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fruight

Member

Registered: 2010-11-04

Posts: 6

suggestions/tips wanted for userfriendly/beginner system

i am using a very minimal Arch with XMonad for some months now and i am very happy with it.
now i am supposed to set up my little sisters pc and i dont want to put windows on it again
i have fiddled with {L,K,}ubuntu but i did not really like those (bloated, buggy...) so i thought about setting something up based on Arch.

requirements:
preferably familiar environment for windows user (she shouldn't have to relearn everything)
media stuff (music, movies, pictures, e-books)
internet (flash)
office suite (shouldn't be a problem)
wine (games )

i guess i cant ask her to cope with a tiling WM and cli without scaring her away from linux for life, so any suggestions for floaters, guis etc. are welcome
so far i think about doing something based on Openbox or Xfce, but i can't back that up by any experience (once you go tiling, you never go back )
if you know some distro that provides all that without providing a ton of unneeded stuff, feel free to suggest that too

anonymous_user

Member

Registered: 2009-08-28

Posts: 3,059

Re: suggestions/tips wanted for userfriendly/beginner system

Xfce, Gnome, or KDE should be fine for a DE.

As for apps, search the wiki and forums.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Li … plications

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Co … plications

Xyne

Administrator/PM

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,963

Website

Re: suggestions/tips wanted for userfriendly/beginner system

LXDE (DE that uses Openbox) or Xfce should provide comfortable environments without bloat, but I haven't used either for a while (although I do use Openbox itself, which is a great WM).

Music & Movies: VLC is a nice media player with an easy GUI that can play just about any multimedia file that you can throw at it.

E-books: Evince is a good document viewer for PDF and DJVU files.

Internet: Firefox and the Flash plugin

Office Suite: LibreOffice (I have it installed but never use as I prefer LaTeX)

Games: It depends on how old she is, but take a look at brainparty (AUR), puzzles ([community]) and slingshot (AUR) for a few simple games. Frogatto ([community]) might be interesting too.

EDIT: Mirage is a good image viewer. (I couldn't remember the name before but I found it on the wiki page).  I use Feh myself, but it's CLI-only and doesn't support animated GIFs.

Last edited by Xyne (2010-12-24 04:22:50)

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jt512

Member

Registered: 2009-02-19

Posts: 262

Re: suggestions/tips wanted for userfriendly/beginner system

I don't know how "little" your little sister is, but if she's teen or pre-teen she'd probably find compiz-fusion pretty cool.  And it's dead easy to configure.

Mr Green

Forum Fellow

From: U.K.

Registered: 2003-12-21

Posts: 5,896

Website

Re: suggestions/tips wanted for userfriendly/beginner system

Think Gnome might be the way to go, if she has used windows before its less of a shock....

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Mr Green

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,597

Website

Re: suggestions/tips wanted for userfriendly/beginner system

Think Gnome might be the way to go, if she has used windows before its less of a shock....

+1 if the point is to ease the transition from windows to linux, gnome is probably your best bet.
+1 for Compiz-fusion assuming the PC has enough gfx power.

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