On 26 December 2010 11:52, Barry Drake <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, 2010-12-25 at 19:02 +0000, [email protected] wrote: > > Whereas Banshee, which Ubuntu is shipping out of the box with in > > 11.04, can do it by default, me thinks. > > Arrgh! This makes the problem worse! Technically it's wonderful > but .... > > This is the scenario: You have seen the advertising, or maybe you are > being told by a friend that Ubuntu is the best thing since sliced bread. > Naturally you are VERY suspicious. You know Windows, and you know that > it is the only reliable system (Oh, there's the Mac, but that's a bit of > a niche market isn't it?). >
Actually the Mac is growing in popularity. Since the iPhone came out Mac adverts have been everywhere. > > But you do go on the website and take a look around Ubuntu. You do a > site-search for iTunes and what you see is daunting! Right at the top > is an article about Virtual Box .... maybe you've been put off already. > A bit further down is something about Rhythmbox, but it only describes a > music player and says nothing about whether or not you can use your iPod > - which is what you really want to know. Right at the bottom of the > searches you do see that Rhythmbox can work with iPods. Did you get > that far? > > Again, another problem; Linux (and Ubuntu entire) comes from a very technical background. > If you do a search for iPod you do get some far more helpful results, > but I think something on the front page taking you straight to something > like > https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/switching/C/applications-equivalents.html > would solve a lot of problems. That page maybe needs a bit of an > update, but it's really helpful and needs to be very prominent. > Agreed. > > This scenario gets far far worse if you use your favourite search engine > to try something like 'iTunes Ubuntu' on the web. You end up looking at > masses of bewildering mostly out-of-date stuff including a lot of > commandline instructions. You won't ever look at Ubuntu again. Just > what you'd always thought - Linux is strictly for Geeks!!! > > Agreed again. > Let me give a further illustration. My sister is very new to Ubuntu. > Her ..... (this is complicated) Alex is my sister's partner's daughter, > so I'll just call her Alex. Alex is highly computer literate - on > Windows. She and her partner bought my sister a webcam for Christmas. > She wouldn't buy a Microsoft one that was offered because she assumed it > needed Windows. She got a Connexant one because Google told her it > would be compatible. She phoned me - I wasn't at my computer at the > time - how could she test it? I said use the Software Centre to get > Cheese - that will test it. If I'd looked at the 'Software > Centre' (which I've never used) I wouldn't have told her that. She > ended up looking for drivers for the Connexant using Google and found a > bewildering array of stuff about Linux commandline instructions. Many will argue that commandline instructions are the simplest way to do something in Ubuntu; that's true, but it's not really user friendly... > She > has never used the commandline in Windows so this was a foreign language > to her. She left a message on my answering machine, and when I phoned > back she had gone home, and I got my sister, who knew nothing about what > Alex had tried. > > I made things worse by not being at my keyboard again. I quickly talked > my sister through firing up the terminal and doing 'sudo apt-get install > cheese' and then 'cheese'. As you would expect, the webcam worked out > of the box. But of course when Alex came back and my sister told her > what she had done Alex said 'I'd never have been able to do that!' > > > The thing is, Cheese fails to come up as an installable in the Software > Centre (on 10.04) when you search for cheese (why?). We need to do > something about that and maybe lots of other things! I know this seems > trivial - to Alex and my sister it was not! It isn't trivial, this is exactly the kind of problem we need to address; your average programmer/console jocky considers it a minor annoyance at best, but to the average end-user, the computer might as well blow up. > Maybe some kind of webcam > app needs to be pre-installed on Ubuntu by default ... Searching the > Ubuntu website for 'webcam' gives all the instructions ... the very > first page tells you to test using Cheese. It tells you the obvious way > to get Cheese .... commandline!!! Now how good is that for the newbie > coming from Windows? > > I would suggest tar and feathering whomever wrote that. > Another time, I had to get my sister's Canon camera working. F-Spot is > fine - but you need to install gphoto2 .... How would a newbie get that > far? I don't know the answer to questions like that. > Shotwell should deal with it... > > I hope you've had the patience to work this through to the end, but I > think all of us need to be getting into the shoes of the average Windows > user. Danté, you accused me of being geeky the other day - and you were > right! Naturally; I'm never wrong ;) > I'm trying hard to leave my geekiness behind and I'm fast > finding that much of the online documentation is very geeky. > Good! Look at not only documention, but EVERYTHING through the eyes of the simple Windows user; from the interface to descriptions in the software centre. > > Regards, Barry > -- > What do you see when you use your Computer? Same old thing? > ...There IS a Better Way! Ubuntu! > > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-advertising > Post to : [email protected] > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-advertising > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > -- -Danté Ashton Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici Sent from Ubuntu
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