I don't know much about the average person, but I have had a lot of
experience of being a below average person.
I use Linux because I am too dumb to figure out Windows, and have
done so since 3.11 days.
The average to below average user does not use an Operating System -
they use a collection of software. The dilemma with Linux is that there
is an incomprehensibly huge amount of software and so when a newbie
sticks in a disc and clicks install everything they are confronted by
forty applications that can look at the photos in their camera, more
email things than they have so far had emails, twenty music playing
things from the subliminal to the next generation for the recording
industry. On most distros I have tried - a week after mastering an
elaborate piece of copylefted free and free software - I can't even find
it and before I have finished looking for it I have got the job done
with something I have never seen before and may never see again. Without
a home folder ??? if Linux apps saved everything in a pocket of itself
----- I shudder to think or I have to think to shudder.
So I got little white eeeee which is great - nothing works to
perfection but if you want to play music it does without trying to ramp
up the old IQ, gets emails, buys and sells shit on trade me, it does not
even invite me to understands its OS, personally I don't even know why I
have to have an OS, I am sure they would run lots better without one in
the back ground demanding to be upgraded and downdated, understood and
all that sort of thing.
What I want and usually get is a distro I can stuff in a machine,
give it a bit of foreplay in the bios cimos department push go and get
up and running without learning anything and keeping my stupidity and
lack of understanding intact. That is the future Go Linux
Nick Rout wrote:
I used to be a gentoo devotee and a kde fanboy. However I switched to
ubuntu (and therefore gnome) because it installed and worked (mostly)
without complete futzing around. the move to gnome was easy. Mostly
people are clicking on a button to start a program, thats the same in
win/kde/gnome, just as long as someone points out the
start|K|applications menu.
Once the program has started, firefox is the same in all environments,
all mail programs look more or less the same (3 panes, message
preview, click a message to read it).
There, we've covered 90% of what people do on their computers - web
browsing and email. And only an idiot couldn't find the web browser
and email client in the average linux install, kde or gnome based.
