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So... The ever unfolding saga of trying to get my wife to use Linux progresses... And yesterday she spent a couple of hours in-front of her PC which I'd booted into Debian Squeeze running a fairly bog-standard install. (ie. I've not done my tweaks with it to "tune" it at all!) It's running Gnome.
Her response was that it was a *lot* faster than XP! However, what she really meant wasn't that it was faster overall, but that she could run more applications at the same time and switch between them - something that seems extremely "clunky" under XP.
It wasn't all easy though - I installed FireFox4 and FlashPlayer - and for this, I had to delve into command-line territory. I also installed Thunderbird - although I did install that without the command-line, but using the file-manager thing to un-pack the tar.gz, then create a launcher to start it. However, I would not expect a non-geek to be able to do this, and a .deb package for FireFox, flash and thunderbird would have been nice (although to be fair, I didn't actually look for one, just used the download links on the mozilla.org website)
And, I was able to mount the NTFS partition and copy over her Thunderbird profile lock-stock and theme and all, and then when we launched Thunderbird under Linux it really did "just work". With her inboxes (she has 2 accounts, both IMAP), themes, etc. all working. Didn't do the same for firefox, but exported the bookmarks from XP and imported them into Linux land - that was OK, and re-logging in to various web-sites & making a few settings wasn't a big deal...
So later today I'm going to look at the iPlayer and Citrix stuff that you've pointed me to in the past. Will need to investigate it's standard PDF viewer though and see what it's using.
Other things I was impresed with - it found her USB printer and printed a test page (It's an HP photo printer + scanner - not tried to scan with it yet), and it found the network printer (HP Lasterjet). However while it found the SAMBA server, it didn't find the home NFS server - which according to google it ought to have, however a manual line in /etc/fstab sorted that and I found a way to put an icon on the desktop to launch a file manager on it. (I'm almost tempted to simply mount her home directory via NFS though - however we only have 100Mb networking here and that might slow things down a bit)
It might have been harder had she been using Outlook or some other Email system, however at least she's been using IMAP for ever.
I didn't like the standard Gnome idea of using 2 "bars" for stuff - we started by moving the bottom one to the right and the top one to the bottom, but really want to lose one of them completely, so some adjusting will be needed there. Although her monitor is 4:3, I think that in these days of wide, short screens, we need all the vertical space we can get!
I was going to use xfce, but Gnome seems to be OK and not sucking too much performance out of it (It's an Athlon XP2400+ with 1.5GB of RAM)
So there you go. So-far, so good! Cheers, Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq