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On Fri, 2009-03-13 at 11:58 +0000, george wrote: > On Thursday 12 March 2009, James Fidell wrote: > > Anyone care to share thoughts on how easy lifelong Windows users find > > Ubuntu to pick up and just "get on with doing stuff" (IM clients are > > another thing she uses a lot from the laptop). Of the many and varied > > distributions, is it likely to be the "best" choice in this situation? > > > > James > > I gave the guy next door a basic driving lesson in desktop computing yesterday > as he's in the job market without the necessary skills. He sat at my > computer which runs SimplyMepis which is Debian based with KDE. I also run > WinXP in VirtualBox and I demonstrated various things between the two. Hands > on he had no difficulty moving between the Mepis/XP and I was surprised by > the similarities between the systems, probably set up unconciously by me when I moved my mother from XP to ubuntu about 18 months ago. There was only one MUST HAVE windows application, Quicken 2004, and it runs fine with crossover office. I've just put the question to her and she says she has no problems at all with ubuntu and once Quicken was up and going (I did have to tweak it a bit) ubuntu itself was fine. The problem for my mum was/is that she was quite an early adopter of PC's and went through word perfect, lotus and then MS office doing quite complex things, macros etc, using keyboard commands. Back when she started up even the average user had to use the dos command line once in a blue moon. But these keyboard commands are not the same or not even replicated in open office. So she gets frustrated and annoyed when shift/alt/control/delete/page up/left doesn't reformat a set of numbers into estimated performance targets for the next six months and output the costs in Kirgizstani Kruuger Rands. She, who is 70, reckons that the only problems are when open office differs slightly from MSO and the slight bother of learning new apps for e-mail etc. If all one wants to do is browse download e-mail and other standard things mother reckons a half hour tutorial (to over formalise it) would be all that is needed. S -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html