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Sneaking Open Source Software Through the Front Door
the_1000th_Monkey writes "LWN daily pointed out this new project today. It aims to be 'a compilation of high quality open source software (OSS) [that] will be made
available as a CD distribution in order to help promote OSS to users of
Windows and MacOS.' There are hopes that this would make it easier to encourage universities, OEMS, and your parents/friends to take advantage of this software and eventually bring them over to a completely free system on their own time. Help for suggestions/discussion is being sought." Newsforge is carrying a slightly more in-depth look at this project. Anyone care to design some attractive, downloadable CD-graphic images?
Take it one step further and put it on shaped cds.
Cygwin is a great way for those bound to the evil empire to have access to some powerful developer tools. For those not familiar with Cygwin, it is the inverse of Wine: a complete Unix environment that runs in Windows. Just about any Linux app can be ported to it, and many already have. - gcc - gdb/Insight - Python - Perl - PostgreSQL - Apache - XFree86 - KDE - Gnome ...plus all the shell lovin' you could ever want.
Jeff
For the vast bulk of "ordinary" users the computer is just a thing they switch on and it "just works".
They use M$ Windows cos that's what it came with, that's what everyone else uses and, in business at least, that's the platform targeted by the mainstream application developers.
They use M$ Office and M$ Outlook and M$ Internet Explorer cos that's what it came with, that's what everyone else uses and they get email attachments and website downloads that presume the existence of this platform.
These people usually have little, if any, computer literacy, They have little, if any, awareness of the "politics" of the open source argument. The overwhelming majority will have no understanding of or use for the source at all.
If you want to change their habits, you won't succeed by selling the operating system. "What's an operating system and why would I care about it?"
If you want to change their habits, you won't succeed by trying to change everything all at once or by selling the virtues of "open source".
If you want to change their habits, you won't succeed by giving them a CD full of strangely named things that they have to "compile" or "make" or learn howto use a plain text editor to configure.
Pick one thing, say OpenOffice, make sure that it is idiot proof with an idiot proof install routine. List ALL its virtues and, particularly, why anyone would want to use it in preference to M$ Office that they're all used to.
That might do it.
Take a look at what was Redmond Linux, now Lycoris. Pretty decent install, except for 1 or 2 things. Nice, simplified setup when you are done. Not for Gnome lovers though.
theres currently a debian project to do just that. have a look at:
http://debian-cygwin.sourceforge.net/
X is just a graphics system, similar to the Windows GDI. It does not, and cannot stand in the way of making apps look good.
/dev/null. You can't just tell people to go for 1 toolkit until you have something that satisfy all of them.
There are only 2 major toolkits: GTK+ and QT.
Even though they both look different (default theme), they look similar enough to not confuse people. I have yet to meet a person who can't see that a GTK+ button is a button, or that a QT button is a button.
I also can't see how the window manager can make things look unpolished. If you like it, stick with it, and *ALL* apps will have the same window borders. If you don't like the current wm, then switch to one you do like.
As for the "brain-damaged font model": it has been "fixed" (Xft), and both GTK+ 2.0 and QT 2.2 supports Xft. GTK+ 1.2 also supports it, using GdkXft.
The reason why we still don't use 1 unified toolkit yet is because many people have different opinions. Person 1 loves the QT look but hates the GTK+ look, while person 2 loves the GTK+ look but hates the QT look. One person likes C++, the other sends his C++ compilers to
In the Windows world, there are different opinions too, except that people are more or less forced to use the standard Windows toolkit (though I have seen quite a lot of apps that don't exactly look like other Windows apps).
Oh yeah, having a way to just "download and select run" to install new apps would be good for linux too ;)
I suppose typing apt-get install $APP_NAME is too much work?Abiword is mentioned as one piece of quality software. I use it, but now only to read new word docs that my MS-Office 95 can't read. Why? Last time I tried to print a 2-page letter with Abiword, it came out on 3 pages. First page and last page were just about normal, except that the middle page contained just 1 line that should have come out on the first page but didn't quite fit. I was using a popular HP printer, so it wasn't oddball equipment. The Abiword site admits that they are small and of limited capabilities vs the bigger vendors of WP software. What they have done is very good for a small team, but why make a poster child out of something that is only a usually adequate second choice? The hassles of one document screwed up like mine just about cancel all the savings of going to a free package for one desktop in a large business.
New Features. Microsoft takes some rough shots from the open source community, but the open source folks are more or less playing catch-up with the feature-set in office. Not only do they need to catch up and match the features, they need to offer some significant improvements to make MS chase them for a change. That way, the software would not just be "Nearly as good as office and free", but "In competition with Office and free".
I will recommend the opposite: fewer features. I've observed a lot of friends, colleagues, and coworkers use office, and two things stand out as being very common. First, people use software very inefficiently. They stay in newbie mode for years. Very rarely do they use advanced features, or employ advanced, more efficient techniques that they didn't learn initially. Second, most features cause more problems than they solve. I've seen more people get trapped by all the extra features and end up with, for example, documents with strange formatting they don't know how to get rid of, than I have seen people make use of even relatively basic features. People might like the idea of having 40 choices of font and 8 different border styles with 20 variations each, but it doesn't really result in a better memo or more informative annual report, and it adds complexity and opportunity for error. Presentation features are generally a problem anyway because most people don't know enough about typesetting to pick the right border style in the first place. Giving them fewer choices reduces the chance that they'll pick something completely inappropriate. Publishers and typesetters do need those tools, but they're a specialty market and they probably wouldn't be caught trying to typeset on Word anyway.
If you took Word Pad and added a handful of features, perhaps tables, automatic pagination, page numbering, and maybe a half dozen other simple features, you would end up with a program that, to most people, would probably be more useful than Word. What would really help people out is to create a set of simple tools that are easy to learn, efficient to use right from the start, and which don't have too many options; the thing should Just Work.
If you tell someone that you have a free word processor that has even more features than Word, they'll probably respond that they already have Word, know how to use it, and don't need any new features. If you told them you had a small, fast word processor that you could teach them to use in an hour, didn't have lots of confusing options and menus, and which made preparing letters, reports, and other common office documents extremely easy,a and by the way it's free, you'd probably get more takers.
There's no such thing as Scotchtoberfest!
How about: -
mozilla -mail
?