Replies

I want to thank everyone who has contributed here both now and in the future, be assured that I will look at every single suggestion given here and also do research on my own, so any thoughts given here will not be wasted.

This looks interesting Ark Linux

Ark Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution designed especially for desktop use, primarily for people without prior Linux experience.

Ark Linux is designed to:

...be easy to learn and use
...include many tools and applications

Ark Linux is fully Open Source and Free Software, meaning, basically, you can freely redistribute it in both modified and unmodified form.

Any thoughts?

I had not heard of Ark Linux before (but there are hundreds of distributions I have not heard of.

Looking around, I would be reluctant to recommend it. Like many distributions, it is running on a very small team, so really cannot test or document much of what it has. The SuSE manuals are damn good - a small distro really can't touch them. And SuSE (with Novell's larger financial support as owner) can test across a wider range of systems and choices, leaving you less likely to be the first one to try something. And with a "big" distro, there is a better chance of continuing to receive updates and fixes for the next several years on a timely basis.

The opening blurb and web page graphics for Ark sound nice, but that is a rather thin veneer. See further details at:

www.desktoplinux.com:
Mar. 20, 2005

After three years of development, the Ark Linux team has released its first officially "stable" distribution. Ark Linux 2005.1 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.11 and boasts the "latest desktop technologies," including KDE 3.4, OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 (a preview of 2.0 is also available), glibc 2.3.4, and X.Org 6.8.2.
Beware -- if it took three years to get out the first release, there is considerable risk they will not be able to provide fixes and updates regularly in the future.
On distrowatch.com:
This is a bug fix release of Ark Linux 2005.1: "Ark Linux 2005.1-SR1, a bugfix release of Ark Linux 2005.1, has been released. Mostly due to our lack of test hardware and testers, a couple of bugs worth fixing immediately managed to get into Ark Linux 2005.1 - based on user feedback, we have made a Service Release to address them and add some commonly requested features. ...
This is a quote from the lead guy, recognizing that they lack testing resources.

On guilinux.com:

Posted Monday, March 21 @ 14:29:20 MST

Welcome to this year's 12th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Two "newbie-friendly" distribution releases appeared on the scene last week - one of them a very nicely designed product with superb usability and great, innovative features (Linspire 5.0), while the other is a promising new product, which is let down by a poor installer, obvious bugs and lack of polish (Ark Linux 2005.1).

Note the "obvious bugs and lack of polish" comment.

On www.osnews.com: there is a thorough review of Ark. A couple of quotes from the review:
- Nonetheless, getting on the internet and getting the video configured was trivial to me, but I sense that my mother would already be lost by this point.
- This version is an Alpha version, they make no bones about that. As an alpha version, you should expect certain things not to work. That said, this is a very nice piece of software for a work in progress, and could probably be used by most people as their main desktop environment. The issues I have are less complaints than just marks of an unfinished product.
Another review at www.extremetech.com. They were pleasantly surprised, though it has some problems.