On Monday 09 May 2005 11:29, you wrote:
> On 08/05/2005, at 15:40, Dan Kaspi wrote:
> > I tried to convince somebody I know to move to Linux at home and
> > at work. I am myself an advocate user of Linux at work and at home.
>
> <snip>
>
> > He argued that migrating to Linux will takes time because you need to
> > learn
> > many new things; The security solution of XP (the XP firewall) and
> > the free antispyware sw are enough for him; And he isn't convinced
> > that it is worth to inverst time in migating to Linux.
> >
> > Are there other Linux benefits which I can pose for moving to Linux ?
> > (except the idea of moving to open and free source).
>
> Frankly, I prefer the "Two step approach"- don't attempt to convince
> users to jump onto linux at once (which takes time, changing habits and
> coping with a learning curve), but rather get the person to use as much
> FLOSS applications as possible.
> That way, a future transition to Linux will be much faster and easier
> (many applications will be the same, many habits won't need to change),
> and many times the user himself will ask about moving to Linux after
> using FLOSS for a while.
> And if he doesn't? Well, this isn't all or nothing. He will still be
> using FLOSS software, and spreading freedom.
>
I fully agree.
My personal experience is getting a job in a web-design house in 1996 when
Perl and UNIX were practically the only sane alternative to having a web
presence. I recall installing Slackware on my home computer by partitions the
hard-drive, getting the hang of the UNIX command line (tcsh - back when I did
not notice much difference with bash, which I now prefer by far), writing my
shell scripts in Perl, and having a blast of a time. But I'm quite the
software and programming savvy.
I think using and developing free software on Windows is a very good idea.
(despite everything that the latest holyway sparked by this KDE developer
sparked). Even the FSF endorses and supports porting free software to MS
Windows - many of the GNU packages have ports either in cygwin or even Win32
native ones.
If you surf the web using Firefox, are used to manipulating images using the
GIMP, use Inkscape for vector graphics, do your office work using
OpenOffice.org, etc. on _Windows_ then making the transition to doing all of
these on _Linux_ with a Windows-like KDE is not such a big hurdle.
Of course, I could not convert my father and my sisters (who are quite
tech-savvy) to use Firefox instead of MSIE. I wish all these clueless or
careless webmasters who design sites that function in MSIE-only to be burn in
Hell for 1000 years for the damage they are doing. But other people are more
successful.
Right now, our WinXP laptop (a Pentium IV 2.4 GHz computer) is doing some
things very slowly, which causes my father and my sister endless
frustrations. The desktop computer (also a P4-2.4) is running Mandriva Linux
2005 LE (after several upgrades including net upgrades from earlier Mandrake
versions (both Community and Official) since we replaced a computer since the
last one caught fire (seriously). It runs like a charm, quite fast in most
everything, almost always responsive or could be made so. It could be made
much faster if I wasn't using KDE.
I hardly reboot it - usually to upgrade kernels, switch to Windows, reboot
after a net upgrade, etc. Works like a charm like in the first days.
Maybe it's because I'm a better Linux admin than my father and my sisters are
WinXP admins. But Linux is more transparent than Windows, and easier to
understand and manage. I know of people much less capable than me whose
systems run perfectly now. So you need to be a very good Windows expert to
keep your Windows system working in perfect order, while a moderately clueful
Linux rookie to make sure your Linux with any half-decent modern distribution
is working perfectly. How's that for usability?
UNIX Rules where Windows Sucks.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/
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