A Linux for the totally maintenance free

[Joe Zeff]

On 10/23/2014 12:57 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
> At first, there were a lot of "How do I do this thing I don't already
> know how to do" questions.  I had to set up the machine with flash and
> rpmfusion codecs for her.   With that out of the way, 'support requests'
> are rare; it just works.

My older sister and I share what used to be our parent's retirement 
condo.  It didn't take more than five minutes with a LiveCD of Ubuntu 
for her to know that this was what she wanted.  After Unity came out, 
she spent almost a year trying to work with it before switching to Xfce, 
and when we needed to re-install because something got messed up, we 
used Xubuntu.  On a day-to-day basis, she manages her box on her own, 
and asks for much less help than when she ran Windows.  She's even been 
known to find and follow instructions that need her to use a terminal 
without asking me to do it or watch what happens.  (As long as I can see 
what she was told to do, I can either reverse what happened or find out 
how to at the Ubuntu forum.)  For her, It Just Works.

My suggestion is to make up one or more LiveCDs and let your wife 
experiment with them.  If/when you find the one she likes, you can set 
her up as a dual boot so that she's always got something familiar to 
fall back on.  I don't know about other distros, but I do know that if 
Ubuntu's installer detects Windows, it will ask if you want to have 
access to it from Ubuntu.  If you do, it auto-mounts the Windows 
partition at boot and puts an icon on your desktop.