On Sunday 16 February 2003 13:38, Curtis Rey wrote:
On Sunday 16 February 2003 8:51 am, Michael Satterwhite wrote: I came late to the computer tech game. It wasn't utill my early 30s that I started using anything on computers. I started with 3.1, just playing some dos games and doing word programs for school. Talk about a pain! The word processing programs were atrocious by todays standard, And trying to install programs was a nightmare in many cases. These were that days in the early 90s when the InstallShield was not around, and hence installing programs in a 3.1 and even W95 was a hit or miss proposition. It wasn't until the widespread use of the "InstallShield" that things got a little better.
Sheesh! Another one, suggesting that the Linux distribution that I buy today is supposed to compete against the user experience offered by the Windows of 1994 and earlier. T'ain't so. All the stuff that Windows developers broke their teeth on in the early-to-mid nineties has been faced and mastered. The moving target has moved on. Today, if you want to sell an OS and its associated tools and GUI stuff to the average office worker, you are competing against XP and the immediately previous version. Installshield HAS been around for the past many years, and has been updated a few times. So, now THAT is the standard. What is the equivalent on the Linux desktop... Synaptic? Last time I tried to use Synaptic for a big upgrade (KDE 3.1), I ended up dropping it and just installing/upgrading all 100-or-so files individually with rpm. The only time I have had InstallShield fail on me in the past seven years, it was a conflict with a virus-checker. So I turned off the virus-checker and InstallShield worked fine. In the intervening years, InstallShield and Norton/McAffee have learned to better co-exist, and even that is no longer an issue. Again, to win the hearts, minds and DOLLARS of the average computer user -- the person who goes to the office every day and sits in front of one to earn their pay (or the purchasing and IT departments that have to supply those people) -- a Linux distro for the desktop must compete against the CURRENT standard from Uncle Bill... and NOT what Uncle Bill was flogging ten or even six years ago. Do you disbelieve that assertion? Why? /kevin