything system-critical (but it is very exciting compared to CentOS where absolutely NEVER anything broke on my boxes :rolleyes:). And if e.g. a kernel or dbus goes crazy ... well ... it's bleeding edge. You should know your way around in Fedora or don't use it - it is not a distro designed for newcomers (like Arch, Slackware, Debian et all). And if you mean "doesn't work"... well, it's bleeding edge stuff ... experimental. Trial and error. B)

 

About RPM being shitty: You should differentiate between RPM, the package-manager and the package-manager frontend. RPM works. Yum works. Packagekit works mostly (broke only once on my system due to a faulty library package) but is far from finished - in fact, the version available in Fedora right now is still a work in progress. Again: Bleeding edge. ;)

 

PS: Mandriva managed to screw up their package manager and their package manager frontend more than once... :whistle:

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  • 1 month later...

Well I consider Mandriva, Ubuntu, Mint and Mepis to be on the top of easy to use list.

Ubuntu at first may not seem as easy as mandriva, but its community makes up for that.

Mint by far has to be the easiest I have worked with in recent times though

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I've always hated Win*, no matter which version. You can live with it when you have to (at work), but you can never embrace it. I'm slowly but steadily getting my friends also switching distros to Linux. Mandriva was suggested to me around version 8.0 by someone with lot's of Linux experience, so I tried it and began to learn. My gf and my to-be brother-in-law switched to Mandriva and they're happy now - after some learning at the start. You can never expect to fully feel at home with *any* new OS right from the start. One of my friends - very far from being a computer addict - is using KDE/SuSE now for years, and there's no complains. Another one who is more technically interested is working himself through Ubuntu, and he's happy, too. In two cases are run highly advanced / rare windows apps, and they do fine in wine. :-)

 

I wouldn't want to switch distro but hope Mandriva will find someone who does as good as Adam did - I can feel him missing. When it would come to the point, I'd try out Arch and Fedora. Mandriva is a good start anyhow.

 

HTH,

 

scoonma

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I have recently tested Mint 6 XFCE (RC1), which had a few bugs, but it was probably the best XFCE4 distro I have tested (and I mean, a distro where everything is working right out of the box, whithout user intervention). Pity that it's Ubuntu based, and not Sid (and as such, a rolling distro).

Sidux/KDE3 is also a great distro, if you respect its peculiarities. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for their XFCE4 flavour, which is both buggy and lacklustre.

And... I have converted my daughter to a Linux fan. She is 14 years old, and she is using a lappy since two years ago (a fairly adequate Fujitsu/Seimens Core 2 Duo Amilo). Initially it ran PCLinuxOS, but after some one year or so she got fed with the bugs in it, and asked me for another distro suggestion. I helped her installing ArchLinux/kdemod3, and she has not bothered me about her puter since quite some time ago. She is not proficient with it yet, but she can do basic tuning, package building from AUR and desktop customization to her likings without my aid. She does not even remotely consider going to another, more "user-friendly" distribution.

So, it's just a matter of mentality: opening a console and issuing some simple BASH commands is not necessarily "newbie-hostile"! It is simply not windows-friendly, but if THIS is the real problem, then, err... use windows.

Edited by scarecrow
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