Slashdot Mirror
Can Ordinary PC Users Ditch Windows for Linux?
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Mark Golden, a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires, tried to switch from Windows to Linux, and found it too complex for his liking. He writes: 'For me, though, using the Linux systems didn't make sense. I often send documents and spreadsheets between my home PC and the one at work, which uses Microsoft Office. And the files are sometimes complex. Meanwhile, for both personal and professional computer use, I want access to all multimedia functions. While solutions may exist to almost every problem I encountered, I was willing to invest only a limited amount of time as a system administrator. Claims by some Linux publishers that anybody can easily switch to Linux from Windows seem totally oversold.'"
Note: it's not my intention to flame.
My problem with what you say here - and similar other arguments - is that for example plenty of hardware exist that do not work out of the box and automagically under Windows, be that hdd/raid controller, nic, cameras/tuners and I could just go on. And while it's true that very often we need to compile and/or load some modules in most linux distros for these to work, at least they will work. Just think, in 2006 tell me an easy way to install a currently available windows version on a system with sata raid controller, no fdd, and then making e.g. nvidia network and audio components work without installing some stuff. While I agree for most people installing these drivers is easier under Windows, that is not because the install procedure is easier or faster, but simply because they are accostumed to doing things this way. For me, loading some modules is a much easier and faster process than making the same hw components work under windows (yes, I use them both very frequently). But based on this, I don't think we can say that Linux is not suitable. It just needs some learning, and being open to do things some other way than usual, which is unbelievably difficult for most non-tech people.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
My work here is dung.
Actually, Linux is ready now. This guy just didn't look for himself. The distros that he looked at all have companies backing them and are the most popular because of this fact. Instead of doing that, he should have invested some time to checking out some others more suited to new users. The distros that come to mind are SimplyMEPIS, PCLinuxOS, and Kanotix. All his Ipod and multimedia problems would have been solved if he'd have chosen these.
I keep telling people that Mandriva, Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSe, and Linspire...while pretty nicely rounded distros...are not a drop in solution for windows. The closest thing Linux has to that are the three distros mentioned in the paragraph above.
Too bad they don't get the deserved attention.
Insert_Ending_Here
Huh? How is it easier?
On Windows: obtain DVD-playing software. Install. Play DVD.
On Linux: obtain DVD-playing software. Install. Play DVD.
Is it hard to obtain such software? Nope. Not on either platform. How, then, is it easier on Windows?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"I should NEVER need to open a console (How often do Windows Users need cmd.exe?)"
/proc /dev and the likes. Hide these."
/, but the user doesn't really have any reason to go poking there. If he wants to investigate, why should we try to artificially try to stop him from doing so?
/lib, /usr/lib, /usr/local/lib, /usr/share/lib/, etc, and my application is almost certainly not going to have its own directory."
My wife uses Linux and she has never opened a console. I occasionally open it, but that's because I like to do "advanced" stuff. If I really wanted to, I could live without ever opening the console.
"The user doesn't care about the neat things they can get from
Well, normally they are hidden. Usually the user just sees his home-folder. Of course there are other interesting (and not so interesting) stuff lcated in
"Coming from Windows all of my libraries are in windows\system32 or in the directory of the actual application. Linux could put them in
And the problem is.....?? Is it "It's different from Windows!": Well, duh!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
I seem to see these every few weeks here on /. This user starts from the assumption that Linux is now easy to install and use for anyone with any hardware. This is, of course, not true.
First of all, his choice of distributions is based on what comes with an old Linux for Dummies book. He could have perhaps looked into (or asked a friend) what modern distributions are popular from a usability and hardware detection standpoint. He likely would have tried (K)Ubuntu or Mandriva.
Second of all, he does have somewhat unusual hardware. I would go so far as to recommend that nobody with a Sony Vaio should take the Linux plunge unless they are prepared to do some manual hardware configuration. My wife had a Vaio which I ran through multiple distros/versions, and always had some issue with the hardware.
Third, he assumes that complete interoperability with Microsoft Office is a condition for success in his test. I have always viewed OpenOffice's MS Office compatability as a convenience, but realize that I will likely never be able to rely on it. Anyone who has to swap complex, particularly formatted documents in MS Office format must use MS Office. This should not, however, be a reason given for Linux non-usability.
