What is the best distro for my business manager?

[Tim Chase]

On 11/23/12 13:39, John J. Boyer wrote:
> I'm getting sick of dealing with Windows. My business manager is 
> agreeable to a switch, using OpenOffice. What is the best Linux distro 
> for someone who does mostly wordprocessing, online shopping, email and 
> accounting?

For the basics, I don't think it really makes much of a difference.
 For servers, I tend to recommend Debian or CentOS for their
stability.  However, for more cutting-edge packages, I'd go with
something kept more up to date.  I'd start by recommending a
Debian-based derivative such as Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, or Mint, since I
find those easiest to maintain (though Fedora-based distros have
also become pretty easy to keep up-to-date--they were just annoying
when I started out with Red Hat about a decade ago).

Most of the distros should have about the same selection of packages
available, so you can do:

- Word Processing/spreadsheets with OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice, or
AbiWord/Gnumeric

- Online shopping: any browser will do, but Firefox, Chrome and
Chromium are all readily available

- Email:  I'm a long-time user of Thunderbird, but KMail, Evolution
(if you need an Exchange back-end), Sylpheed, Pine/Alpine, or mutt
all have their fans

- Accounting: There's KMyMoney, GnuCash, MoneyDance, and a variety
of other packages, as well as on-line options.

-tim