cheaper Mandrake upgrade?

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

   Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 12:45:09 -0500
   From: Seth Gordon <sethg at ropine.com>

   > How is your wife when it comes to linux knowledge? If she's like my 
   > wife, she enjoys the games, and she's learning more and more 
   > command-line stuff all the time. Would she be willing to give Debian a 
   > try? I got my wife hooked on Gentoo with the emerge tool, so maybe 
   > she'll like apt?

   She knows the Unix command line and, in her previous life, was a 
   sysadmin for a Linux-based Web server.  However, she has better things 
   to do with her time than optimize her system to be as 31337 as possible. 
     (So do I, but for some reason I occasionally succumb to the urge....)

   I'm tempted to switch my own laptop from Debian stable to Ubuntu, but 
   that's my own toy, and if I end up spending the a whole week with an 
   unusable system while I suss out some obscure issue with X or Wi-Fi 
   configuration, that's my problem.  I don't want to switch the 
   distribution running on *her* machine unless there's a compelling reason 
   to do so.

What Dell laptop, by the way?  I ask because I have an Inspiron 8000
and I know someone else with an 8200 and Linux (various SUSE flavors
in my case) runs very well on it.