Best Distro For My mom?


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Shes like pretty well every other middle aged woman, that is she is a total noob. The thing is she has an aging PC (Pentium 3 550MHz, 512mb RAM, 64MB Geforce2), now its fine for windows xp but everytime I visit her shes got a bunch of spyware and crap slowing her pc down. Plus I think a Linux distro would generally run faster for her on a P3.

All she does is basically surf the net, plug in her camera and do some mild picture editing in picassa. What woul be a good distro for her? Prefferebly one thats totally GUI.

Thanks :)

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Ubuntu maybe? Edubuntu...lol...

Bah just wait for the linux experts...

For my parents I installed ubuntu...they just need to surf anyway.

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Ubuntu should work shouldn't it? 512mb ram should be the win. :)

Picassa will be abit more difficult. Theres a Linux version, but it has to run under Wine. And the camera. :\

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Depends on the camera. You may have no problem with it.

Before you switch your mom's OS on her, what have you tried to minimize or eliminate the infection reoccurrence? Have tried an always on piece of software, like Spybot? Have made your mom a limited user instead of an administrator? Have you set up automatic updates and regular spyware/virus scans, perhaps weekly, or even nightly? Just a few suggestions.

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Shes like pretty well every other middle aged woman, that is she is a total noob. The thing is she has an aging PC (Pentium 3 550MHz, 512mb RAM, 64MB Geforce2), now its fine for windows xp but everytime I visit her shes got a bunch of spyware and crap slowing her pc down. Plus I think a Linux distro would generally run faster for her on a P3.

All she does is basically surf the net, plug in her camera and do some mild picture editing in picassa. What woul be a good distro for her? Prefferebly one thats totally GUI.

Thanks :)

Right, I think from personal experience that Mandriva 2008 is completely user friendly and has the taskbar/button like windows xp. Also, please specify the camera and picasa is multi-platform so their is no worries about that :)

Mandriva:http://www.mandriva.com/

Picasa: http://picasa.google.com/linux/index.html

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OS X

I am pretty sure it can't be installed on the target PC.

Ubuntu should be fine. Even Xubuntu might be nice, get a little lighter resource usage, but still visually pleasing and easy to use. (My wife liked Xubuntu, but one problem kept her from using it as her daily OS - I will update it from 7.10 to 8.04 as soon as it is available, and we will see if that solves the keyboard problem).

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Kubuntu would probably be a good option. It designed more for GUI than Ubuntu is. Kubuntu is designed on KDE, rather than gnome and KDE is a little more resources intensive but you don't have to do as many things manually as on gnome (Ubuntu).

You might also get some ideas from this thread: https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=631724

Edited by yanowhiz
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I would suggest ubuntu what with Hardy getting released today.

As for picasa, google has a repository with picasa in it, instructions for getting it are here.

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Ubuntu.

Picasa has Linux support (basically just compiled with Wine) and hardware support (like Plug 'n Play) isn't as bad as some people make it out to be (in my case Ubuntu as as good as Vista in hardware support, and much better than XP)

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Kubuntu is perfetic. Sorry, it is possibly the worst KDE distro I have even tried.

OpenSuse=All.

Do you not like *buntu in general or something?

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ur gonna puch linux on a 40 yr old??? eek. GL with that...

Be careful about being too quick with comments about age vs intelligence/ability!! My parents are in their 80's and dual boot XP/Ubuntu! Im close to 60 and have probably forgot more than you have learned. :p

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Ok, thanks for all of the input guys. I think I'm going to let her try Ubuntu then :)

Depends on the camera. You may have no problem with it.

Before you switch your mom's OS on her, what have you tried to minimize or eliminate the infection reoccurrence? Have tried an always on piece of software, like Spybot? Have made your mom a limited user instead of an administrator? Have you set up automatic updates and regular spyware/virus scans, perhaps weekly, or even nightly? Just a few suggestions.

Thank you for your suggestion, yes I have s&b and etc installed on her box but I would like her to be able to run a robust os without me having to clean it up every second week. She has no clue what a sceduled task is, or what to do if it finds anything. As bad as that sounds thats her user ability in a nutshell, basically "let me surf and get my digital pics developed i dont care about anything else" and I dont blame her, I still remember being a little tot and her teaching my grandpa to use a tv remote :p

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Do you not like *buntu in general or something?

Ubuntu it's self is ok, the colour scheme is terrible but the support base is huge. I guess it has it's ups and downs just like every other distro.

Eitherway I think it's over rated. I used ubuntu alot at first and tried other distro's like mandriva, fedora and puppy but the best I have used yet for my hardware is Opensuse.

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