On Mon, Oct 03, 2005 at 07:36:38PM +1000, Amos Shapira wrote: > On 10/3/05, Anatoly Vorobey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It's because Windows is easier for them to learn and use than the > > alternatives. > > That's the exact misconcept the open source community (or actually, almost > any MS rival) has to fight.
I'd say it's the *reality* which the open source community should fight. And it does so rather well, to an extent. > My mom just got her first computer a year ago and until today she has no > clue as to what she sees on the screen, even though she somehow manages > to achieve some very basic goals with it. I bet I could have helped her a lot > more remotely Use VNC to help her remotely. > if she had a Linux on her desktop but everyone else in the > family who were in the business of helping her veto'ed against it (and even > against Firefox and Thunderbird). Firefox on Windows is by now probably more user-friendly than IE on Windows, especially if you take care to install things like Flash and Real Audio plugins before turning it over to the user. > On a second though - were you trolling when you wrote this? :^) No. I use a Linux desktop at home and prefer it to Windows. However, I see no shame in admitting the reality as to which system is still more friendly to users which are totally or almost totally computer-ignorant. You can get a recent Linux distribution, setup a nice desktop environment on it, install and configure Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office. You can *maybe* configure printing to be as painless and seamless as it is on Windows. It will all be rather good, but still not as intuitive to your average computer-illiterate user as Windows. Do you know how computer-illiterate users operate? They put *all* their documents and other files on the desktop until they can no longer get away with it. They click "Yes" on *every* dialog box they encounter without reading it. If they screw up somewhere, they panic and press the reset button. They *will* be misled by any UI button that's located in a less-than-perfectly-obvious location. The environment and the UI that Linux offers are just not good enough for this. No, let me rephrase: they're good enough, but Windows is better. It's both more intuitive in its interface, and more robust to user mistakes (by "robust" here I mean that mistakes can be blundered away from by moving a mouse and clicking some buttons; anything you might need to so much as fire up Control Panel for, let alone the registry editor - forget it; similarly on Linux, anything you need to run a shell for - forget it). And why shouldn't it be? The company poured untold millions into researching UI, stole all the good ideas from Mac and NeXT, hired really good people and paid them really good money. They did it for years. All this effort has got to show somewhere, even if MS corporate culture sucks, as does their software engineering in general. Forget Linux for a second; recall in your mind's eye the interfaces of Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98/NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP. A marked improvement at every step. And yet they had a boatload of money and good monitors in '95; why couldn't they bring out the eye-candy and the easier interface/file search/whatever of Windows XP? Because it took a bunch of years and a bunch of millions to research and refine, that's why. Linux is doing pretty well, actually. Desktops are getting better every day (though by now they're hogging way more RAM and CPU than Windows GUI ever does, go figure). Open Office is great. Firefox is a blast (don't know about Thunderbird, it'd take a damn miracle of a MUA to make me move away from my mutt). I'm just not going to mistake PR efforts for reality, that's all. -- avva "There's nothing simply good, nor ill alone" -- John Donne ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
