On Fri, 2005-04-29 at 05:05, Mark Crean wrote:
Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Colin Carter wrote: Hmmm this ought to provoke an interesting discussion [snip]
Great post, bang on the money in my experience. Well said!
The answer to a lot of those who dislike MS but dread tangling with Linux is, I think, "Buy a Mac". Apple are on a roll at the moment and it is Mac OS, not Linux, that is hoovering up MS escapees and emerging reinvigorated by the iPod as the natural alternative to the Beast of Redmond. I'm a Linux user of a few years's standing now and use it as my main desktop OS, but alas Linux still seems so much in the grip of developers and gurus that true ease of use and consideration for the poor old end-user are as far away as ever, imho. Mac OS shows it can be done.
Quite a few posters on this thread have been sayin that their elderly mothers make ideal Linux users. Cue plangent violins. Promoting Linux as the ideal OS for the over-70s is not necessarily a plus point, though. Second, in my experience non-technical friends and relatives are much happier with a nice Mac laptop if Windows has been ruled out, not least because the children can come and play around on it with their mp3s and mini-iPods and you can watch dvds without first requiring a broadband internet connection and a degree in science. SuSE's decision to make multimedia an even tougher challenge in 9.3 is an extraordinary step backwards no matter how convincingly the arguments for their decision are put.
You know that Linux has a problem when Eric Raymond hammers at how difficult some things are. What brought this to mind was his rant on CUPS, and how he'd prefer to see something like what Mac does in terms of greying options and hardware detection. I can see why the likes of Linspire and Xandros have an install base.