[Tfug] Ideas for the ultimate "Grandma Millie" distro...

[Jim March]

Folks,

I'm running into a circle of politically active older folks almost entirely
running XP, "geek genes" about on par with a hampster, and they're getting
*hammered* by malware.  We're talking dozens now expanding into hundreds of
these folks just around Tucson.  They use a few basic apps hard and heavy:
EMail, web, MS-officecrud.  Some do simple photostuff.

I just spent about 8 hours doing a total "nuke from orbit" cycle on an XP
laptop, which means talking them into scoring an external USB drive cheap,
do the backup, reformat, reload, reconfigure.  I am NOT going to "rinse
lather repeat" on the next 50+, I'll go completely bugfuck.

Ahem.  Sorry.

Anyways.  Fedora Core 6 ain't newbie-friendly enough.  The initial installer
is ghastly at times, but I can get them past that.  The problem is, once in
a while the cutting-edge updates (as in, I'm now on kernel 2.6.19.xxx...)
break something, like the package installer or the ability to mount USB
drives fr'instance.  In both cases I fixed the issues right quick after
searching Fedoraforums but that's not going to help a true newbie.

Finally, I had an instance where my laptop's built-in touchpad didn't
initialize one fine boot and Xwindows barfed all over the screen with dire
ultra-geeky errors before dumping to a command line.  "Grandma Millie" would
have a heart attack.

Ubuntu Edgy is too unstable.  PCLinuxOS '07 looks like it's got big
potential BUT it's still beta and I haven't pounded on it yet...any other
ideas?  OpenSuse 10.2 had potential too, it was stable at least...but
riddled with odd glitches in the update process.

Where else should I look?

Jim