All this is to say that if he wants a usability test, then first hand over his laptop to someone like me, I'll get everything working as smoothly as I can, and then we can discuss his issues with usability. If he wants an ease-of-install comparison, then compare how much of his hardware works after he installs Windows XP from scratch vs. some Linux distribution.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
Very true. I've seen the computer novice in action attempting to learn windows for the first time. Windows, while popular, is not in fact as easy to learn as one might make it sound. It's just that through market share, and being the dominant platform for software, that users steer towards MS. And once they've spent hours on end learning the interface, they are too scared to switch to something else, especially if the going notion is that it's going to be harder.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
I have yet to meet an off the shelf, home consumer piece of hardware that would not work with a Windows system.
Hrm, never used an Adaptect SCSI RAID controller on Windows, huh? The more recent controllers aren't supported by Windows and why, for the love of Pete, does Microsoft still insist on requiring a floppy to install drivers? Granted, you won't find SCSI RAID on your typical consumer machine, but you will on higher level ones.
Which of those distributions has a legal DVD player and has plugin support for all the latest Real/QT/Windows Media formats?
Neither of them know the difference, or had a hard time learning it, because they had never used Windows before.
ok now wait two years and then get them to install Windows on their machine. Just give them a Windows install CD and don't help them at all. Tell them to log all problems they have.
Then write an article "Can ordinary PC Users Ditch Linux for Windows"
Just in the interest of neutrality...
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
To move to home user desktops codecs must be included. Until then, it's just to hard for them to use. I have to add {unknown} repositories to Yum to get the required applications, codecs, drivers, or other files so that my desktop functions properly. Either include them in the distro or have the OS/application recognize what is required and link to where it can be downloaded and automatically installed. Non-techie home user isn't going to know that they need to add any software much less what software needs to be added. Then they have to know where to get it and how to install it. That is a mountain of unknowns to someone that is new to Linux. It's easier to just use Windows. If you don't have a codec, Windows media player tells you and ask if you want to try and downloaded it. What a wonderful idea!
my thoughts anyhow...
I wish the writers at Newsforge and such places would take some cues from this article. It is clear, concise, and avoids commonly overused slang and metaphors. What a relief from the usual "Linux switcher" articles.
Mark Golden is a smart guy, and though he doesn't say it, he apparently was comfortable reinstalling Windows on his machine. He did something that is very smart, that most Linux reviewers don't seem to have done. He bought a book. Installing six, count them, six, different Linux distributions shows quite a bit of determination and interest on his part. The interoperability testing he did between office software packages showed some depth as well. Judging from the end of the article, he has been bitten by the "if I just can get this other thing to work under Linux" bug. I would ascertain that he will probably be a Linux hobbyist now.
I appreciate that he didn't go into long paragraphs of complaining about Free Software. It's free, so you are not allowed to complain about it. If you don't like it, use something else. He understands this.
I would say that, as a longtime Unix guy, he has come up with an accurate evaluation of the situation. Common things are easy or at least doable under Unix these days, and most everything else is possible, but only if you are willing to do some work yourself. It is this last catch that is the most frustrating part. As someone who spent a good bit of time this past week breaking C code and tweaking linker knobs, only to fail to make things work, I can readily say that this extra work can often be a bottomless pit. I certainly appreciate the efforts of the wizards who have made the rest easy.
There's a difference between floundering around for a length of time prohibitive to productivity, and floundering around until you can figure out how to launch MS Word. There's the difference. Windows users can get what they are accustomed to out of a Mac - IE, Office, iTunes, and a number of other products. None of that is available on Linux, and a significant number of people are unaware that there are alternatives. Many who do know about alternatives don't realize that those alternatives support Office formats. And frankly, I hate using Open Office because 9 times out of 10, the documents in load in it don't look the same or print the same.
The difference between Windows and Linux isn't just an interface. Granted, the difference between Windows and OS X isn't just an interface either, but the user can be almost completely insulated from the technological and philosophical differences in the OS design. That's just not the case yet with Linux, and the sentiment of the Linux development community seems (to me) to be that the user should never become completely insulated enough. Linux is going to become a victim of its own success. As it is developed to be more widely adopted and to be a serious desktop contender against Windows, it's going to have become more of what we hate about consumer-grade desktop operating systems.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
This article looks only in one direction. Mark Golden has years and years of Microsoft experience, working with Windows is just what he knows. Its just never easy to swap to a whole different operating system.
