Give Xandros a try. Was: MS Windows Linux Distribution?
- From: Ron House <house@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2006 13:29:30 +1000
Michael James wrote:
It's been my experience that the average user is reluctant to try Linux
because they are used to MS Windows, and Windows nomenclature. My question
for the group is: Is there a Linux distribution that mimics MS Windows to
the point that the average MS simpleton would have no problem using the
computer on which it was loaded?
Try Xandros. I installed it on my wife's computer recently. Everything worked, almost right off the bat - wireless (but only after I noticed it was listening on the wrong channel), fonts, scanner, HP printer, movies, annoying virus scanner popups so you feel right at home, flawless installation of MS Office, disk sharing, remote logons, openoffice, thunderbird (almost flawless pickup of old windows data - it missed the password file), reads and writes to ntfs windows partitions, and doesn't have that annoying top task bar that you get with ubuntu. On making a new user, it asked whether their home directory should be encrypted. Also it uses kde by default, which was a pleasant surprise. The only hiccup in getting up and running: the latest firefox won't read amazon.com book previews properly, and I had to scout out another browser on the xandros site just for viewing amazon.
The premium version comes with crossover office, which worked perfectly. I set up a bit of networking so I am now able to edit word docs on my debian machine via a shared partition running Office remotely on my wife's xandros machine under crossover office and feeding back to my X server while she does other things without interruption. And it was close to trivial to set up, but that did need a smattering of tech knowledge. My biggest beef is that, being slightly techie, I like to edit fstab, and that file on xandros has a warning that it is computer-generated and will be overwritten. I think all such files should have begin and end markers for the overwriteable part.
From being a 100% windows user, my wife hasn't had to boot windows once since I installed xandros for her. But she has found some settings, mostly in openoffice, that are not what she expected, and wasted some time in the first few days.
But it is not perfect; it has two serious bugs: the CD drive spins whenever a disk is in (so take it out when through) and the xandros-branded reworking of the package manager is very counterintuitive, lacks options, and I am not convinced it is error-free. The xandros people need to look closely at these issues, but nevertheless I am very impressed with the amount of work that has been put in to integrate things well - and I like that it is debian-based.
--
Ron House house@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/staff/house
Ethics website: http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/staff/house/goodness
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