Devnet Distro Roundup
I’ve been reading Yet Another Linux Blog for some time now as the writer (’Devnet’) has been submitting various distributions of Linux to a test. He’s used his wife (who has no Linux experience) as a judge to find out which distribution is the best distribution for a brand-new user to work with.
Devnet had his wife try out the following distributions (from having to install them to having to remove them - the whole experience):
I won’t mention how each of them performed individually except to say that there were two very big surprises. When Devnet tested Ubuntu it was found to be rather difficult for a newcomer to start off with. This generated a lot of (undeserved) negative feedback toward the project and the people involved from a rather excited Ubuntu community.
And the huge surprise was the success of the little-known PCLinuxOS. I’d never used it until it appeared in this project and was found to be the most new-user- friendly Linux distro. Granted, PCLinuxOS will not meet the needs of every Linux user - but that wasn’t the point of the experiment. According to Mrs. Devnet: “I need to do simple AND it’s easy on the eyes. It serves my purpose, bottom line.”
A big thanks from Distro Jockey to Yet Another Linux Blog for running this test. Linux is steadily approaching desktop-readiness for the real world - this will help the Linux community to know exactly what needs to be worked on to get us all the way.
