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Blah blah blah. Now you're turning the subject to OEM's and what the "dominant" distribution is. Everytime you start to get your ass handed to you over knowledge of facts, you turn the argument to something else.

That's why you nitpick over stupid points such as "what started this issue" and that kind of petty crap, when in fact you've been the one changing the subject every 3 seconds. It diverts attention from the fact that you are pretty clueless about what you're trying to argue.

But, I can't blame you for using such tactics. That's all you've got now that you've demonstrated your lack of understanding.

I'm not discussing the likelihood of what distro Granny's computer shipped from the factory with, because lots of people her age probably don't see the need to even get a new computer. Lots of them are introduced to computing by a hand-me-down from another family member, and in the process getting an old, infected Windows installation that is all but unusable anyway. Either that, or someone KNOWLEDGEABLE reinstalls the OS, just like you could with Mepis or another distro of your choice.

Your silly argument about "dominant" distros and not having a choice is just another red herring thrown out there in a futile attempt to steer the discussion in a direction away from where you are losing.

I'm talking about what will work for her. Synaptic will do just that.

And, if you want to put an OS to "the granny test", let's let Granny go about locking down a brand new XP installation with a firewall, antivirus, and antispyware program, if she even knows what that stuff is. Let her connect to the Internet everyday, then check back in 6 months and see how she did.

Let me answer that...Windows XP has had to be reinstalled on my own mother's computer twice since she's had it because the old installs became unusable-completely clogged with garbage. The last time, she tried to reinstall on her own and messed up the partitions I'd set up for her on her HD.

So, as long as you're bringing up arbitrary tests of whether or not an OS is "easy", let's include that one.

Blah blah blah. Now you're turning the subject to OEM's and what the "dominant" distribution is. Everytime you start to get your ass handed to you over knowledge of facts, you turn the argument to something else.

Whoa, hold a sec there, Sherlock. The point being made by your colleagues is that Grandma should simply choose the distribution that offers her the easiest path to installation. The problem with that argument is that it ignores how people get their computers in the real world. Grandma isn't going to install Linux, herself. Nor is she going to take a vanilla machine over to some tech gearhead at the local strip mall and ask him to install Linux. No, consumers get their OS when they buy their machine. Dell or Gateway or Fill-in-the-blank is not going to give the consumer a choice of which Linux build they want. They standardize on a particular distribution -- and that's what you get. Consequently, the "just choose the distribution that meets Grandma's needs" argument just doesn't have any legs.