"user friendliest" Linux distro

[Lloyd Budd]

On 10-Mar-04, at 9:59, Noah John Gellner wrote:

> Finally, you might consider other distributions as well. I am given to
> understand that both SUSE and Mandrake are fairly "user friendly"

IMHO SUSE is now the leader in "user friendly" -- though Debian or
Gentoo are the only way to go if you have the "resources" for the
initial installation and configuration.  I am not suggesting switching,
  but if I am to recommend a distribution to a new user or computer
  (Debian/Gentoo clause above) then it is SUSE.

When there was the uncertainty regarding a RedHat product for
home users I switched to Mandrake.  The problems with
Mandrake are:
* finding online repositories (urpmi) for Mandrake
-- http://urpmi.org/easyurpmi/index.php really is not that nice
* non-"members" do not have access to "core" computing
technologies such as Macro. Flash plugin for browser
* too cutting edge -- you are likely to cut getting cut, or at least the
members will ;-)  This is not much of an issue, because there is no
good reason to always run at the latest release.  But what makes
this issue annoying is Mandrake members whining about it ;-)
* Mandrake loss / losing / frustrating some of the best independent
  pkg makers .  For example, Chipster and Texstar.

When I did select Mandrake, a main consideration was to use a
Gnome supporter.  Now that Ximian and SUSE have the same
parent company, SUSE has the best of both world (Gnome & KDE).
I did not overcome tryiing to find "sources" for YAST(2) for software
install sources and update, but I thankfully I did not have to.
Ximian's red-carpet , as was my experience under RedHat ,
is a fantastic, complete pkg management tool
(and the downloads have plenty of bandwidth)

I have yet to install SUSE on a lap top , but I am looking forward to
  trying SUSE's functionality that I understand defers 'eth' exhaustive
  "resolution" of failure (not connected) on startup.

Cheers,
Lloyd



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