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Introducing Linux to Joe Average
eco2geek writes "The local "alternative newspaper" is running a cover story titled 'The Rebel Alliance: An unlikely army of hacker hippies, geek visionaries, idealistic teachers and corporate giants is making Portland ground zero of a digital revolution.' I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call Portland 'ground zero' of anything, but the article does give the average reader a good introduction to what Linux is, why it's important, and some of the politics surrounding it. (The article also mentions 'the frenetic Slashdot.org.' :-)"
Oh, yes! Right here! The average Joe can handle Linux just as well as he can handle Windows. Teach a little boy Linux from the very first moment he touches a keyboard and he'll be just fine. The sad part is the national government is in bed with Microsoft. Let's hope that little project keeps going.
Frankly I see advertisements of Linux as a good thing, I mean more people should merely just know of Linux.
And the day came when the risk to remain closed in a bud, became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
It should be titled: Introducing Linux to Joe User.
Linux is still a techies OS. Any headway made swinging it into the mainstream is by Linux bending towards what the user wants (Start Menus etc.), not by bending the public at large (i.e. not us) towards Linux.
I've heard so much about the so-called "Rebellion" whenever Linux is mentioned. Sometimes I gotta admit that I dunno what they are talking about.
I use Linux not because I rebel against anyone, it's just that I got tired of the blue-screen-of-death cum you-gimme-more-$$$-and-we-still-won't-fix-the-bug thingy so I switched.
No rebellion, just got tired with you-know-who.
In other words, the "Rebellion" thingy may be overated.
Just my thoughts, anyway.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Whoa - your friend just proved that despite the efforts of IBM, Red Hat and others to defend Linux against the FUD being spread by its competitors, that some of it is still getting through to the enduser. Her comment about Linux being swallowed by the corporations is a frightening one, and proves (at least to me) that we need to be much more proactive when it comes to explaining the philosophy and history of the Linux distribution, so that people don't continue to make this mistake in their thinking.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
(That would make a good slogan...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
News flash: the open source and priprietary software poles are not actually involved in a zero-sum game, for all the mouthpieces in the respective camps love the sound of their own voices.
They serve different audiences, their goals sort in different orders, and they use different methods to achieve the same aim: getting the job done.
Yes, the demagogues can be entertaining or alarming, depending on the moment. Yes, the legal and technical skirmishes can be quite entertaining. Yes, the market power of his Majesty Satanic may eventually be diminished.
But no, the GPL worker's paradise will never be fully realized, and no, the GPL/BSD free-as-in-the-love-of-God software that continues to grow in usefullnes will not just go away, and no, you shan't be free of spam short of killing all your email boxes.
It's, like, a market, or something, dude.
Information Technology is a means to an end. What has occured is that too many view the means as an end unto itself, and expected to jump in and make ridiculous money for minimal effort. Guilty.
The market forces eroding the IT economy are perfectly reasonable, and the pathetic attempts of Some Cretinous Orangutans are unsurpsing. My fear is that the chemotherapy required to purge the legal system of the cancer of monopoly will have catastropic effects on the legal system, which is brittle enough on its own.
What a wandering rant.
a better slogan i think :)
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
I've talked to several non-linux users about why they don't use it, and I'm not talking about the die-hard MS supporters. I'm talking about people that have tried it at one time or another, ran it for a while, and just gave up on it.
Why did they give up instead of switching over to it as their primary desktop? Answers ranged over several salient (if not because they're real, at least because they're perceived) problems.