But what if you take somebody who has been working with Linux non-stop for 10 years, and has never worked on a Windows machine. Place him before a empty computer with a Windows CD. How easy would that go..?
(Anybody willing to test...? Probably not...)
The switch itself might be hard, but it says nothing about how easy working on Windows or Linux is, just a matter of what they've learned to work with.
Link with intresting discussion:
http://sig9.com/node/269/
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
Multimedia is a real key. I am an experienced linux user (been using it since 1993) but Multimedia is a real killer. And Legal is the key word there, I can hack in the players into my system if necessary, but a new user quickly gets frustrated with this. And then to top it all off, once you get something working, it only takes a small change to break things again.
I have been working on capturing video from a site that does a 24x7 stream of video. They use a Microsoft server to stream the video and thus it is in ASF format using mms://. I got it working last week and the capture was working perfectly. Unfortunately, a couple of days after I got it working, something changed on the other end and now it doesn't work again. I am going to have to go in and debug it to make it work again.
A typical Windows user doesn't want to deal with that nor do they have the skills to deal with that. It took me about 20 minutes working with totem (gstreamer), kaffeine (xine), etc to get the video even to play again (after a change on the windows side) and originally it took me about 2 hours to figure out what needed to be loaded to get it to play.
Until we can get all this working out-of-the-box on Linux (in general) and legally distributable with all distributions, we are subject to reviews like this one. Admittedly, you usually have to install a DVD player on your windows machine if you purchase the DVD player as an add-on, but you don't have to look for a decoder that is on a site that says "it is illegal in some countries to install this on your computer due to copyright laws". Most users just expect things to work. The comments in the article concerning MS Office are similar to the Multimedia issues that I have encountered. Most users just expect things to work. They don't expect to have difficulties moving data between systems. They don't expect to have to add software on their own to do something as simple as watch a DVD on their computer. They just want to do the work that they need to do.
I have no sig, does anyone have one to spare?
BINGO!
My daughter had problems using her new mac until I told her to think logically instead of "the windows way".
she was trying to save a picture from a website and trying desperately to find the " save as" function.. after I told her to think logically as to how it shoud work, she clicked on the picture and dragged to the desktop and said, "Oh! Mac works like you think it should!" and has been going full speed ever cince.
Windows users have problems UNLEARNING the adaptation to the OS instead of the OS adapting to the human.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The main problem has changed. The main problem used to be that there simply wasn't good Free Software for what people wanted to do.
Now the main problem is that key elements of what people want to do are blocked by software patents and other legal stuff. People want to play MP3s, but can't because MP3 is not a Free codec. People want to watch DVDs, but can't because any Free Software DVD player program is classified as a "circumvention device" (and is therefore illegal) under US and Australian copyright law.
We've made progress. Software exists for doing everything we want to do, now we just need to get the laws changed so that we can use that software.
OMFG!!!
...at least until you've done it once or twice...then Widnows becomes counter-intuitive.
A Mac user who actually understands how counter-intuitive that is to a *windows* convert!!!
You nailed it. It's easier, but not the first time. We'll happily dig for hours trying to find a setup.exe, or install.exe file....
*sigh*
Thank you. How very refreshing to have someone who can explain the frustration without calling them idiots.
I am a graphic designer and creative director. I have been looking into Ubuntu, Fedora and Novell as possible replacements to Windows for over a year. The problem is two-fold.
...sorry I have to reboot or my system will crash - thanks Bill Gates.
First; software compatibility. No Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark or any of the "mainstream" software necessary to send files to printers/clients.
Secondly, the "holier-than-thow" attitude towards new users. I am a reasonably technical person, but with poor manuals and instructions on the basic usage (i.e. installation of new software, hardware, command-line workability, etc.) and the ever increasing attitude of the so-called experts telling people like me to go back to windows makes for a very difficult migration.
We all want to get a away from the Microsoft dominated world and work in a more open environment, but Linux and it's communities need to be more "user friendly".
I still want to make the switch but at present, I am stuck with the Microsoft world.
-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
It's unclear if you mean that all three programs work with files you've tried, or if at least one of them works for any file you've tried. For the latter, it is disappointing that a linux newbie would have to know to try all three.
Windows != Linux and Linux != Windows
So many switchers want a drop-in replacement. This is not the case. If the expectation is a "free Windows" then they will be sorely disappointed and not give Linux a fair shake.
