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Trivial Barriers to Personal Linux Use?
saintp asks: "I'm currently multitasking: building a computer for my girlfriend, and also trying to convince her to put Linux on it, so I've been thinking a lot lately about the barriers to adoption of Linux by Normal Everyday People. One that seems to be a major problem is that Windows users are addicted to downloading every piece of crapware that comes down the tubes -- hence the popularity of Gator and subsequent popularity of Ad-Aware. While geeks the world over sigh at this behavior, it makes a lot of people really happy, and they are very chagrined to discover that they can't do this on Linux without some command line mucking about, compilation, etc. What other minor, apparently trivial barriers exist to personal Linux use? Is anything being done to address these, or do many of the major vendors seem to be focusing exclusively on the business market, possibly to the detriment of Linux in the long run?"
Your girlfriend might download alot of software just to try it out, but everyone I know is too scared to.
I know back in the day before I had migrated to Linux, I would install various programs just to play around with them. However, I never installed crapware like Gator, it was usually just stuff from sourceforge that sounded useful.
Maybe you could try giving her a distro that uses RPM, then show her freshmeat and sourceforge, and teach her how to install any programs she might want. That should satisfy her urge to try out new things.
My mom's computer was popping up ads every couple minutes under windows, so last summer I set it up as a dual-boot Debian box. Installed mozilla, gaim, openoffice, & the usual basics (my mom had to have solitaire & mahjohngg), and showed them how to switch back & forth w/ the lilo menu. I also set up gdm w/ the face browser, & set it so they don't have to type in a password (although my 16-yr-old sister opted to have one anyway, 'cause "it's cool!").
Next time I went home, they had me switch the default to Linux so they didn't have to sit there when it booted up. My mom, sister, and stepdad (who can't even figure out how to use the DVD player) have been using it quite happily since then, and aside from having to install flash for my sister (which I was able to do remotely via ssh, another plus), they haven't complained at all about not being able to install shit. They're just damn happy they can read their email (they use mozilla), chat, & web surf w/o being bombarded by popups all the time. They're also quite impressed that they can each have their own web bookmarks and desktop pictures (first thing my sister did was put up a Pirates of the Caribbean background). I don't think they've booted into Windows much at all since then.
Only real problem they've had is that there's currently no way I know of for them to switch users when my sister has xscreensaver locked, short of killing X.
On Windows the majority of well-written installers are single self-extracting .exe's or .msi's.
.dmg if you are lucky (and a .dmg.gz, .sit, or .dmg.sit if you are not). You double-click the .dmg and it mounts a virtual disk. You run the program inside. You try to unmount the virtual disk but it won't let you because it is in use. Then you close the program and unmount the disk. You still have to throw away the original .dmg and the archive (if it came in one).
With OSX you get a
It kind of sucks to have your OSX desktop cluttered with foo.dmg.sit, foo.dmg, and Foo, just for one program.