distro for novices
Hi folks,
this is not a troll, really! I'm just looking for some advice.
I've been using Debian exclusively for about 2.5 years, and it's the
only linux with which I really have any experience. I teach in the
history department at a Canadian university and have been asked to
teach a somewhat unusual coursee next semester: not history at all,
but a kind of "technical self-sufficiency" not-for-credit
community-based course in a local housing project. Students will
asssemble their own computers, install an operating system, and learn
how to use it.
The students will come from a pretty wide variety of backgrounds; many
will be refugees and refugee claimants, others are new immigrants to
Canada. In other courses offered in this program, a high percentage
of students have been (HIGHLY motivated) middle-aged women, and that
will probably be the case with this one again.
I'm very excited about the course but a little worried about which
distro to use in the class. As I said, am only really familiar with
Debian and quite love it; but I do all my sysad work on the command
line and use the menu system very little, so I'm not sure my
experience is especially relevant. I'm worried
that's not the best approach for this class. So, I guess I want to
ask, which distros would folks recommend for the following situation:
- novice computer users, who probably know how to use a web browser,
an email client, and a mouse on windows, but little else;
- relatively slow hardware (hopefully not ancienct, but in any case
not cutting edge);
I'm not looking for beauty or even speed, really; I *am* looking for
out-of-the-box usability, compatibility with both old and new hardware
(especially plugin devices like mp3 players, which are likely used by
the kids of some students), and accessability.
I had a bit of a wake up call this week when I tried out Ubuntu. I
know it's based on Debian, and uses gnome, which really isn't so far
from my desktop, xfce. But I found it surprisingly confusing to use;
having everything hidden behind the gui layer seems quite foreign to
me now. so I really don't want to give folks a distro in which the
ocnf files need constant tweaking, as I've found they sometimes do
in Debian (at least in Sid, which I guess is an unfair comparison).
anyway, thanks as always,
matt
PS: any suggestions as to which list this request really belongs on?
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.''`. Matt Price
: :' : Debian User
`. `'` & hemi-geek
`-
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