No offense taken, Cole. As I mentioned, I've never even touched a Linux gui
yet. This isn't necessarily for some holy reason however. My home box is a
486/33 w/ limited ram & hd space. I keep it gui free mostly to keep
performance up. At work we don't use any windowing system either. Even if
they were available to me, however, I doubt I'd use them much. I'm not
doing anything requiring graphics, and it's just more `fun` this way, imho.
As for your actual argument, I have this thought on it. Most of the general
population and business in America use Win9x (which is why the houses in
Seattle are bigger than ours). Most of these people are not going to come
around just because there's a better system, and they will actually oppose
it if it makes them uncomfortable. My previous job was administrative and
when I started there the department was just beginning a transition from
Macs to Win95. About a year after it was all done, everyone was saying how
much they love the Win boxes for this, that and the other thing. But I'll
tell you, the first couple months after the transition almost everyone in
the department was ready grab pitch forks and torches and rush the I/S
peeps. Windoz was DIFFERENT than Mac. They had to work harder to find
things. Setting up their printers was different. Some were even mad that
the little spinning disk was gone and they had a static hourglass (until I
showed them the animated hour glass).
My long-winded point is that a gui that looks and behaves like Win9x is a
good thing while trying to break ten years of conditioned brain washing. If
you have a couple IS peeps telling their PHBs that there is a fast, secure,
stable OS available for next to nothing (support costs, etc) they may get
some interest. If they add to that argument that it is available with a gui
that will allow their WinDrones to keep working without missing a beat, then
the transition might actually be considered. After that is done, THEN the
IS can start introducing new gui skins and such.
Not really a good example, but remember how to boil a frog. If you put him
in a kettle of boiling water he's going to jump out. If you put him in a
kettle of cool water and slowly bring it to a boil he won't care. Of
course, boiling amphibians is not really what we're after, but it goes to
show that a slow transition with as little perceived change as possible will
be met with little or no resistance.
<disclaimer> These are my personal opinions and not to be construed as the
official position of my employer :-) </disclaimer>
(the writer would like to point out that no frogs were actually harmed in
the making of this email. Thank you.)
Lawrence Tilly
Middleware Support
Liberty Mutual Insurance Group
* [EMAIL PROTECTED]
* 603-245-4246
-----Original Message-----
From: Cole Tuininga [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2000 1:10 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Help me push Linux
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Con: Potentially higher learning curve for users. You can run a
gui that
> will make them feel like they're working in Win9x which would
help, but if
> you use something else then it may take some time to get some
people back up
> to speed. I can't help out much here...all my work and personal
Unix /
> Linux experience is command-line.
I wanted to point out something here that I find interesting.
It seems to me that I keep hearing people say things along the lines
of
"Make it seem like Win<whatever>". Is it me or is this a
counterproductive attitude? Why are we making ourselves sound like
we
are attempting to aspire to something that the majority of us feels
is
inferior?
I understand the argument: Most folks are familiar with the win GUI.
Here's my point though - if we talk about how linux would "make them
feel like they're working in Win9x" I think we'll never accomplish
the
idea of changing the mentality in general.
(BTW - My apologies Lawrence. My intention is not to pick on you.
Rather, you gave me the opportunity to illustrate my point quite
well.)
--
Grabel's Law: 2 is not equal to 3---not even for very large values
of
2.
Cole Tuininga
Network Admin
Code Energy, Inc
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(603) 766-2208
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