You may want to try Mepis 8.5 http://www.mepis.org/
I've sampled just about every major distro and Mepis 8.5 seems to more closely approximate Windows install-and-play friendliness than any other. It has by far the best KDE implementation, great fonts, useful user GUI tools and it comes loaded with the basic goodies Windows users expect, a working FLASH-plugin, multimedia codecs, etc. I've found Mepis 8.5 the best out of the box Linux available, missing only ufw or some other firewall front end, about the only must-have Windows refugees will need to download from their Debian repository. Mepis still employs a simple useful great-looking boot-loader (grub-legacy w/gfxboot) that you won't need to be a dark-basement geek to tune to your needs. I moved to Ubuntu back in the Hardy days after watching Windows degenerate in user friendliness, security and even stability from NT-4/Win2K (great!) --> WinXP (faulty but tolerable) --> Vista (just plain awful). I still use Ubuntu (10.4-rc) today because for me it combines some level of user friendliness with just enough complexity and gotchas to encourage the user to learn about their OS "under the hood" so to speak. Every user is different in their needs tolerances and expectations. To me this is Linux's greatest strength. That it offers so many different takes on a basic OS that is a) totally free and b) in most ways much better than Windows. You may also want to scope out Distrowatch to learn more about various Linux flavors http://distrowatch.com/ _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug