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.