I do want the masses to enjoy free software and can give lots of reasons why. It takes less "support" than you think it does and uniformity is nicely brought in where it belongs by groups like KDE and Gnome. Newbies are happy with those interfaces and so am I, but we can all experiment with others when we want. The difference between distributions is not such a big deal as long as the user can find the same tools on both.
The world of X has gotten much easier. Lots of auto recognition has been built in to X itself and the distros have filled in the gaps. You used to need to manually edit XF86Config and that was hard, but those days are gone. It's been a very long time since I've had X broken and I'm running some nasty SiS, Nvidia, even ISA cards. Outside of gaming, nothing is easier than X now. Even installs are easier for the newbie. Sarge simply asks if you want a GUI and gives you both Gnome and KDE with lots of nice fonts. Mepis does not even ask, it just runs and installs KDE all nice and tweaked. Other distros like, Xandors and Suse and even Red Hat have had good auto configuration for a long time. Now it's close to perfect. I can't say the same thing for closed source competitors where you have to crack a manual, check a website, feed CDs and reboot multiple times to get hardware working. This ease translates into ease of support for people who really know nothing about computers. When someone in my neighborhood has a computer problem, I can fix it with Mepis in 20 minutes and they love it. Desktop environments are also a great example of modular software and the power of free interfaces. You can easily explain the difference by saying, there's this one package that manages your hardware and another that draws things with it. That there are many environments you can use with the same basic drivers is really cool and they enjoy seeing that. Newbies don't have to be exposed to the details of config files to understand modularity. This flexibility also helps to illustrate how free software teams work together. It would all fall apart if people tried to keep secrets, but they don't so it all works. Differences between distros has never been that bad, has it? Some of Red Hat's customizations have been nifty. Their printer control was the first I saw that set up gnome and kde applications at the same time. Now they all do. As the environments continue to mature, everything is getting easier. The differences between KDE and Gnome these days seem easier to deal with than differences other vendors push between versions, like win3.1 win95, win98, ME, 2000 and XP. Debian has also been easy to upgrade and I've taken machines from potato to sid without losing data, sometimes without losing settings and preferences. I moved my wife from Red Hat 7 to Woody and now Sarge without losing any data or too many settings. Both Gnome and KDE have excellent control centers that manipulate everything in a logical way. Once you get there, you have it. Windows, by comparison, is fragmented, and a pain to upgrade. When you get passed all of that, the feature set you get out of KDE and Gnome is vastly superior to what you get from a M$ package. My wife does not really care why X is broken, because it's not. She loves KDE and Mozilla though she uses 1/100th of the applications. It works well and looks good for her. Linux is more than ready for the Desktop and I look forward to people using it. On Thursday 20 January 2005 09:34 am, Brad Bendily wrote: > > X was part of my problem with understanding Linux > and, I assume, confuses a lot of newbies as well. > > The confusion is when someone tries to explain > the difference between a Window manager and a > desktop environment and X. It would be a lot > easier if X could be taken out of the equation. > Let KDE or Gnome or any other desktop run their > own X server. It should be installed or uninstalled > with that app. I think this is a hurdle that > GNU/Linux needs to overcome to compete in the > home desktop market/easy user market. (If it > wants to compete there.) A lot of people say > we don't really want Linux to be used by the > masses. But then a lot of people tell their > friends, parents and grandparents to use Linux > so it's going to be used in that market. > > If so then a few things in the overall OS needs > to have a bit more cohesion. I know there are > supposed to be standards, so why don't people > follow the standards? Especially the big players > should. Suse, Redhat and Mandrake (haven't really > used mandrake in a while so I'm probably wrong > making a generlization about it) have different > ways of completing the same task. Whether it's a GUI > tool or a CLI tool there needs to be cohesion > between distro's. At least from the major players. > Still, there are hundreds of other distro's > where people want to do their own thing, which > is fine, because most newbies don't venture > into "other" distro's. Usually. > > Myself, i've always been happy digging into problems > and figuring things out. It's just the geek in me. > But my wife or my mother don't really care to know why > X is broke or why KDE won't load cause X is broke or > because X can't load drivers or sync rates for the monitor. > > bb >
