[Long. To some extent preaching to the choir. You've been warned.] Hmm... Good news for your mom-in-law. Much of what you wrote actually refers to installation rather than desktop readiness, I am sure you are aware of it and I'll treat your post as one about installing, rather than using, a desktop Linux machine.
I actually have a few friends who installed Linux on their own (for the first time in their respective lives and for their personal use) and never looked back. One or two credit me, quite undeservedly, for telling them of the option, and make a point of saying they had never realized what they were missing. None is a techie. This tells me that your "no way" comment sounds too harsh. Especially since installing Windows means infinitely more pain, what with its concept of "installing drivers" from separate media for every piece of HW from motherboard to network card - stuff that any Linux distro has on the main installation ISO. No way a housewife can install and configure Windows herself, by the same token. Another observation: judging by the experience of most older relatives and acquaintances of mine (you are younger than me, so your mom-in-law must be relatively young, too, but I am still drawing a parallel... :) even with preinstalled Windows tasks like connecting to ADSL/Cable or finding and installing a program to view a movie or burn a CD are way beyond comprehension, and even finding a file or organizing files in hierarchical directories is often daunting (the same people happily browse the web, read and send email, and use YouTube and Skype). In this sense nothing is ready for desktop. Oh, and someone needs to maintain AV! ;-) Back to Linux, and specifically Fedora. What I always do on installation is enable several optional yum repositores, including extras, rpmfusion (free and non-free), adobe, etc. This solves many of the problem you mentioned, and as a result my own pet gripes are different. This single management infrastructure is, of course, much superior to the Windows' horrible mess. Typically, after, say, 30 mins of installation I do "yum update" that may take a while depending on how much you need to download and how fast your connection is. Then I go to a couple of sites such as Adobe for flash (can never remember the repo or rpm name) and Skype, install those things in a minute, and I am done. If anything is missing (I never remember if, e.g., VLC is installed out of the box) it's "yum install vlc" or equivalent (there is a GUI or three for that - with a launcher from the plasma panel out of the box - but I can't be bothered). Nowhere near 10 hours that you spent. Some further comments and tips. 1. Never had a problem with audio or video (VLC handles the video stuff I need without a hitch). 2. Don't recall any serious problems with (pulse)audio during the last few years - even though I use KDE and it is gnomish. 3. Skype works out of the box once the RPM is installed. I don't think it comes preinstalled on Windows, either (maybe it will soon, now that they belong to the same company). I must mention that I don't use video, so my "works out of the box" refers to voice and chat. 4. Adobe's flash plugin is trivially installed with yum today. Not so long ago there was a need for 32-bit wrappers, but IIRC the 64-bit version is back now. 5. I always disable selinux from the start on desktop machines. I just don't see a point in worrying about all the extra configuration for a desktop as opposed to a production server. I seriously doubt selinux is critical for your mother-in-law - a firewall plus normal security precautions should be sufficient. 6. Once I pick Hebrew keyboard layout (at installation and double-checking in KDE) I can see and type Hebrew - IMHO much easier than on Windows that has an annoying habit of switching between layouts whenever it feels like it. My Windows VMs at work don't have Hebrew, and if I needed it I would have no idea how to even approach the problem. 7. I have never experienced Fedora installer problems, with date or anything else. I don't install/upgrade often so my sample is not large. 8. The biggest problem in my experience is setting up WiFi (relevant for laptops mostly, but it's important). One problem is installing non-free firmware for some wireless cards (Broadcom, looking at you!). It's not difficult for me, and Google easily finds useful documentation, but a newbie would have a problem. Another problem is the STUPID NetworkManager that is buggy, undocumented, and unconfigurable. By the way, "yum install wifi-radar" may alleviate some pain. > 3. I had to set up ADSL. It turns out that in 2011, the pppoe > package still doesn't come preinstalled, and when you do install > it and set up ADSL, you discover that NetworkManager has a bug > that prevents it from starting the connection during boot. I > spent more than an hour to circumvent this bug. 9. Yum says rp-pppoe is in the main Fedora repository so it should have been installed (what choices did you make at installation time?), but in any case the setup should be as simple as "yum install rp-pppoe" followed by "/sbin/pppoe-setup" (I heard NM had a GNOME GUI that should pick it up but since I am a KDE user... ;-). I never ever used PPPoE (or PPTP or anything else like this) myself, so this point is theoretical for me. 10. I admit my ignorance - I thought Picasa was Googlish/webish and did not require any software but the browser... 11. A few of newbie-relevant things that I just love about KDE/plasma GUI (no intention to start a GNOME/KDE war, I just think it's relevant to the topic) are as follows: a) The central configuration/customization GUI for most things. b) The launcher widget (the equivalent of the Windows' Start menu) has a smart fuzzy search, e.g., if you need to burn a CD you can just type something vague like "burn" and the right applications are suggested, if you need to scan a document typing "scan" will give you options, if you need to reconfigure your network, type "network", if you need to look a your photo albums "photo" will help - extremely intuitive, and even though I generally know what my favorite applications are I tend to just type "photo" rather than brose the menu. For a newbie it must be good. Oh, and it looks like the search remembers your choices and puts them high in the list. Well done, and far superior to the Start button... c) When you plug something into a USB port the right applications are suggested, e.g., plug in a camera and the "device notifier" widget immediately suggests to download pictures from the camera with digikam or another photo app, view them with whatever image viewer you have installed, or open a file manager - all very logical choices. Again, very well done - never saw anything comparable on Windows. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | p...@goldshmidt.org _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il