I'm now using and recommending Trisquel or gNewSense instead of Ubuntu

Kia ora koutou

<disclaimer> This post is not intended as a personal attack on any
employee of Canonical, or any other grassroots member of the Ubuntu
community. It's also not a judgement on anyone who disagrees that the
Amazon lens is spyware - we can peacefully agree to disagree on that,
but personally I'm throwing away all my Ubuntu CDs, and I won't be
using or endorsing it again until Canonical hands over control of the
Ubuntu trademarks to the Ubuntu Foundation. Peace, love, and mung
beans :) </disclaimer>

For the benefit of anyone else who has been looking for a distro to
recommend to new GNU/Linux users, I'd like to share that I've settled
on Trisquel (currently on 6.06 Toutatis). It's one of a handful of
distros endorsed by the FSF, and the first of the ones I tried which
is up to everyday use. I'm now running it on both my Acer AspireOne
laptop (1.6 Ghz CPU, 1GB memory), and an old mongrel desktop (3Ghz
CPU, 1 GB RAM), and it's handled pretty much everything I've thrown at
it. I've even had a go at gaming on the laptop! Although due to the
lack of 3D acceleration in my hardware, it won't cope with anything
requiring proper 3D, it managed Freedoom and BOS Wars admirably.
http://trisquel.info/

The other distro on the FSF's list which I'd recommend people have a
bash at (pun intended) is gNewSense. Version 3.0 is out, and is based
directly on Debian rather than Ubuntu (although Trisquel is derived
from Ubuntu, and this is fine with me as long as all non-free and
user-disrespecting add-ons have been stripped out). You can get a copy
from the download page, here:
http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/Download

Both of these seem usable on fairly old hardware, and pretty
beginner-friendly, although I want to throw both of these at a
GNU/Linux beginner and see if I still have any sense of what it's like
to be one ;)

BTW Thanks to Matt for the suggestion of Linux Mint Debian Edition. I
haven't had a chance to test it yet, but I will.

BTW2 Thanks to the person who recommended me SnowLinux. I gave the
Enlightenment flavour of version 4 a try, and it's certainly an
improvement on Bodhi. I had enough niggles with it to come to the
conclusion that it wasn't quite ready for everyday use, but I still
think the Enlightenment desktop has a lot of potential, and I'll keep
an eye out for version 5.

Compute in freedom amigos!

Hei kōnā
Strypey

-- 
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype

"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates

"Voting... is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The
last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will
get a version of it through a dessicated question, and then will
submerge it in a Niagra of similar opinions, and convert them into -
what else? - another piece of news. Thus, we have here a great loop of
impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which
you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you
can do nothing."
- Neil Postman, 'Amusing Ourselves To Death'

_______________________________________________
DunLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ethernal.org/listinfo/dunlug
DunLUG Wiki - http://dunlug.kallisti.net.nz/