[kwlug-disc] What's the best desktop distribution?

[Gary Walsh]

On Tue, 2010-02-02 at 14:14 +0000, shane.msg at gmail.com wrote:
> Having used more than one distro I am not certain that one is significantly better than any other.  But as I say, I hscre tried more than one. 
> 
> I don't know about now but three years ago the differences were significant.  Installs were less "user friendly" and required significant knowledge of the underlying system, something I did not have time to learn and get a system up and running at the same time. 
> 
> At least then, Ubuntu was the answer.  Canonical seemed to be the only group who understood that many new users had either no time, as in my case, or no will to learn command line syntax, et al. Just to run a compute when all that was necessary to run Windows was to stick a disk or CD ionto a drive and say go.  I saw on more than one message area where Linux so-called helpers claimed that people should be willing to invest time and effort into learning the command line.  Most would not.
> 
> Right or wrong was not an is not my business.  What worked was; at the time that was Ubuntu.  It isn't and wasn't perfect but it filled a void, a void that seems to have been recognized and seems to becoming addressed by more distros. 

When I tried Ubuntu a couple of releases ago, I found that I had to
resort to the command line to do things that could be easily done with
graphical management tools in Mandriva.  I think that the only advantage
to Ubuntu is that it has been promoted better than other distros, so
more people have probably heard about it tried it than some other ones.
I haven't tried the latest release, so I don't know if some things have
improved since I last used it.

-- 
Gary