Well, Linspire has an annoying tendency to charge for software most other Debian based distros offer for free. But there's probably a way to hack around that, if you choose that route (most likely simply altering sources.list). But as I understand them, Xandros and Linspire both aim to make the administration of their boxes as painless as possible. At this point most any of the distros can be molded to fit the Windows UI for things like browsing the net and writing email, although the integrated peripheral support (digital cameras, scanners) isn't like XP's system. Of course, there's no quality substitute for some programs like Office, but if you've been using SuSe for a while, you've probably found out what applications suit your family.
Stay away from ATi cards, their binary drivers tend to be far lower in quality than nVidia's. Wifi cards, should you choose one, are a mixed bag so far. Some, like my D-Link, are supported by a pretty good linux driver. Others have to resort to ndiswrapper, which manages to actually use windows drivers for linux, to a decent standard of success. Regular network cards are almost always supported natively by linux, as are most sound cards. Serial ATA drives are usually supported, although motherboard based RAID for that is hit and miss. Processors, those are generally fully supported, if not more so supported than Windows XP.
I don't know about SCSI, and I've only heard about ATi cards 3rd hand (from a lot of people). The big problem with telling your nephew what brands to avoid is that the PC hardware business has multiple tiers in most cases. One company designs the chips, another one makes them, a final one puts them on a board and markets them. Linux drivers generally support chips, not brands. For example, my wireless card uses the Atheros chipset, and the madwifi driver supports most all atheros based cards. Thing is, you can't always look on the box and figure out the chipset.
Justin Dugger
So here's what I want input on. Are there any brands for the hardware that I should tell my nephew NOT to consider? What are your practical opinions on the distro?