Rise of the 'Consumer' Linux Distribution

Hodge writes "Newsforge has an article discussing the potential for 'Consumer' Linux distro's, i.e. ones aimed at regular users rather than the Geek Elite. It's quite an insightful article, recognising that the vast majority of computer users just want a system that works and don't care about issues of open- or closed-source and don't even want to know about dependencies."

Comments

Buffalo News.

[saintlupus]

There was a similar article in the Buffalo News yesterday.

Odd to see this stuff getting so much mainstream attention. I especially liked how the author of the Buffalo News article went out of his way to point out how much cheaper a computer is without MS Windows.

Free software won't be taking over the world any time soon, but its definitely getting more and more mindshare every year.

--saint

Why do we always come back to this

[Achmed Swaribabu]

I think this shows that the open source community no understand the real problems. Windows has never been much more user friendly than Linux on desktop and less friendly than Mac yet it is the king of the hill. Why is this? It has nothing to do with ease of use or superiour technology, it has to do with marketing and consumer lock-in.

Microsoft use the "repeat until people start to beieve it" marketing method which make people think that windows is some revolutionary concept that make computers easy to use. Then when they get people on the windows they lock them in with proprietary file formats like Word doc.

If microsoft started to market Linux today they could make the peoples think it's easier than anything else aftera a matter of time too, it's all in the marketing. Linux will never ever have a consumer success on desktop until they understand this. But you watch the FreeBSD learn this since they are really OSX. they will be the ones to make consumer success, not Linux.

Half-geek response

[fleener]

As a half-geek, I admit the "ease of use" issue is why I don't use Linux. If I switch, the Microsoft area of my brain will atrophy and I'll won't be able to answer the tech questions and assistance asked of me by my friends and family.

If there was a Simple Linux, I'd switch and bring my friends and family with me, and could very well bring my employer too (because I provide the tech support there). The current distros of Linux simply are not worth that effort.

$99seems to be the new price point...

[cygnusx]

From the article: $99, give or take $20, seems to be the new price point for full-featured, consumer-level Linux distributions.

Incidentally, Windows XP Home's undiscounted price is $99 as well. And it comes with Windows Update for *free*. Add on OpenOffice for Windows and one's all set: very usable OS, lots of apps.

Given that an Office suite is the only chink in it's armor, I'd wouldn't wonder if an office-suite-lite was bundled into the OS soon. Three cheers for competition!

The day I knew Linux was ready

[Joe Tie.]

A couple weeks back my curiosity finally got the better of me, and I burned an iso of the latest knoppix release. It was hard to believe that this was the same operating system that I'd had to strugle so hard to install not so many years back. Time consuming note taking in preperation for the first experience with Linux had been replaced with simply opening the cd door!

One simple step and a fuller desktop than the default windows quickly loaded up. Open office documents, play mp3s, divx or even some games, all within minutes of putting the CD in. I think someone nervous about computers would actually have an easier time with this stystem than any of the windows flavors. Configuration tools were about the only thing really lacking, and KDE seems to be moving to including beefed up tools anyway. When KDE 3.1 comes with knoppix, and with a few font changes, I really think it will have surpassed windows for user friendliness to those with little computer experience. With a a little tool for automated hard drive installs, I'd almost start handing this thing out to people at christmas.