Hi all,
1. I pretty much agree with what Gabriel said. We'll have a hard time
to convince long time Windows users to switch over as long as there
are no Linux ports for their favourite applications available. What
I'm frequently faced with when trying to convince Windows users to use
Linux instead are questions like "Is e.g. Adobe's software available
for Linux?" - that's certainly something that's not in our control,
the only way would be to either convince software vendors to port
their applications to our operating system (which will be a hard
challenge) or to provide at least rock solid emulator solutions like
Wine "on steroids".
2. As of ease of installation: From my perspective we made a great
step forward with the 11.0 installer and the live-installer, but
something like WUBI would certainly help to further enhance the
installation experience especially for Windows users. I mean the
standard installation procedure can hardly be further improved.
3. Something very important from my perspective is to significantly
lower the entrance barriers to try out Linux in a sufficient way. I
mean LiveCDs are certainly providing a possibility to try out Linux or
openSUSE in particular, but they are on the one hand damn slow and
what's even more important, they are non-persistent. If we want to
convince Windows users to switch over we need to provide a way to
trying out Linux over a certain period of time and the solution from
my perspective would be... ready-to-use LiveUSB images with persistent
overlay. They are pretty much as fast as an harddrive installation and
are able to provide the user an understanding of what Linux actually
has to offer over a period of several days. They can tinker around,
try out things, save their bookmarks and some files to deal with, they
can try out package management and get an understanding of how easy it
actually is compared to Windows. Most major distributions are
providing LiveUSB solutions nowadays and honestly, our KIWI system is
way more powerful than competitors offerings - we could even provide
ready-to-use raw-images to just "dd" onto a stick, something superior
to what Ubuntu https://launchpad.net/usb-creator or Fedora
https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator has to offer currently and
therefore something to differentiate from competitors.
4. Something additional that come to my mind, I already mentioned that
in former marketing team meetings, would be, to further enhance our
presentation of openSUSE at http://opensuse.org - In that context I
mean visual presentation and explanantion of what openSUSE has to
offer. The screenshots available as of lately are a step into the
right direction from my perspective, but there could be done much
more. Seeing is believing and especially Windows users are still
thinking that Linux is plain shell, don't laugh, that's really
something I hear frequently. We need to find ways (screencast and
presentations of the major parts of the operating system) to present
what openSUSE actually has to offer. In reagard of Windows users we
have, at least from my perspective, the possibility to outline the
really superior parts of the OS compared to their current solution.
One of the best arguments in that context is ease of software
installation and update. I mean I know very few Windows users that are
aware of a package management solution and that's honestly an area
where we are way better than Windows will ever be.
Cheers,
Rupert
2008/10/22 Gabriel Franco
Hi all,
From my experience trying to get more people to use and get to know linux these are the major problems usually I have to deal with:
1) Linux is hard to install: Most people that tried Linux for the first time a few years ago and experienced a bad install, hard to config and no device drivers, are afraid to give linux a try again. These are the easy to convert scenario... Usually with a Live CD or a USB Distro we can convince them that the reality for linux is different now.
2) There's no <put your fav application name here> port to linux: Most people are used to a group of application and most of them doesn't have a linux port (most have a Mac port tough), and when you try to say you can run it on Wine or any other emulator they say "why bothering configuring a linux to run windows applications? Just install windows...". And showing them equivalents is no good. They don't want to work with a similar application that *might* have all the features.
I think that our main focus wouldn't be try to migrate windows users to linux, but rather get the new users to start with linux.
One research here on Brazil showed that people that had a contact with Linux first (on our public schools that uses Linux on their computers) they tend to keep linux on their home desktops, because that's what they are used to use on school.
For the old users that are used to Windows, we would only be able to actually convince them if the major software companies started releasing their software for linux too.
[]'s
Gabriel
2008/10/22 Martin Lasarsch
: On Wednesday 22 October 2008 12:58:41 Stephan Binner wrote:
So any idea what are we missing, how to reach and help Windows users better (this can be also feature requrests for future distro releases like [6])? :-)
Wubi is really nice. I tried it and it's perfect for people who are afraid of the installation. This is something we should have to attract more Windows user.
-- with kind regards,
Martin Lasarsch, Core Services SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5 90409 Nürnberg GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) martin.lasarsch@suse.de - http://www.opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org
-- Rupert Horstkötter, openSUSE Community Email: rhorstkoetter@opensuse.org Phone: +49 6151 7897817 Mobile: +49 176 21820039 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-marketing+help@opensuse.org