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I would suggest the Trisquel distro, which is completely free software (it's officially sponsored by the FSF) and IMHO the desktop is more user friendly than Lubuntu. http://trisquel.info/

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Some of the primary things people use computers for are watching flash videos and listening to mp3s and I would rather people use 99% Free software and 1% proprietary software than the other way around because someone zelously recommended to them a 100% Free Distro, which they found unusable and then switched back to windows. One of my worst experiences when starting out with Linux was installing Debian on a laptop, when I was without ethernet, because it didn't come with the proprietary wifi driver I needed, I don't wish to subject a non-technical person to that.

tried this recently on a macbook air without an ethernet port - it's actually not even as simple as downloading the relevant .deb on a flash drive and moving it over, as the default .deb will, sometimes, insist on downloading the actual firmware blob from the manufacturer during the install process! I refuse to pay for a USB ethernet adapter which I will use once, so I'm sticking with virtual machines for now.

I agree, normal humans simply don't put up with this stuff - in the end, even I didn't!

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