Ok, long rant coming up: Everytime I see a beginner (aka n00b) ask a ... beginners question here, a large volume of emails that follow harshly criticise the person asking the question for not googling, or not RTFM, RTFA, RTFwhatever. ... Well, ok, not googling is inexcusable, but anyway. What has to be realized by us (the linux community) that most of the users whom we want to 'convert' are not developers. I know hardline windows devs, and they're not going to convert. Sure, there's a small segment of 'upcoming' developers (aka students) who should strictly follow the usenet rules, and who should RTFM, and who should try and familiarize themselves with the unix shell. But for the larger community of 'others', this advice falls on deaf ears. Such an audience simply does not have the time to do all these things; usability is the key issue; things should just work. Anyone on this list who has used a Mac will know what I'm talking about. (Again, I know the whole story about apple having to work with its own hardware, while linux having to work with uncooperative hardware manufacturers who dont give out their product details). But the truth is that most things on a Mac just work ... ok, most things other than their one button mouse. Now, its not that linux (or other free os's in general, eg the BSD's) are not capable of desktop eyecandy. The new opengl based stuff going into x.org is stunning and way beyond what windows will have in years. But everyone has to admit to one fact. Linux systems are just not as usable yet, atleast to my mother and father. As the originator of this thread said, he's gonna want to double click on an rpm 5 years from now, and why shouldn't he? After all, that makes more sense than hunting out something called a package manager in your menu, or going to the terminal and typing rpm -ivh or something. Now, unless we stop bitching about how these people should stop wanting to double click on rpms and instead go out and buy a book on bash programming, linux is never going to start being a threat to windows. It is important to note that the audience is no longer people who go "ooo look! shiny new kernel!". Unless that happens, linux will remain a hobbyist os, and windows will remain the dominant desktop os (i dont think x86 macOS will overtake windows by then :) )
So there. -- Sagar Gokhale -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: ([email protected]) List Information: http://plug.org.in/mailing-list/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.
