[ale] Linspire and other commercial distros

[Van Loggins]

I bought a lifetime membership for Linspire a while back when they had
their choicepc.com website and was trying to get money up to assist
with the fight against microsoft's lawsuits against them in foreign
countries.

It's an OK version of Linux for a beginner. For ease of Use though I
would recommend Xandros if the person has ever used a Windows based
computer before. It's set up to be used in a business environment
where the amount of time needed to retrain someone to use it is kept
to a minimum. If they haven't it's still laid out very well and easy
to show someone how to use. I loaded it on my laptop a while back and
let my wife use it who has never used linux before and she had no
trouble figuring out how to do stuff on it.

Why do I not recommend Linspire? Well,I had built my Father a computer
as a Christmas Present, and I had loaded it with Linspire and gave him
access to my Click and Run account. We kept having issues with this
system where Linspire's version of Mozilla kept destroying his user
profile for him and would constanly prompt him to set up his email
account every single time he attempted to use mozilla mail to check
his email.

I say that it had something to do with their version as I've never
been able to duplicate the problem on any other version of Mozilla
other than the one that came with Linspire 4.5

I am ashamed to admit it, but getting my father to use linux failed
because of the linspire mozilla problems. At the request of my Father
his computer now has Windows XP Professional installed on it, but I
did win a small battle for open source in spite of the loss for linux.
My father was used to using mozilla / netscape and because of this I
was able to get him set up and running with Mozilla Firefox and
Thunderbird instead of having to use IE and Outlook Express.

My Father Liked using OpenOffice, and had already created quite a few
documents with it under Linux so he wanted it instead of Office.

If the free version of Xandros 2.0 OCE had been available around the
time that I was building that system I bet my father would still be
running Linux and Loving it.

So in closing my recommendation for a good Newbie friendly version of
Linux go with Xandros.

Have a great Day!

Van



-- 
Van Loggins
"Linux Geek In Training"
vanloggins at gmail.com


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