Re:Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10
by yellowapple on Monday August 24, 2015 @08:19PM
(#10113641)
> Anyone know about any good unix distros that wont be too much of a culture shock to someone who has used windows his entire life?
Try openSUSE:
* UI is designed to be very familiar to Windows users, with a Windows-looking taskbar complete with start menu and system tray (if you pick KDE, Xfce, or LXDE for your desktop environment; GNOME is a bit... well, out there).
* openSUSE ships with YaST, which provides rather extensive graphical system-wide configuration. It's arguably the closest thing to a proper and fully-featured Windows-style Control Panel you'll find in the GNU/Linux world. Thanks to YaST, it's pretty rare that you'll ever need to touch the command line for the vast majority of tasks.
* If you're running in an Active Directory environment, openSUSE's builtin support for joining AD domains is abso-fucking-lutely phenomenal; the YaST-based configuration blows even Windows out of the water, let alone other GNU/Linux distros.
* Pretty stable (openSUSE is the testbed for SUSE Enterprise) without being totally behind the times like Debian Stable tends to be.
I've set it up on the formerly-XP-running machines of multiple elderly, computer-illiterate people with effectively zero issues (other than one user complaining about the default desktop background; I showed him how to change it, and he since managed to figure out how to set up his own without further intervention on my part). If computer-illiterate old people can figure it out, I'm confident that someone who knows that Hacker News even exists can figure it out ;)
Try openSUSE:
* UI is designed to be very familiar to Windows users, with a Windows-looking taskbar complete with start menu and system tray (if you pick KDE, Xfce, or LXDE for your desktop environment; GNOME is a bit... well, out there).
* openSUSE ships with YaST, which provides rather extensive graphical system-wide configuration. It's arguably the closest thing to a proper and fully-featured Windows-style Control Panel you'll find in the GNU/Linux world. Thanks to YaST, it's pretty rare that you'll ever need to touch the command line for the vast majority of tasks.
* If you're running in an Active Directory environment, openSUSE's builtin support for joining AD domains is abso-fucking-lutely phenomenal; the YaST-based configuration blows even Windows out of the water, let alone other GNU/Linux distros.
* Pretty stable (openSUSE is the testbed for SUSE Enterprise) without being totally behind the times like Debian Stable tends to be.
I've set it up on the formerly-XP-running machines of multiple elderly, computer-illiterate people with effectively zero issues (other than one user complaining about the default desktop background; I showed him how to change it, and he since managed to figure out how to set up his own without further intervention on my part). If computer-illiterate old people can figure it out, I'm confident that someone who knows that Hacker News even exists can figure it out ;)