On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Beartooth <beartooth@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> She's far more likely to outlive me than I her; so I want to
> install something requiring a lot less maintenance on her machine, so
> that she'll have it and be used to it, years ahead of need.
>
> I'm thinking CentOS 6, whenever it's ready, is probably my best
> choice. Any thoughts? (And yes, I do mean what my .sig says.)
>
Hello, Beartooth.
I have given this a lot of thought over the last few months. You
certainly can't leave her on Fedora. That turns over too fast.
On a server or in a public lab, I run Centos or RHEL.
This is a Centos list, and I don't want to inspire a big distro flame
war, but here's an opinion. If you are serious that you may die and
leave your wife with an OS she can't manage, you might think about
installing the LTS version of Ubuntu. The Ubuntu email list folks are
more helpful to non-experts. The distro team is more energetic about
making device drivers work, even if you happen to own the "wrong"
hardware (proprietary drivers for Nvidia video, MP3 encoding, etc).
They are somewhat like Macintosh in attitude. "If we can't package it
up for you to click on, it is not worth doing." That's not the way
experts need it, but for somebody who is just using the system, it may
be about right.
On the other hand, if I have a really serious problem, something wrong
in the kernel, I'd much rather seek help in the Fedora list. There
are more true experts floating about in there.
I suppose that once you install the OS, the trouble due to automatic
updates from either Ubuntu LTS or Centos/RedHat will be about the
same. The trouble will come when she either has to get a new computer
or make a major distribution update, eg from Centos 5.5 to Centos 6.0.
If she needs to find Linux help, my *guess* is that she will be more
likely to find a teenager who has used Ubuntu than the others.
She'd have the same trouble with Windows, the only difference there is
that it is easier to find/hire geeks to help on a Windows system.
pj
--
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
