Re: Best Distro for the consumers market ??
On Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:52:49 +0100
stephane lepain <penguindeb@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have been reading couple of posts talking about different kind of
> distros, but what would you guys suggest as the best distro for the
> consumers market? There would be a need of stability and reliability.
> Of course, it would have to be easy to use for the end users.
> As a complete newbie to IT and Linux, I have tested Mandriva 2008,
> Ubuntu, and now Debian etch and testing. I found Debian testing the
> best of all: etch being not very compatible with new hardware and
> software. Testing on the other hand is the most up to date distro,
> fairely compatible with newest technologie (software and hardware
> from the consumers market) and quite easy to maintain.
> Yet, i would suppose that my opinion is quite biased and what I could
> suggest as the best distro for the consumers market might not be the
> case. So I would appreciate if you guys could give me your opinions.
>
> Thank you all
>
> PS: I tested all those distros on a AMD64 3800+
Ubuntu.
Why? Because it works.
Consumers don't care about freedom. If they did, they're all be using
FOSS on the desktop right now and MS would go bust within days.
Consumers want a product that allows them to access YouTube, the BBC
and bittorrent/kazaa/<other file sharing network> with minimal (possibly
0!) effort.
If I buy a laptop for my Dad or any other relative, I expect it to work
out of the box without any questions. The new Dell Ubuntu-based
laptops do this. My Dad (and indeed probably 98% of consumers) doesn't
need anything more than a word processor, an email client and a web
browser. OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird do this very nicely.
Personally it's my belief that if you want a stable OS that you can
rely on for servers/corporate desktops, use Debian/Gentoo/RHEL/SuSE.
If you want a desktop that has the software you need for a Personal
Computer, use Ubuntu.
My £0.02,
M.
--
|Matthew Macdonald-Wallace
|Tiger Computing Ltd
|"The Linux Specialists"
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