Well no, not really, Linux is for everyone. :-)

But I'm having a really hard time finding much in the way of genuinely newbie-friendly Linux support sites. By "newbie" I mean people who don't have much experience with computers, and who just want to use them for things like browsing, e-mail, typing etc.

Love him or hate him, the technology columnist Bob Cringely summed up the problem quite well a few years ago: "Hands up everyone who uses Linux who hasn't compiled software?"

Linux has a very unfair reputation for being a "geeks-only" operating system, but the state of the Linux scene seems to just reinforce this.

For example on the official Ubuntu forums' "absolute beginners" section some still seem to regard command lines as something people should use.

I've got nothing against command lines in general, if you can use them that's great, and I'm sure it brings lots of flexibility. But it's ludicrous to expect ordinary users to cope with something like that. It makes it easier for Linux to be unfairly dismissed as a geek's OS that isn't suited to ordinary people's needs.

Does anyone know of Linux and/or Ubuntu sites that are actually aimed at ordinary non-techie people who don't want to learn anything complicated?

Personally, I disagree with your premiss that commandlines are something users should never have to use. 20 years ago pretty much everything was commandline and most people seemed to get along just fine.

It's not that I'm saying command lines are impossible to learn, what I'm saying is that people will take one look at them in Linux and stick with Windows. They won't want to try to learn, because Windows doesn't force them to.

The aim of something like Ubuntu is to win those kind of people over to Linux, and command lines are a serious obstacle in that task.

20 years ago (and I remember because I did it and so did my friends) people got along fine with loading applications from audio cassettes that took up to 10 minutes per app, or even more if it was a multi-load. People were willing to do this because disk drives were prohibitively expensive at the time, often costing more than the computer itself, whereas cassette players were extremely cheap.

Things have moved on though, drives cost nothing, so people won't put up with a loading delay longer than a few seconds. Even though the cassette system was viable in its day it no longer is now, and no one will ever put up with a 10 minute loading time ever again, even those people like me who did once do so.

The same goes for command lines, they were fine in the days of MS-DOS when there wasn't much choice but are no longer okay today (there was the Mac of course but it was tremendously expensive compared to a cheap PC clone).

Well, I think command lines are an essential thing (or at least highly recommend imo) to know when using linux. Anyone who says you don't are ultimatly B.Sing themselves.

As for me, I find the command line a lot faster than interfaces for quite a few tasks. (I'm not going to deny that I aint a command line expert e.g my bash scripting are non-existant). I'd obviously use firefox over links but I find running sudo apt-get install build-essential for example to be a lot faster than finding synaptic and searching for build-essential.*

I mean try and make things easier for yourself but taking the time to learn command lines will easily save time later on doing tasks in linux.

As for compiling stuff; ./configure --prefix=/usr; make install

(ok, i exaggerate a bit but most of the source packages in archives actually do work like that from experience. for everything else, there's "cat INSTALL" :P)

*Ok, I lie, you can type apt://build-essential in the firefox address bar in ubuntu to install applications too.

I don't think that command lines are the real problem. I know people who go bonkers when you say "just right-click the mouse."

While I agree that command lines are worth learning as they do give you quite a bit of flexibility and speed, I've found that most things I want to do on Ubuntu, there is a graphical interface for. Whether or not it's intuitive is one thing, but it's there(why Ubuntu has a different application for adding new repos than installing packages is beyond me, but regardless).

I don't think all distros are user friendly enough for beginners, but some, specifically Ubuntu, definitely are. However, do be prepared to google around, and to try and solve your own problems first(google an error message, etc.). Might I suggest www.linuxquestions.org? That's the forum I used when I was learning, it became invaluable for me. As I progressed, I began to use it less and less(partially because I started to understand what i was doing, and partially because IRC was easier). The resources are out there, it's whether or not you want to look for them

Windows forces them to learn. They just don't want to relearn.

Also command line is still okay. Only because something wasn't possible earlier, it doesn't mean that it's better.

My wife uses Ubuntu on her ThinkPad; she even did the install herself (guided by me, admittedly).

It worked out of the box, and she's never compiled a thing.

Why do you need newbie friendly sites? There's a perfectly good newbie oriented help system in the major distributions which is often presented or easy to reach at first boot.

I'm using openSUSE where every YAST window has a context sensitive help (in the KDE interface you can see it directly in the window) to help you configure your system.

It's not like the information is not there, but i find out that most people just don't want to read, but instead ask in forums...

Canonicals goal is to make money from corporate support, so my guess is that translates into what the priorities for the paid developers are. There isn't as much incentive to make it as slick and 'it just works' as say, OS-X. The same goes for Red Hat and Novell. That changes if the OS is meant to help sell consumer hardware, like Apple and Nokia. So I think that because of the trend of the NIT, MID, EEEPC etc. hardware companies will sponsor development that aims to make Linux more joe-consumer friendly. This thread is kind of deja vu. B.t.w.