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On Thursday 12 March 2009, James Fidell wrote: > ...as people were in another thread just now. > > My wife's laptop is becoming increasingly unstable running XP. She's > loathe to use anything else though as she's used successive flavours > of Windows in all her jobs pretty much forever and it's just really > deeply ingrained. She will use Firefox happily, but getting her to > use Thunderbird and OpenOffice when she's used to Outlook and MS Office > is an uphill struggle. I might try telling her that god kills a kitten > every time someone opens a Word or Excel document :) > > The kids share a desktop running XP that she could use when she's > desperate, so I'm thinking of completely replacing XP on the lapdog > with Ubuntu for those times when you absolutely, positively have to > use Google from the sofa (or do the Tesco order). > > 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 to Mepis. On the other hand, he had no pre-conceived ideas to overcome and just used what was there. Once a computer is set up for printers etc by someone who knows what they are doing there is no reason why a Microsoft user shouldn't be able to move to Linux/GNU with just a days familiarisation, IMHO. Plenty of people move between Apple & Microsoft and you don't hear people whining about the differences. Yes, Apple does use Ms Office but if someone has difficulty moving to Open Office then I would say that they don't eat boiled eggs either because it's too much hard work to take the top off. (It's amazing how quickly you can get into rant mode when talking about Ms) George -- 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