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For a company with non tech savvy computer users who will mainly need to upload/save pictures, send/receive emails, play solitaire/euchre, print envelopes, and manage taxes, what Ubuntu version would you suggest installing on all their systems?

Ubuntu? Kubuntu, Xubuntu. some other one?

Looking for the mix that does the most of this out of the box (if any of them at all even come with an envelope printing application).

Thank you.

5 Answers 5

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Ubuntu, clearly.

Gnome is built first of all to be easy to use. Whereas the KDE and, especially, XFCE people have other things on their agendas, such as Performance (xfce), Über-Modern technologies (kde) and so on.

Gnome is used by some of the major Linux implementers, such as the city of Largo or Swiss federal court - they certainly bought this argument.

GNOME understands that usability is about creating software that is easy for everyone to use, not about piling on features. GNOME's community of professional and volunteer usability experts have created Free Software's first and only Human Interface Guidelines, and all core GNOME software is adopting these principles. (via http://live.gnome.org/SWOT)

I would not only recommend ubuntu, i'd strongly discourage you from using anything else. For any reason you like, but firstly Usability and Support.

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  • Thanks. I wasn't sure because I haven't ever used K/X ever. Oct 24, 2010 at 1:47
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Plain Ubuntu. It's the most widely-known and the best supported. It also has Canonical's full weight behind it, rather than being a community project, so commercial support is also readily available direct from Canonical.

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Although I believe the current version of plain-old Ubuntu will be just fine for most anyone, there is a very popular version that makes life a lot easier for many people.

I highly recommend looking into Mint Linux. It is a popular version of Ubuntu (that is 100% compatible [won't act differently]) that comes preloaded with a lot of things people just expect to be on their computer (MP3 capability, Adobe Reader, Flash, certain fonts, etc.)

It get updated in the exact same way also so there shouldn't be any security concerns as it really is just a few great packages different than the vanilla Ubuntu.

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  • I second this, Having to install flash and mp3 codecs is a fair pain. Mint works very well out of the box.
    – Will
    Oct 24, 2010 at 14:58
  • mint is a derivative, not a version.
    – RolandiXor
    Mar 19, 2011 at 15:10
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Try them for yourself. Download the LiveCDs!

I don't know of any dedicated Linux envelope printing application but you may find that with a small investment of effort you can get good results with glabels.

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Ubuntu - its more popular, and as a result there are more people to turn to when problems arise, better software availability, and in my experience, more stable.

As for which version, for a commercial environment, id suggest sticking with an LTS release for the longer support cycle, the most recent is version 10.04.

Good luck.

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