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Mom Meets Linux - A Lindows 4.0 Review
JimLynch writes "We just put up the first review of Lindows 4.0, with a twist. I actually gave it to my Mom to see if she could use it. Find out if Lindows 4.0 passed the "Mom Test.""
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Linux: Nerd tested, Mom approved.
I actually gave it to my Mom
I gave it to your mom last night, as well.
my mother can't stay awake for a whole movie, let alone try and learn a "new" OS
his mom is an electrical engineer, so of course she won't be able to understand Lindows...
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
but can I meet your Mom ??
It passes if he hasn't managed to delete some critical files after using it for 2 hours.
Designed by Gurus, built by hackers, crashed by mothers?
Domesticated Pengiuns?
"The OS Your Mother Would Have Made You"
"Linux and Apple Pie"
"Linux, with extra chicken soup"
sorry... the idea of a 'mom test' blew my mind. my mom (at 65) has been using computers for more than 20 years, and i don't think there is any proof that age is a barrier to using linux. how about 'tried lindows on people with a measured IQ of one hundred'.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I can foresee shortly after the first "Mom-Approved Nmap" version hits the market, any web site containing pornography, Barney, or Martha Stewart will find itself under constant attack by a wave of vigilante 'Script Mommiez'.
My mother was getting fed up with BSODs and unexplained freezes and the like, so I suggested that she try Linux and brought over a Knoppix CD. She was pretty impressed with it, but she had a few questions.
"Can I play Counter Strike on Linux?" she said.
"Counter Strike? You play that?" I'd been laboring under the impression that she was a Freecell addict.
"All the time. I love fraggin' n00bs."
"Mom!"
"And what about my pr0n? Can I use Linux to view it?"
"This isn't happening." I felt an icy ball forming in my stomach, a feeling of nausea rising in my throat.
"Don't be ghey. I have needs too, you know." She opened up her browser; the home page was set to goatse.cx! I shut my eyes and put my hands over my ears.
"LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LA LA LA LA!" I felt as if my whole world was crashing down around me.
So yeah, Linux might not be the best choice for my Mom. Also, if you play CS on a low-latency East Coast server, watch out for Mom. She likes to AWP wh0r3.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Did anybody else notice the roll of paper towels next to the computer? And to think, he let his own mother type on that keyboard.
The large roll of paper towels by his monitor in the picture of his mom?
I wonder what those were for...
*cough* one handed surfing *cough*
June 11: I have been observing Mom for quite some time. She has been facinating over the last few months. Today I decided to give her a little test. I placed a computer pre-loaded with Lindows 4.0 in her habitat to see what her reaction will be. I hope this proves to be a valuable experiment.
June 12: After ignoring the computer yesterday, she walked up to it this morning and stared vacantly at the monitor. I hope she figures out how to turn on the machine soon.
June 14: Success! The computer is on, and is currently loading Lindows. Mom seems facinated with the fsck's progress bar. The desktop is now loaded, and... what's this? A flash presentation has popped up and is explaining how to get started with using Lindows. This frightened Mom; she is currently beating the case with a large rock.
June 16: The computer has been replaced, and I took the liberty to disable the welcome presentation this time. It appears Mom is learning mouse movements fast. It took a few hours, but she managed to find and open OpenOffice.org. Her concept of written language is improving; yesterday all she could type is random garbage, but now she's at a level equivalent to an IRC user. Now that I think about it, that's a step backwards.
June 19: Like most mammals, Mom got bored of doing things like typing and playing solitaire. She found the shell and began exploring. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed to see that the first programming language she discovered was Java, and she has also been getting attached to Emacs. How unfortunate.
June 21: Oh great, now she's starting a flame war on debian-devel. Where did I go wrong?
Interesting that this article came up today. Tomorrow my dad's borrowing my laptop to visit some relatives and scan a load of old family photos (he's into that stuff)... thing is, he's used to Windows and the laptop only has Debian on it.
:P
So, I set up SANE, plug the scanner into the firewire port, it all works perfectly. Nice. Set up a minimal, Windows-styled KDE desktop with a nice friendly icon, "Scan and OCR software". All he has to do is click his name on the KDM login screen. Cool. Even he can't get this wrong. I do a few test runs. It's dead simple, even more so than his Windows setup.
So I sit him down in front of the laptop to see if he can manage this. He just about figures out the login. OK. Now we've got the KDE desktop, nothing there but a few icons. Mouse is right over the "Scan and OCR" icon. He sits there for about 20 seconds in silence before saying "which one is it?"
If there's anything getting in the way of linux on the desktop, it sure isn't linux