On Fri, Mar 09, 2001 at 11:03:06AM +0100, Fr�d�ric Aguiard wrote: > You can't ask a secretary to understand all the complexity of a linux > system. You can't even ask her to use a shell, nor anything like vi or latex > or anything else. This is not HER job. She just needs a tool, a tool > providing her what she needs for her daily work, a tool that does not break > up in her hands while just using basis functions, nor doing something > reasonably foolish.
I think you always have to distinguish between the _administrator_ and the _user_ of a system. Of course here at my personal desktop-system I am both admin and user but this is not the way it has to be. I friend of mine knows nothing about computers and he decided to get one for his studies. I installed Debian an his system, configured it, provided it with a nice gnome-desktop and showed him how to open netscape, play mp3s and write documents with StarOffice. He is happy with it because it works. It's not the users job to install and maintain a system, he wants to use it. There are better people around to install and configure. Just because M$ told the people that computers are easy and everybody can install Windows and use it doesn't mean GNU/Linux has to support this wrong assumption. Phil
