From Matt Hartley, over at MadPenguin.org:
This just in: it’s an Ubuntu future. Think I’m nuts? Take a cold, hard look around. Even though I’m a fan of other delightful distros like Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux, there are other honorable mentions, such as Fedora (a fine distro) and OpenSuSE. At the end of the day, however, Ubuntu has won the hearts of common users. And that is not my opinion, this is simply a matter of numbers.
He makes the point that no matter whether Ubuntu is the “best”, it’s all about how easy it is for new users to get up and going. Ubuntu’s motto: It Just Works. I put the latest Ubuntu on a 1.2G Celeron box with 640M of RAM using the instructions I posted to this blog earlier. I then loaded up Swiftfox, a Firefox version optimized for Linux and Intel processors. Two nights ago I gave that box to my woman’s girls (she’s my woman — unless of course she’s listening — then she’s my love, my light, my reason to live). The girls are ages 12 and 16. School’s out, and they are spending more time on mom’s computer, making it harder for a work-at-home mom to get things done. Mom’s PC is running Windows 2000 on an AMD Athalon 3100+ and she uses the Firefox browser (of course — who do you s’pose does her computer support?). I showed them how to turn the PC on — they all ready knew about user IDs and passwords. I turned them loose. In the first hour they figured out how to switch between user accounts and had changed the wallpaper. Last night when I dropped in on them the youngest was busy online and the oldest was observing. They were taking turns, playing games and cruising YouTube. I asked the youngest what she was doing: “Making money so I can buy an egg”, she replied. Bottom Line: No Fear.
