Windows XP Edges Out KDE in Usability Test

AstroDrabb writes "Linux, once viewed as an operating system that only computer geeks could appreciate, is today a much more user-friendly software that companies, public administrations and consumers can master almost as easily as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP."

Comments

Easy on the walet

[SoCalChris]

It's a lot easier to fork out $40 for a good Linux distro wth KDE in it that spending $200 on an XP system.

Unfair experiment, not scientific.

[rice_burners_suck]

Uh, yeah, we got 100 people, such as old geezers, home boys, veteranos and nomads from the African desert, none of whom have ever seen a computer before. We asked them to install Linux From Scratch on an as-yet-unsupported architecture, and build a complete desktop machine, using assembly language in place of any scripts that they may have to write.

Then, we got Bill Gates and asked him to copy a file using Windows XP.

The 100 people looked at a blank black screen and commented that they have no idea what to do and that Linux can only be appreciated by geeks.

Bill Gates said that Windows XP is great and that he will undoubtedly continue using it instead of switching to Linux.

In other words, 0% of the people who tested Linux liked it. 100% of the people who tested Windows liked it.

This is an exaggeration, of course, but when you put 65 people on Linux and 20 people on Windows, that is automatically unfair.

A more fair experiment would have been to get 100 people. 50 would start on Linux; 50 would start on Windows. After some elapsed time, each group would switch. This evens things out quite a bit.

But then again... What do you expect from a bunch of Germans? I mean, this is where Jagermeister comes from, people!

Windows XP usable?

[kasperd]

Yesterday I was trying to help my brother with some configuration problems on his Windows XP machine. Maybe it is just me that is too used to better things from four years of using Linux. But at least I found it hard to do just some very simple tasks. For example I would like to generate the list of all files in a directory including subdirectories. I had to give up, I couldn't find a function to do that. I'd also like to compare the contents of two directories. Again I had to give up. Finally I realized that perhaps it would be easier to just copy all the stuff to my Linux computer, because at least there I have all the tools I need. However the attempts to copy files bailed out with cryptic error messages. And I wasn't even given the option to continue with copying the rest of the files. And the progress indicator was useless, for more than half an hour it said there was 17 minutes left. While I had the computers connected I also found, that this XP installation by default had a directory shared with read+write permissions for everybody in the world. It is fortunate that this machine is not on the internet yet.