So once again I am faced with opportunity to introduce someone to linux.
You see my dad has this friend, hes not too tech savvy and when his desktop had an issue I elected to repair it.
In my initial boot of his desktop it was not booting into the hard disk nor even recognizing it.
BIOS came up fine (which is good as BIOS errors are usually only fixable by actual pros not by folks like me who have no training in fixing a BIOS)
I used my linux recovery thumbdrive to access it and turns out that SMART was reporting a dead disk drive.
So I gave him my old hard disk drive (just as big has his dead one, but a little older yet still functioning)
Now I gave him the option to recover windows 7, I have professional and he had home premium and I offered to give him a copy of win7 if he wanted me to buy it
He said to skip it once I said the cost of a windows 7 install disk or its licence.
Then he asked what could I do to help him get his computer to do anything again and I suggested linux.
Of course he never heard of it but I said that if he knows what an android is then he techically knows what linux is.
I said it was free and could do practically everything windows can and he said do it.
So came to the question of what distro to give him, knowing what kind of person he is a knew I needed something dead simple.
After giving some debate I think I found his distro... drumroll please....
Ubuntu 13.10
I know, I know not the ideal choice but it seems to be the most logical for the range of this persons limited computing technique it seems the best route.
I could have gone the mint or zorin route but both have some delays in their versions being based off ubuntu.
No Ubuntu's predictable upgrade cycle and the next version being LTS it would make their user experience upgrading to it better for this kind of user.
The no fus no muss style of Ubuntus upgrader is the key element in my decision.
If this person was a little more tech savvy I would have given them something else but this person has only really used windows 7 at the age of 55 my decision seems to be the right call.
Plus based on my own experience with my parents knowing how non tech savvy they were when I shown them linux I feel my call was right in this case.
You see my dad has this friend, hes not too tech savvy and when his desktop had an issue I elected to repair it.
In my initial boot of his desktop it was not booting into the hard disk nor even recognizing it.
BIOS came up fine (which is good as BIOS errors are usually only fixable by actual pros not by folks like me who have no training in fixing a BIOS)
I used my linux recovery thumbdrive to access it and turns out that SMART was reporting a dead disk drive.
So I gave him my old hard disk drive (just as big has his dead one, but a little older yet still functioning)
Now I gave him the option to recover windows 7, I have professional and he had home premium and I offered to give him a copy of win7 if he wanted me to buy it
He said to skip it once I said the cost of a windows 7 install disk or its licence.
Then he asked what could I do to help him get his computer to do anything again and I suggested linux.
Of course he never heard of it but I said that if he knows what an android is then he techically knows what linux is.
I said it was free and could do practically everything windows can and he said do it.
So came to the question of what distro to give him, knowing what kind of person he is a knew I needed something dead simple.
After giving some debate I think I found his distro... drumroll please....
Ubuntu 13.10
I know, I know not the ideal choice but it seems to be the most logical for the range of this persons limited computing technique it seems the best route.
I could have gone the mint or zorin route but both have some delays in their versions being based off ubuntu.
No Ubuntu's predictable upgrade cycle and the next version being LTS it would make their user experience upgrading to it better for this kind of user.
The no fus no muss style of Ubuntus upgrader is the key element in my decision.
If this person was a little more tech savvy I would have given them something else but this person has only really used windows 7 at the age of 55 my decision seems to be the right call.
Plus based on my own experience with my parents knowing how non tech savvy they were when I shown them linux I feel my call was right in this case.