[Trisquel-users] Re : Helping new users choose application software

[lcerf]

I disagree. People who do not want to learn how to use a terminal and yet  
want to install and use programs absent from the default install (i.e., more  
than 90% of the population, including, for instance, my parents, my brother  
or my wife) would never use Trisquel (contrary to, for instance, my parents,  
my brother or my wife). They would believe there is no way to install  
additional software but following unsafe the Windows way of downloading  
applications from their sites... what often means, in the GNU/Linux world,  
downloading source codes that they cannot compile. Opening the Synaptic  
package manager, searching in the description of the packages and installing  
them is a breeze. Learning alone how to use 'apt-cache' and 'apt-get' or  
'aptitude' (+ the mere existence of those commands + sudo + the basic use of  
a terminal) is not something most people want to do. And I do not see  
anything wrong with that.

Notice that most computer users spend far more time writing in a word  
processor than administrating their system. By your logic Trisquel should not  
include LibreOffice but rather only ship Emacs (or should it be 'vim'?) and  
LaTeX. It is indeed a far better and faster way to produce perfectly  
formatted texts. But you first need to learn the use of that powerful text  
editor, the LaTeX language, how to go from the .tex files to the PDF, etc.