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posted by
Dopefish
on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:30PM
from the no-need-to-join-the-microsoft-collective dept.
from the no-need-to-join-the-microsoft-collective dept.
resignator writes:
"'Arm yourself with the information needed before telling someone to install such and such distro because it's great,' warned blogger Ken Starks in his recent FOSS Force post. 'It might be great for you, but maybe not so much with my hardware choices.'
What considerations do SoylentNews readers have when recommending an OS? What OS do you recommend the most or least? How far would you go to 'tailor' a Linux distro to a potential adopter before recommending something that will work out of the box but lack non-essential features?"
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 4, Informative) by mrclisdue on Wednesday March 05 2014, @08:03PM
I've installed Slackware, using xfce as a de, on 23 existing systems for friends, relatives, and friends of friends, including a real estate office, a lawyer's office, and a livery business.
If they *insist* on Windows, I install it virtually and have a cronjob take daily snapshots so if they trash their precious Windows, it can be restored in 30 seconds, over the phone.
Of 23 installs, only 2 regularly run Windows (virtually, of course.)
The anecdotal fact of the matter is, most folks have PCs, and most folks do nothing more than browse the net and email. The occasional document (libreoffice), that's about it.
As for xfce, I don't use it personally (fluxbox), but I find it simple, intuitive, and no eye-candy (if they're really interested, I'll show them kde, but no one really gives a shit for the eye-candy.)
I rarely hear from anyone once the system is up and running.
As an aside, I've done over 50 raspberry pi installs, using raspbmc; cord-cutting is slowly taking hold....
cheers,
(Score: 1) by cykros on Friday March 07 2014, @01:56AM
Slackware is, once up and running, perhaps the most pleasant of distros I've had the pleasure of personally experiencing. I used it back around the Slackware 8 days, and then went the way of the Ubuntu/Debian herd in search of a little better autodetection of hardware (especially having had a few broadcom wifi cards in a row that really weren't so fun to deal with on the driver side of things). Having found my way back to Slack, I have to wonder how I ever got by without it. All of the idiot-proofing so many of the popular distributions make use of does little more than make it that much harder to do anything unforeseen by the distribution curators, and, truth be told, it's really not THAT hard to pick up the Slackware specific quirks (and there's always linuxquestions.net, which entirely makes short work of those kinds of issues). And that's all from my personal perspective; someone who admittedly does "weird things" to my computer. For the average user? Once slack is installed, and MAYBE a couple of cronjobs have been set up to keep it up to date, it's something I'd hand to my grandmother in a heartbeat, and worry a lot less that it'd give her issues than any of the various Windows systems I've helped her out with.
It's a shame that the greated linux community has largely taken to viewing Slackware as an amusing relic (especially as it's one drawback seems to be that it only has a few thousand supported packages). I have to wonder if Ubuntu will make it to be half the age Slackware is now without utterly disintegrating under silly curator interference with general functioning...