In my experience, having people new to Libre operating systems try several distros, is very likely to overwhelm & cause them to give up on libre software. I suggest that they try Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, & stick with only the LTS version, rather than upgrading to the STS versions in between. They're still on XP which means they don't like to mess with all the new bells & whistles of each short term support release.
Since they're used to Windows XP, Kubuntu is the most similar experience to that. Another option would be Mint KDE 17 when it comes out in ~July. Cheers, Elcaset On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 2:19 PM, John Jason Jordan <[email protected]>wrote: > On Sat, 19 Apr 2014 15:13:01 -0500 > Richard Owlett <[email protected]> dijo: > > >It said in part "I haven't quite given up on XP yet but am trying > >to go to 7. The problem is that I hate 7 and hate Chrome & Gmail > >even more - but I'm not going over to whatever you happen to use > >- I'm not smart enough to learn something else - and then teach > >Judy. " > > > >I'm a Debian fan. Judy, his wife, has a M.S. in Music Education > >(major in piano, minor in organ). In my opinion they are both in > >the audience targeted by Microsoft and Canonical. I suspect that > >that anything looking like Gome3 would be a show stopper. > > The first step is to find out if there are any programs that they > absolutely must use. If any of them lack a Linux alternative, you'll > have an uphill battle. And having said that, I have found that getting > a Windows user to start using LibreOffice even while still on a Windows > machine is a good idea. LibreOffice is the gateway drug to the open > source world. And for the music major I might suggest Lilypond as well. > > I agree with your estimate that Ubuntu is probably the best option for > them. As for which "buntu to turn them on to, that is kind of tough. I > haven't used Windows since Windows 2000, so I don't know what the > desktop looks like. You'd probably want to suggest one that looks the > most like an XP desktop from the beginning. We know that a Linux > desktop is highly configurable, but they won't realize that for some > time after trying Linux. They'll think that the desktop must look like > it does when it first boots, and if it is too different from XP it will > turn them off. > > You might send them live DVDs of Ubunu (Unity), Xubuntu, Ubuntu-Gnome, > Kubuntu and Lubuntu, and have them spend some time in each one. > > It also occurs to me that their motivation for making a move is because > XP is no longer supported, so they are probably worried about security > issues. Well, they could use XP forever with great security if they run > it in Virtualbox on a Linux machine. > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > -- Free Geek Seattle- Helping The Needy Get Nerdy http://www.freegeekseattle.org/ https://groups.google.com/group/freegeek-seattle/topics?hl=en _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
