On Saturday 25 January 2003 15:04, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:
On Saturday 25 January 2003 13:59, Kelly L. Fulks wrote:
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It is still a rare thing to have a family of complete geeks where both the male and female would be interested in Linux.
My point exactly. It's still seen as geek heaven, and as a mysterious and unfriendly beast to use, compared to Windows.
My point also. I am a male BTW, but my wife uses linux and strongly dislikes the tactics used by MS. She would likely have found Linux without me. But she would not likely have found this list as this list does have more of a geek air about it than what normal average users would migrate to. I wouldn't call Linux mysterious and unfriendly, but I would say that it is less friendly to the latest hardware (which is what the average consumer would be purchasing). This is one of those "which came first, the chicken or the egg" scenarios. Until the hardware folks believe that there are enough Linux users they will not deliver drivers for new hardware and until there are drivers, no one can use the hardware with Linux, and thus Linux appears to be less friendly.
And as to unmarried geek females, maybe they are smart enough to have a life away from the CRT or LCD. That is more than I can say for most single geeks I know whether they like Linux or MS.
I work in a techy office. By far the majority of people have computers at home -- though one or two did say that they get enough of the nasty things at the office and have better things to do in their off-hours.
By asking, I found out that seven people (including me) out of 75 have Linux at home. I'm one of just two who are running without Windows. Not one of the Linux users is female.
Lucky you. There are only 6 in my office of 106 that I have located and this is a techy type office also. There are 3 in IT and 3 programmers. One of those 6 is female (but is a rare one with an entire geek family), she is our W2K system admin and her husband is an HP-UX admin where he works. Our office runs on Windows and there are only two machines that run Linux in the entire organization. I am working on some server side stuff that could possibly take off shortly, but I am not betting on it yet. Of the 6, three of us do use SuSE (all the programming guys), but I am the only one on this list.
Several people use their home computers simply as appliances for e-mail, browsing and maybe schoolwork and to do their bookkeeping and taxes. Not even games. I say "You could do that with Linux." They say: "Why? Windows works."
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The difference between that number and 51% of the population is, ipso-facto, a huge untapped, potential market for SuSE... or for their competitors... whoever gets there first.
In short, I don't think that this list is a good indicator of the users of SuSE Linux (or Linux in general). Lists like this tend to have a higher geek membership than the general population. The other side of it is the "Why" group that when they purchase a machine it comes with MS installed and working and "Why would they want to start over from scratch?" The same would apply in the reverse for them, if the machine came with SuSE (or some other version of Linux), they probably wouldn't change that either.
/kevin
-- Kelly L. Fulks Home Account