Well pretty much, i'm writing this because if there was any Gnome Distro i'd use (if i used gnome of corse), it'd be ubuntu because of the slick design and nicely layed out structure.

It's pretty much my reccomendation lol, i just hope they get the new Gnome in so i can try it out sometime.

Anyways though, It's nice to see ubuntu added to LQ, and i'm guessing Xandros never will be coz of the commercial state of it oh well though,

BTW: what Distro's would someone reccomend to someone who knows nothing about linux? (i'm trying to find an OS that's easy to use and doesn't take much at all to confuse a Linux Illiterate person, thus Xandros was a good canidate, and i just found out about www.xpde.com )


Anyways if you use Gnome, and you havn't tried Ubuntu, i suggest giving it a go.

The one thing I would say for newbies: avoid distros that could be considered "obscure". A large base of support and active developers for bugfixes are critical to providing a smooth user experience.

The official forums (ubuntuforums.org) are quite lively, and actually the main reason I took an interest in Ubuntu was because of the active development. If you're not aware, they publish on a bi-annual schedule. Every 6 months there is a new version, with the usual incremental activity in-between. The current stable version is 4.10 "Warty Warthog" (2004, October), and coming next month is 5.4 "Hoary Hedgehog".

Don't think I'm disputing what you said because I think you're absolutely right, and I'd say Ubuntu makes the grade.


*edit*

For the record, I chose it for my desktop because it was Debian-based, but without the pitifully glacial lifecycle. ;^)

Twice a year is semiannual. A biennial release cycle would have a new release out every *other* year--something like Debian, eh?

I say toe-may-toe, you say toe-mah-toe. ;^)

In this case (a Linux illiterate), I would recommend to use some established distributions, which include about everything you can think of "out of the box", such as Mandrake. I assume Fedora or Suse qualify too. In the case of Ubuntu, my main distribution for 3 months now, you have to add manually a number of things which are by default included in Mandrake et al., such as some configuration tools, multemedia utilities, scanning tools, etc. They also support both Gnome and KDE by default, which allows access to a larger number of apps.

This being said, I'll personnaly stick to Ubuntu, 'cause I like the flexibility it provides hand I encountered much less dependency problems to install new apps.

Alain