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Comment by antidoh | Hacker News Reader

What distro would you recommend take the place of Ubuntu, as a recommended for newbs distro?

I mean a distro that you would feel comfortable recommending to a stranger that you will not be able to help install or support the distro, as well as the more traditional "lemme help you with that."

As a subset of that, what apt based distro would you recommend for that niche?

Is plain Debian really something that people feel comfortable recommending to non-supported strangers? Something that you would not be embarrassed about if they looked you up and told you what happened?

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I hope that my reading of your question as a rhetorical one than a literal one is correct?

Because your entire comment is one big reason I have been rooting for Canonical from day one. I have been on Linux on and off since slackware 1.0, Redhat 5 (5.0 (Hurricane)/5.1 (Manhattan)) all the way to SuSE 7.0 and not one time was I able to get someone (anyone) to adopt it completely -- despite all my handholding and regular support! Finally resorted to recommending Cygwin as an alternative, and I was still called upon to help with "things" ;-)

The first/only time I managed to get a successful switch and retain, was when I recommended Ubuntu.

I meant it literally.

I recommend Xubuntu. And if they run Windows, install it as WUBI.

I mean something not derived from Ubuntu.

Yes, Xubuntu (which I currently run underneath XMonad) does not (yet) have this and future related features, and that's good.

But by using an Ubuntu derived distro, you lend credibility to Ubuntu and Canonical.

I would prefer to recommend something higher up the derivation line between Debian and Ubuntu.

Linux Mint as a Debian based version of their distro, which comes with all the desktop polish of Mint, but in their own words: "it's not as stable. Things are likely to break more often but fixes can also come quicker. For this reason, LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT"

Personally I'd take a look at OpenSuSE. It was a pretty good as a Just Works desktop last I looked, but that was a few years ago.

Another option is actually PC-BSD. I've never quite gotten along with it, but that is mainly because I want to do all kinds of hacky strangeness, but for a newbie desktop it's solid with great documentation and easy to install software.

"Linux Mint as a Debian based version of their distro,"

Didn't realize that, I'd always seen it as Ubuntu-derived. Thanks.

Fedora is good enough although it's a bit more bleeding edge.

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