[wellylug] Linux distro

[Brent Wood]

 If you look at www.distrowatch.com they have brief descriptions of pretty much
all Linux distros with comments as to ease of use for newcomers.

I tend to recommend Mandriva, Suse & Ubuntu as free distros for new users, as
they have very easy to use graphical setup tools, are generally very popular
and are often recommended in reviews & such for new users. PCLinuxOS is another
less common one, but is growing & is also very easy to use/install (based on
Mandriva).

At the recent installfest a long time Debian supporter exclaimed "my mother 
could use this!" when watching a SuSE 9.3 install.

This suggested to me that despite many claims to the contrary, Debian is
probably not the most appropriate distro for newcomers. I'd suggest Ubuntu is a
new user oriented Debian based distro. 

There is an alternative approach, which is to purchase one of the commercial
Linux distros, such as Linspire, or the commercial versions of Mandriva or
SuSE, as these tend to have pre-installed third party 3D accelerated graphics
drivers, flash players, etc, which are often not Open Source, and are not
included with the free versions.

Hope this helps...

   Brent Wood