I am interetested in doing a small project with my wife as my guinea pig. I am a linux user, and I am personally familiar with most aspects of linux. I currently run two linux boxes in my house clustered together... just for fun (Slackware). I want to have her start using Linux, and record the problems that come about. She is already somewhat familiar with OpenOffice because she uses it often on my own system from time to time. Anyway, I know with Fedora there has been problems with it, and with the new release of Mandrake, I was curious on the thoughts of the latest distrobutions of Linux out there. I can do any setup that is required, but I'm looking at features for the extremely computer illiterate user out there.

Thanks,
Jason Bush

That's funny....I"m trying the same experiment on my wife

I think the distro you choose depends on your goals. If you just want your wife to use linux, but not really do any of the admin work, I'd stick with Slackware. That 's what I'm doing. I've got a laptop set up to boot to kdm and I set her up with KDE as the X environment. It's close enough to windows that she can operate pretty successfully.

However if you want her to do some of the admin work, I'd still stick with Slackware. Odds are she is going to be dealing with compiled packages for software installation and how hard is it to use pkgtool?

I shifted my wife to linux a few years ago and she's never been happier. She does still use staroffice 5.2 and I'll shift her to openoffice one day soon :-)

For a long time she did dual boot to win to run a specialized application that records dog pedigree details, but she now runs that on 98se under win4lin on the desktop and she is totally happy and never boots windows.

All she wants to do on the PC is browse and do the dog database, financial stuff, and games. She does still prefer some of the win card games, but her fave desktop games these days are shisen-sho - and now frozen bubble.

As an experiment... Well it's all point and click, so the transition for her was easy. She just hates crashes - a lot. Windows was always crashing. Linux never crashes and she leaves it running 24/7. That way she can just sit and do stuff when she has a spare moment.

Her win4lin windows 'window' still crashes on occassion, but she loves the way she can just run windows as an application :-)

Oh, I've tended to use mandrake/KDE here.

Thanks for the replies.. I'm leaning towards Mandrake I think. I figure after I get it loaded and setup for her, then I may show her how to install different software if she ever wanted to. Thus, I want it to be easy for her to do, thats why I picked Mandrake over Slackware.