Die-hard linux people see variety as a good thing. That's true, and it's not true. Variety always has to be put in context, especially if there's a lot of it. Here's an example that even die-hard linux people can understand (assuming you're not chefs too). Let's say I'm making salsa and I send you to the store to pick up some heat. You don't know the first thing about peppers, and it just so happens I live next to a produce mart the likes of which you've never seen before. To choose from are: jalapenos, habaneros, anaheim, chipotle, ancho, pablano, thai, serrano, scotch bonnet, etc. What are you likely to do? That's right--grab the jalapenos, cuz that's what you've heard of before, even though they're probably not the best solution. Some die-hard linux people would argue, hey, if your goal is to help your buddy out, you'll head over to your favorite bookstore and read up, and then head back to the produce mart armed with this newfound knowledge. To these people I say, you are truly a die-hard fan of linux if you didn't get this point.
This is the pressure novices feel at every turn with linux, not just from what OS to install, but what is the install process? (Depends on the distro you've chosen.) How do I install an application? (Ibid.) Which application do I install if I want, say, an email client? (Good luck wading through all of the available options.) Why is it that everytime I head over to my buddy's house, he always knows about all this crap that I've never heard of, and he's got this smokin' setup that I wouldn't have the first clue how to begin assembling? How does one even keep up with all the choice that's available?
All frustrations that don't happen with Windows. You only rarely head over to a buddy's and see him running Mozilla instead of IE and think, hmm, I'd like that and didn't know about it. 99% of the time, you're both running the same media player, picture editor, etc, and if you're not, there's only a small handful of well-known choices to choose from.
The next barrier to installing/using linux on a long-term basis with these folks is what I call the annoyance/showstopper problem. Eventually, usually sooner than later, these people run into something that's either really annoying (they can't get X to run at a desired resolution, for example), or a really serious problem that impedes their ability to move forward (they can't connect to the web). They also don't really know where to look for help, or even how to find out where they should start. I myself ran into a problem years ago with RedHat, I simply wanted to upgrade the asteroids game, but the web of library dependencies that had to also be updated made it hardly worthwhile. Eventually, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work--I finally got to the end of a long dependency chain and discovered that, no matter what I did to upgrade this particular library, it wouldn't go in because it was replacing a basic graphics library that is used by virtual terminals. Because it was always in use, it couldn't be replaced, even in single-user mode. So I know this frustration well...even I was asking, how great can this OS be if a simple game can't easily be upgraded, and then it turns out when you finally commit yourself to an afternoon of hunting, it simply can't be upgraded at all? The bigger issue here for most users is, why should I have to know about library dependencies to upgrade a game, why are virtual terminals relevant to the problem I'm having, and what is a virtual terminal anyway? (The point is, whatever it is, it's totally unrelated to what I was trying to do, and most people find t
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Pretty dumb yes, but at the same time, it's not hard to build an email server with virus filtering built into it. It costs all of about $300 for a server license from most antivirus vendors, and there's free virus scanners available as well.
As much as I think Windows blows goats, if you're putting an email server on the net I think it's the admin's responsability to ensure it doesn't propogate viruses. I put implementing virus scanning on the same level as making sure you're not running an open relay. It wasn't always like this but that's the climate we operate in now.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Blaming the "UNIX mail servers" for spreading MyDoom is like blaming the USPS for spreading anthrax.
I'll put a question to the community...do people think that it might be worth re-naming Debian in some markets (like campus bookstores, for instance) to FreeDebian?
Ogg/Vorbis. Need I say more? Sounds "foreign", where "wav" files sound friendly, and its easy to guess what it stands for. This is like the Linux pronouncing debates 3 or 4 years ago (Lie-nux vs. LEE-nux vs Lin-ux) In the end, it doesn't matter because new users are going to pronounce it how it looks.
One thing that OSS developers can learn from us "evil persons in the marketing world" is that a name DOES matter (Shakespeare be damned) and it is the name that creates the first impression. This is the whole reason Lindows fought for its right to use the name, because it tells what it is by the nature of the name.
As Free Software begins to gain more and more acceptance, I think you will be seeing less obscure names, or other companies will simply take GPL software and rename it to a more reasonable term for public acceptance. This is sure to piss off more than a few authors, but otherwise, the programs won't get acceptance.
PERL: Good name, easy to say, means something.
