On Tue, 2009-12-15 at 06:23 -0600, Will Stephenson wrote:
On Monday 14 December 2009 23:21:18 N B Day wrote:
The default to KDE 4 is part of the problem right now
Please, give details.
Will
My users are not typical -- all well over 60, probably averaging somewhere over 70, some technophobes, almost all of them believers in some vast conspiracy that will change everything for the worse, possibly before Christmas. These people don't grok "click on the cashew." They don't want to know about plasmoids which sound a lot like the first fruits of the terrible conspiracy. They just want their web browser, their email, to look at the photos of their grandchildren and do their political and religious stuff (don't ask!). I regret to have to report to you that some of them also like Russian and Japanese porn sites. This makes Windows (set up for them by the same grandchildren with a single administrative-powered account) work for a month or so before it becomes a wilderness of pop-ups and malware. I gave one of these guys the 11.2 DVD and told him to accept all the defaults. It did a beautiful job of shrinking Windows and installing openSUSE, but I forgot that he'd get KDE. This was not what either of us wanted, nor anything he was going to cope with. Gnome is less configurable, (that is: harder to reduce to a whimpering state in which nothing can be done). Linux Mint has all the "illegal" stuff and works out of the box without any "one-click" installs that appear to do very scary things and sometimes don't work anyway. It lets them do the web browsing, email, cute picture viewing (and the other stuff) with a minimum of calls to unpaid me. I especially don't want to drive 100s of km through howling deserts to unscrew stuff they've messed up. You have to drive Nevada state route 361 from Middlegate to Gabbs in December to really know loneliness. Don't worry about it. KDE wasn't built for these folks. -- N. B. Day 39° 28.3964' North, 119° 48.6346' West, 1403m up Aurelius up 3 days 6:51, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.16 2.6.31.5-0.1-desktop x86_64 GNU/Linux openSUSE 11.2 (x86_64) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org