On April Friday 2005 6:31 am, Mike Dewhirst wrote:
Mark Crean wrote:
Marc Chamberlin wrote:
Colin Carter wrote: Hmmm this ought to provoke an interesting discussion
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Great post, bang on the money in my experience. Well said!
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This is my newbie take on Linux ...
New users will become Linux gurus or fall by the wayside according to darwinian self-selection. I'll probably drop off the perch before I learn enough. Linux sux unless you are prepared to devote considerable brainspace to it. Compared to being "competent" in Windows it's a different place. No comparison.
Except that no ¨ordinary user¨ *IS* ¨competent¨ in windows, if they were, there would be far fewer virii successful, and far far fewer malware,spyware products could get anywhere useful enough to them to keep producing the stuff.. ( Shutting off vbs scripting in their email program ) and stopping html messages before they are sent and received would make the whole rest of the world safer, but most windows users, even tho they are repetedly told to do those things simply won´t or can´t do that.. Alleged ¨competent" users can´t or wont figure out a way to import a document in rtf format into Word anything... and I mean business users who certainly should be able to do that, or go to the company IT folks and find out how to do that.. it isn´t really hard to do, in fact it´s a menu choice... so ...
This discussion should really be about KDE versus Windows not Linux versus Windows. Don't want to offend any Gnome users out there, I haven't even seen Gnome. Anyway, that is the comparison which mattters.
The first thing you need if you are going to take market share from Bill Gates is a strategy which begins with seeing things the way they really are rather than the way you want to see them. That's a reasonable definition of sanity :)
Begin with a name. KDE is a marketing black hole. Gnome is a better gname only if the marketing ploy is gnu-based. But even so, Gnome sucks too. Apple is brilliant but it is taken. Apple is as silly a name as the ads that call it something like cantaloup or grapefruit .. ad ends w/ the guy who will grow up to be Jobs suggesting
Windows the GUI has successfully blurred the distinction between the operating system and the GUI. Linux as the OS should be in the background; the GUI (whatever GUI) should be in the marketing foreground. There should be a boot level 6 where you never see the Linux OS booting up - instead you should see your favourite photograph and a progress bar. There IS a system like that, I am pretty sure most businesses show the
I reckon the time is right to launch a sharply named GUI to compete with Windows. Longhorn will be released too soon - under the direction of the accountants who need to keep the shareholders happy. It will generate heaps of bad press. Windows users are all savvy nowadays. They know what Bill is like. Just give them something they can hang their hopes on. feel free to evangelize, give them a free copy of Xandros, or Linspire or whatever name he has settled on.. show it to them... believe me they do not find either of those two confusing to install .. Xandros will even set up your internet connection w/o asking what it is.. it will ask you if you want to have it shrink the windows partition a little, which is only
The big selling point for the GUI is that it runs on Linux which is brilliantly stable and forever being improved and tested by millions more users than Windows is tested by. It is secure and comes out of the box to reveal a fortress against the vandals who understand Windows so well.
only if you are Bill Gates... he is now panicing over Macintosh since apparently more people would rather pay for proprietery hardware as well as software.. who knew??? And what got them to go over ??? Not the os or the box or the pretty gui ... ipod and the itunes deal... if you could call it that. <heavy sigh> the Woz ¨work on the name for a while ¨ .... KDE could do as well as Windows, or Apple for a Gui name, or they could call it Kady which IS how most pronounce it anyway.. thing booting behind what we usually hit escape to watch.... I suspect they have a company logo or perhaps a department blurb or cheer... fact is , most linux boxes are never turned off... those that are wind up w/ updatedb ( for findutils-locate ) running for what seems like an eternity.. The progress bar on 9.3 is the circle of dots round the geeko´s head... people adjust. AND if they get used to it at work,and I can tell you they do in less than a day... they will want to find out how to use it at home.. that was how windows got it´s home users base.. Guys who needed to work at home, and then when Bill discovered Al -baby´s Internet they wanted to use that from home... there WAS NO major move to home computing, in spite of what you heard in the press until Bill discovered the Internet and said to waiting press ¨ Microsoft has invented TCP/IP ¨ a full year after he told the press that ¨Windows wouldn´t support it because it was unnecessary ¨ polite. And that is about it... you can watch progress bars or pictures in Suse, or Xandros, or Linspire.... it´s simply a matter of which tab you pick to look at.. and W2k as well as XP took over and hour to install.. and I got to choose nothing... well, I would have had I been a ¨competent" user. It´s the same mentality that won´t let you delete umteen megs of extra icons, or worse extra pointers... they are in use or needed for some reason, and dragging them to the trash only gets them re done w/ copies of copies of copies... That is nonsense... true, but most folks don´t have any idea how to find a copy that can be installed easily.. and ( see above) there are many of them free or nearly free w/ all the software most windows folks ever use ... I am not certain but I *think* Xandros even installs lame.. I haven´t installed it lately so I don´t recall... but I do test it every time I get a copy.. usually compliments of LInux-Magazine ( European version, if you got a boxed set of Suse there is an advert for the mag ) It´s well worth the money... whether you are a vexed newbie or an old guard ( which you are sort of... <G>) You just don´t know it. ;-) In fact a lot of problems folks on this list complain about is Suse´s scripting that auto sets up things... now those folks and the CLI guys, that is OLD school... they want really fine grained controll over every single thing.. and if the way they want to do it isn´t what Suse´s staff does, we hear all sorts of bitching... AND lest I be accuse of not explaining a ,perhaps, not understood acronym ( agronym? ;-) ) Command Line Interface (CLI) has no gui at all ... but oh boy can you tweak everything , do IRC , and most everything except perhaps watch movies and maybe even that... I have a group of friends attempting to convert me because ¨KDE is so bloated¨ ... And Bill Gates think´s he is ¨hard core¨ ... I beg to differ. ( Besides, apparently no one has told him (them) that it´s a rather offensive phrase to a lot of people. He simply doesn´t care because he believes he can sell his stuff forever. Microsoft has become what he called IBM, old , slow and stodgy...
Everyone needs at least one server and that gives you another marketing point for the (you do need a name!) GUI is that it interoperates with Linux servers just naturally. Finally, it also interfaces with all the legacy Windows systems out there. What is wrong w/ the name Apache??? kinda cool if you ask moi.. Bottom line for me is that SuSE Linux is a server not a workstation. To be a workstation it needs a snappily named GUI with simple apps and simple documentation aimed at my simple clients. They are the ones you need to convince. Not me. That is what the business guys get.. not so snappy names perhaps, but they don´t know the names of most of their programs anyway... except for IE, and that is what they think the name of that app is.. otherwise it´s the ¨ email¨ and web and oh yeah the media player.. that´s a snappy name, huh? Regards
mike
right back atcha, Mike. j