Why Free Software is a Hard Sell

jeffro writes "Dont know if this has been submitted yet, but the Independent news UK has a rather newbiesh article on the ups and down of Linux software as a free alternative to Windows. "Perhaps Linux shouldn't be regarded as an operating system at all, but more as a sophisticated multi-player game with a large number of enthusiastic players. You can lose yourself in Linux for hours, tweaking here, updating there. It's great fun if you like that sort of thing. But if you need to produce a document, spreadsheet or presentation, you're still likely to be able to do it faster and better by sticking with the Microsoft devil you know.""

Comments

The quote is a valid quote

[irony nazi]

That quote is valid. I try to use Gnumeric at home for everything. At work I use Excel for about 90% of the time.

Excel is very efficient compared to Gnumeric. I've looked up the keyboard shortcuts in gnumeric, but Gnumeric and many of the Linux Office/Productivity offerings have more sharp edges than the MS Office/Corel Office alternatives.

As I said, I still try use them if at all possible, but they have a ways to go before they offer the same amount of productivity as the finely honed Windows alternatives.

The products, however, have come a long ways and after a few more versions, I could see them becoming just as efficient for the power-user as the MS offerings. If they go the way that the Web Browsers have, they shall become *more* efficient than the MS offerings.

Not quite the full story...

[abischof]

Though most of the article is about right, it is a bit misguided at times:

• Some of the default settings make it all too easy to destroy the existing contents of your hard disk. [?!]

But, I also happened to come across this article at The Register that actually provides for a more balanced look at the install process:

• As for other hardware detection, Mandrake was infallible. The drives; the wheel-mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, the video card (nVidia Ge-Force AGP 64 MB), the sound card (SoundBlaster Live), all of it. All I had to do was confirm its choices every now and then.

So, Mandrake 8.1 looks like a good choice for a beginner, and I definitely look forward to Mandrake 9.x :).

Re:They make a good point

[Psiren]

None of what you miss there has anything to do with Linux per se. The hitting Y for yes is mostly an X toolkit issue. ALT-F4 is Window Manager territory. Right click is again Window Manager, but changing resolution is an X thing. None of this has anything at all to do with Linux. Linux doesn't need X, and X doesn't need Linux. They are seperate things.

Re:Key phrase ...

[Danse]

I don't think that's what he was saying. I think it was more along the lines of "Nobody should be able to copyright or patent a user interface because it leads to very bad things in the end."

Re:SES - Re:Hmmm...

[omnirealm]

To anyone trying in the business of selling, the whole concept of trying to sell free software is as much an enigma as trying to conceptualize the "weight" of the color blue.

The color blue has a wavelength of approximately 460nm. This gives us a value of 2pi/460nm, or 1.366e7 inverse meters, in k-space. The momentum of the electromagnetic waves is Planck's constant
(6.626e-34Js) over 2pi multiplied by k, which turns out to be 1.422e-26mkg/s. The waves are travelling around the speed of light (3e8m/s), so the mass is the momentum divided by the velocity, or 4.739e-35kg.

Weight is actually mass times gravity. So, the weight would be 9.8m/seconds^2 times 4.739e-35kg, or 4.644e-34newtons.