? I'm building a system for a user new to linux and know that Slackware
is
not the preferred distribution for such a user. The various Debian
offspring
seem to be very popular, but it seems to me to be a very large family.
Would
xubuntu be an easy to learn, stable, reliable distribution for this type
of
user? Or is there something else that you'd recommend?
I don't have a true answer for you, but a consideration should be which
distribution you are willing / able to support when questions come up.
With Slack being a decedent of the RPM tree, I would suggest considering
Fedora unless you are also fluent in .deb, apt, and dpkg.
dafr
GUI software managers that look and work like other commonly known app
stores are ubiquitous these days and don't require fluency of Debian
package tools.
Free Geek has chosen to install Mint on all the computers they sell. Mint
has a simple, clean ad intuitive desktop experience. Although I prefer it
to XFCE, I think the benefit for both you and the new user is that they
could go to Free Geek for tech support.
Also, for the sake of clarity and accuracy, Slackware isn't a "descendant
of the RPM tree." Slackware was originally based on the Softlanding Linux
System and was the basis Suse and other distros.
RPM is a package manager. Package managers connect to software package
repositories and provide software dependency resolution. Slackware doesn't
have an official package repository like Debian or Red Hat nor does it come
with a built-in package manager such as apt or yum.
In fact, one can use an apt like package manager called slapt-get or a
NetBSD's pkgsrc which supports Slackware.