SPAMASSASSIN: Ditto. The best possible name.
GNOME: Bad name. A little evil dude, I dont want him in my computer, or my underwear drawer.
OUTLOOK: Decent name, positive ring to it.
FRONTPAGE: Good name, means what it is
OFFICE: Good name, obviously.
While I find recursive acronyms amusing, most people find them confusing, or more likely, they don't know what it is, even after you explain it. Its been a few years, but it confused me at first, and probably all of us. We need to be more reasonable if we want people to accept OSS on the desktop.
Part of the problem is many authors don't care if the masses use their programs, and prefer it to be a leet few, which is why IBM et al will just repackage the programs with shiney new names and piss them off. Don't worry, we will be talking about "how wrong" it is to do this in a year or two.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
While it's true that "Linux" is not the answer to every question, neither is *BSD, or Slowlaris, or AIX... etc.
Yes, many people are "Linux Zealots". Many are "Windows Zealots". But, for my money, if not in numbers, certainly in snobbery quotient, *BSD zealots win... :)
Face it, all of them, from AmigaDOS to ZeOS (wasn't there one called that?), there are zealots - that doesn't mean that everyone who uses Linux is a zealot, or incapable of seeing past the end of his/her floppy disk.
Thinking outside my Head
You know, BSD strikes me as far more of a religion than Linux these days.
Which is kind of sad. I'm typing this on a Mac, which is siting right beside a Fedora box.
As far as I'm concerned, if your goal is ease of use and install on a *nix distribution, Mac OS X has it, and some of the Linux distros are getting there.
FreeBSD proper, the last time I touched it, was not even close.
Way back when my brother was using windows 95 I thought it would be fun to try linux. What was cool about was that it was NOT like windows. In fact I had never seen anything so different from Windows. I bought a book with Red Hat 5.1 and it was good.
Now I know that Linux is great for servers as I run my own site on it but even as the desktop becomes more usable, it is boring. It's nothing but a second rate clone of windows. And I doin't use anything second rate so I went back to windows when XP came out.
Make Linux cool again. Make it different and BETTER than windows and you will win me back but as for now why bother?
Thanks
"You do not support the root but the root supports you." - Romans 11:18
But if they said Tesla and Che Guevara no one would have understood the reference.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I don't want to hear any Windows using moron say that I should use Windows.
I think that most Windows users feel the same way about Linux.
if they ever come out with a version of their operating system that can't be used illeagally(sic) I see them going down in FLAMES
.NET to write and compile a 20-line console program using only standard C libraries. Apparently gcc is "too much typing" for them. I say, bring on working copy-protection for all commercial software, please! And yes, I do realize what a pipe dream this is :)
I went back to University a few years ago and am just finishing up once again. The level of software piracy around here absolutely astounds me. As a personal goal, I've spent the past couple of years trying to rid myself entirely of any software that isn't 100% legit (whether it's free "educational" MS product, or OSS, or whatever). The time I sometimes spend trying to get work done is frustrating (need to print something that isn't in a University-approved file format? ie: anything not a Word doc or PDF?), but the personal satisfaction is worth it.
I rant almost daily about professors requiring us to hand in our work with MS-specific file formats, and my fellow classmates yawn and hand me a warezed copy of MS Office. OpenOffice is SO close, but still not 100% (as I learned after initially receiving a 0 on an assignment - thankfully the prof was understanding and let me re-submit it).
I really, REALLY would like to see upcoming versions of Windows and Office be 100% unpiratable. Most students I know aren't going to be shelling out hundreds of dollars to keep up with software when there's a free alternative that does what they need just fine. Give it a few years, and we'd have an entire school generation almost entirely unexposed to Microsoft's software. Other than games (about 99% of which are also pirated, incidentally), I just can't see Joe Student *needing* Windows, to the tune of paying for software licenses for it.
Hell, I've seen students fire up Visual Studio
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.