> The other problem that faces someone peeping over the hedge from M$ > Windows land is ``where to find the applications''. There aren't so many > magazines reviewing Linux apps as there are reviewing M$ apps. If you
The magazines are paid for by the advertising. They will always concentrate on commercial products as that's where their bread and butter is (actually I normally buy computer magazines purely for the advertising!) It's something that schools seem very poor at putting across, that the world you see in the media is not the real world, but much more of a Truman show world. Shops are in a similar position; if you can legally duplicate your own Linux system, they will not give much shelf space to them, and will only have them in jewel cases, whereas there will be vast boxes to contain the CDs for the commercial products. > walk into your local high street computer store you will probably see a > few boxes of RedHat/Suse/..., and hundreds of boxes of M$ games, finance > apps, music composition, ... This means that if you want these apps you > need to know where to look and you really need an internet connection. Originally the internet bypassed the traditional advertising channels, but is now being swamped with the same sort of advertising, so even on the internet you have to know what you are looking for these days. On the othe hand, Linux is not set up to support dumb end users, so it is maybe better that there is a filter to eliminate those with little initiative. MS products are normally designed for minimal configuration by dumb users, and have a support organisation to cope with those who aren't satisfied with the defaults and can't work out how to configure the products for themselves. Open source software is now getting overwhelmed by end users expecting free consultancy as of right - most people are prepared to help those who have done their own research and failed, but not those who just want to be told how to make things work their way (often without clearly understanding what their way is).
