The Senior PC with Linux
I have a question I'd like to ask of techno-seniors: Which Linux apps (besides the obvious, those labelled as magnifiers and such) would be superior for Seasoned Citizens? Which distro has the best interface?
Saw this ad (below) in Readers' Digest and it led me to wonder how much better Linux could be for folks who are new to PCs. The price of a rebuilt PC at FreeGeek is appealing to folks who know they're not making any more money and must live on what they've earned in a lifetime of work, and the anti-virus, anti-spyware, updating, and general stability of Ubuntu-Kubuntu-Lubuntu are far superior to Windows, as is the Ubuntu Software Center.
Comments
I found your site on the freegeek list :) I volunteer there too, at times.
Try downloading "eldy", simple interface, runs on anything with java (is a jar) www.eldy.eu
Perfect for 100yo great grandmothers, needs just a minimum configuration.
cheers,
daniel
:)
I envision multiple interface choices for the users, so they can choose what they like. Natch, there must be one close to XP, another close to 9x.
A possible solution could be a distribution with preconfigured different desktop managers, tailored to look like different systems (win9, XP, OSX and the three standard gnome, kde and xfce default configurations), and possibly different shells to emulate the syntax of the OSs they refer to, sounds like big work, but it could be a "silver bullet", who knows.
Some windows manager close to common systems, could be XIGE, Framer, mlvwm, qvwm (this is similar to 98), xpde (this is similar to XP) or some other looking more like gadgets, such as PAWM.
Another way is a minimal overhead system, running the real OSs in VMs, but then it needs very steep hardware to run at lousy speeds (XP and OSX), NT, 98 and MacOS run fast enough in VMs, so do Linux and BSD. But this solution is going to be either very complicate or very expensive, "besides" the licensing issues.
cheers,
daniel
:)