URGENT! Vista or Ubuntu for my grandpa?

**e79** · July 4th, 2011

16 cans of coca-cola from c. 1996 (in the attic)

And don't open any of these lol...or you won't be able to finish your task

**tekkidd** · July 4th, 2011

Ubuntu would overall be the better choice as in my experince it usually preforms better. However, Ubuntu does suffer from bugs that only techie people can really fix. If you are going to load Ubuntu on his laptop then I would suggest loading 10.04LTS as its the most stable version that is still supported. Otherwise just keep Vista on the box.

**blackbird34** · July 4th, 2011

and learn ssh/vnc with remote desktop viewer in case

**smurphy_it** · July 4th, 2011

If vista was pre-loaded on his system, there should be a shortcut on the start menu somewhere which will point to "Making a backup" of your system. Specifically making "recovery DVDs". I'd suggest you go down that route before making any drastic measures.

If you are going to copy all of it to an external hard drive, you could boot from "clonezilla" and do your backup that way.

Good luck.

PS. Vista is the worst piece of garbage from windows I've dealt with to date. It's even worse than Windows ME. I'd give him a pen and paper before handing him M$ Vista.

**dFlyer** · July 4th, 2011

Good choice with cloning the old system.

**snowpine** · July 4th, 2011

Why "classic gnome?" Gnome 2.x is DEAD; it is no longer supported by the Gnome Foundation and will not be supported by Ubuntu in a couple of years either. If he is using a computer the first time, then why teach him obsolete skills? Better to teach him a desktop environment that will be around for a while, like Unity, KDE, Xfce, etc.

Just my 2 cents.

**blackbird34** · July 4th, 2011

True. He won't be an anti unity troll on the forums either

**apollothethird** · July 4th, 2011

Originally Posted by Datum47

Thanks, everybody!

Given what I have seen so far, this is what I am going to do:

1. Back up his HDD on one of my external drives - he doesn't have much on it, so that part should be easy!

2. Install Ubuntu 11.04 - but keep the default session mode Ubuntu Classic. That's what I use, and it should be relatively easy for him to learn.

3. Hope and pray.

Thanks again!

I believe you made a wise decision to go with the latest. He can grow with it. I understand you've chosen the classic interface, most likely because you're more familiar with it and the new interface takes some getting used to.

I have used it almost exclusive since the day it was released. I have become very used to it. I went back to Ubuntu Classic for a day and it appeared a bit awkward. The new interface does have some advantages. If you would use it exclusive for a substantial amount of time I believe you'd start to discover it also. It's similar to people thinking they have to go back to Windows from time to time because they think there are things they can't do in Linux. That isn't true. The longer they use Linux and look for the Linux way, they'll find they won't really have a need for Windows. They are just going back to something they were used to.

Let him go with the latest, Unity, if his computer can handle it. The Unity task bar was lacking for me as far as selecting individual task. I added docky to resolve this issue and find it to be better than the gnome-panel that I was missing.

There are lots of reasons for Ubuntu being the best way to go.

And as the other user mentioned, its a good idea to backup the image. The manufacturer might void the warranty if you have a problem with the machine if it doesn't have the shipped OS on it.

What I would do is use GParted to shrink the Windows partition and use the other space for Linux and linux-swap.

-- L. James

--
L. D. James
ljames@apollo3.com
www.apollo3.com/~ljames