Slashdot Mirror
How To 'Sell' Open Source Software
An anonymous reader writes "Have we missed the boat in terms of selling Linux to the average Joe? The writer of this article at NewsForge certainly thinks so. He points out that most people don't yet get the idea of a free operating system, and that the best way to start winning them over is to provide free software for Windows, such as OpenOffice.org." This sentiment isn't new, but unlike a lot of commentators, the writer in this case is in a good place (as a retailer who's tried selling Linux-equipped systems) to observe the man-on-the-street reaction to Free operating systems as of 2003.
I personally probably won't be buying any open source products off the shelves anytime soon.
I bought a copy of SuSE linux a while back at a store. Paid about $40 or $60, got a few CDs and a couple manuals. I figured it was worth paying for the manuals and not having to download a gig and a half of ISOs... but unfortunately I was wrong.
I got it out of the box, and spent a couple hours installing it on my machine. So far so good, the installer was pretty easy to use and it went pretty fast (took maybe 30 or 40 minutes, I think.)
I booted up and was presented with a somewhat confusing login screen, and here for me is where it all went wrong - right there I had the option to choose multiple 'desktop environments' - it offered me KDE, GNOME, and a couple other options (I believe one of them was X11)... for me, this was confusing. I knew what all the environments were but I didn't particularly care to have to choose one just to use the machine. I started up KDE, since I had heard it was good. KDE started up fast, and I was able to hop in and start doing stuff. Did a little web browsing, and it worked great.
I logged onto IRC using XChat, and eventually one of my friends helped me get my windows drives mounted... unfortunately, it really wasn't pleasant having to figure out how to mount drives. I either didn't see SuSE's gui stuff for doing it, or that was a major oversight. So, SuSE lost a point there.
Then I started listening to some of my music in XMMS. Good so far, it worked great. I minimized it and started trying out the various apps that came loaded with the distro - games, productivity apps, etc. This is, IMO, where this distro (and the others I've played with, to a lesser or greater extent) failed. I was presented with multiple types of programs for almost everything, and there was very little on-screen help or guiding to help me select the best software to use. And to make things worse, some of the applications did things that I didn't expect. Selecting Wine caused my KDE desktop to dissapear and be replaced by Nautilus (the GNOME desktop, or so I'm told), and I couldn't get rid of it, so my session was now almost completely useless. I couldn't figure out how to do anything with nautilus or close it, so I had to shut down.
Then I tried to play one of the games I'd played on windows - Tux Racer. It said I needed hardware acceleration support, and here lies trouble. I fiddled with SuSE's configuration program (YAST) and could not get it to give me hardware acceleration for my Radeon 8500. It claimed to support it but wouldn't enable hardware 3d. So I went to ATI's site and grabbed their drivers. I then proceeded to try and install them. The installer messed with my configuration files, and then told me that I needed the kernel source code so I could recompile my kernel. (!) I didn't have the sources and I didn't know where to get them, so I closed the installer. Then, I opened YAST again to see if I could somehow find a way to get hardware acceleration working... and it wouldn't work. To make a long story short, somehow the combination of ATI's installer and YAST totally corrupted my XFree86 configuration to the point where even the CONSOLE would not display properly onscreen. Goodbye, linux partition.
If the companies behind these distros want to sell Linux to people and have them be satisfied customers (I have no problem supporting developers, but I wasn't happy with what I got for my money.), I think they need to work more on focus.
The average user doesn't need 3 CDs of stuff that he or she will probably never use. Include one good office suite, and make it easy to download the other ones if you ever need them - that's not hard to do! Do the same with other software... I don't think the average user needs to be confronted with multiple desktop environments, editing configuration files, and discerning the meaning of confusing application names. I know some distros are really good at being accessible, but there were only two distros at the store I visit
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
WTF? if you are going to cut and paste a karma whore, at least do it from another article's thread. And spend the time reinserting the indents-- if you are going to plagiarize, do some work at least and call it "value added".
(#6602870)
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
If you want to show your mechanic customers even more value... show him how a single Cheap main computer and 5 surplus NCD explora terminals can cut his hardware bill by 90% all only possible under linux while the same thing is 500% more expensive under windows. (windows terminal services... How can we charge you more today?)
I set up a resturant this way. Total bil with hardware and software was $2900.00 Expensive because he decided to use flat panel touchscreen LCD's at the worker stations. Now when any software get's updated, all stations are magically updated. and he still get's worried because he hasn't had to call me for any trouble for 8 months now (he used to use a windows solution.. they called the vendor for the windows setup almost monthly for dll errors, strange crashes, and needing to reboot stations almost weekly because the printers would quit.)
It's great, he's tickled that he has a spare NCD explora to replace a station if it breaks that doesnt need anything bot to be plugged in and turned on, nor do the stations EVER need to be upgraded.
Only drawback of NCD terminals, they are a tad slower on screen drawing if you use 1024X768 resolutions. but that's about it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.