As a result, a successful Linux switcher needs one of the following:
1. Reason to switch to Linux (the "killer app")
2. Reason why Windows is not viable (security risk, drm, whatever..)
There are lots of areas where using Linux makes sense. However, it *does* require some learning of new methods of accomplishing tasks. Unfortunately, so many new people to Linux attempt to run it like Windows which is generally a bad idea (I find myself doing the reverse which tends to also be a bad idea).
It's not easy to install most software and when you do manage to install the software most still don't show up in the programs list. The average user relies icons not the command line that's where windows has you beat. I'm a computer professional and I like Linux and it's abilities, but there is no way my mom or dad could use it as far as installing new programs goes.
And how many things worked at _all_ under with Windows Live CD?
Sorry but Windows is a lot more intuitive. One of my old teachers went to China to teach kids computers. He sat them at a computer with Windows and Office. With minimal instruction the kids could easily find there way around and start typing a document. Pretty soon they found solitaire and the likes without instruction, sorry but the Start button makes sense especially compared to the OS X world. The dock has its issues such as figuring which applications are open versus which ones are available to open. KDE and Gnome both use symbols for their menus which most people wouldn't recognize as something to click on.
As for the "Windows Way," What exactly did you find backwards? I'm curious... I've been a student of multiple platforms for years so other prospectives are great when I have to recommend a platform for a project.Then there's my GF. She uses my old PowerBook and its a similar story. I gave her some basic instruction on the differences, and she was productive almost immediately. I've introduced her to some more advanced uses of the GUI since then, which she's had no problem taking on board. But she just gets on and uses it, and that was her first experience with a Mac of any kind. The only time I intervene is to make sure she's got the latest security updates on it and to back it up for her. That's it.
If you think there's any Linux distro out there, or any Linux desktop that could deliver the same no brainer user experience, then you're smoking crack my friend. Gnome and KDE have come on leaps and bounds over the years, but they've a way to go yet.
Setting up a powerful webserver, database, and parsing languages
This isn't the task of your average home user. Your average home user wants to be able to stick the DVD in and have it play. Windows makes this a pretty simple task. Linux sometimes gets it right, sometimes not. When there are problems they usually aren't trivial to fix.
I love my sig.
I suspect 90% of programmers don't care about that at all. What they do care about is:
- Cocoa Bindings, which make it trivial to write the controller layer of your MVC app.
- Core Data, which makes it very easy to write the model layer.
- A well designed set of view controls, which mean you rarely have to do much for your view layer.
The amount of an application you can generate before you even start writing code with Cocoa is simply staggering. Oh, and this gives you a nicely layered and abstracted app, not some kind of VB-like mess.I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Here in the EU, software patents are still illegal and so we can redistribute things like MP3 implementations without any problems. If this is not the case in your jurisdiction then I strongly suggest that you contact your elected representatives (assuming you live in a democracy) and inform them that your country will become unable to compete economically with the EU and China in the next few decades unless your IP law is addressed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When people buy a PC, they buy it with Windows ALREADY installed, with the drivers ALREADY installed.
In other words, the users have done ZERO WORK to make Windows usable. (for this it doesn't matter if Windows is the worst, most unstable and prone to viruses OS. The installation "just works" and that's what we're discussing here). What we want to do is insert a CD that says "Installing Linux", ask very simple questions as what country i live in and what keyboard layout we have, and be done with it.
When I installed WinXP on my machine, Windows already had drivers for all its hardware. It didn't require me to install an additional driver. Of course, when I upgraded the motherboard, it was a very different thing (I really can't speak about this, since this was about the same time SP2 came up, and there were other complications).
But for most of the machines i've installed WinXP on, installation went flawlessly. It "just worked". Yes, I had to install the video driver, but it went flawlessly, too.
Now compare with my installation of Ubuntu Hoary, where the internet didn't work (thank God I installed it in a dual boot, otherwise i'd be locked out), the audio drivers didn't work, so I had to boot windows to google for help installing ubuntu with PPPoE modems (which are the grand majority in my country). I'd reboot back to Linux and try, and if it didn't work, I'd have to reboot to Windows again, browse the web... do you have any idea of how exhausting that is for a technical user? A Joe user would be COMPLETELY CLUELESS about it.
And if the OS can't just install right, we're talking about a SHOWSTOPPER. So no, Linux is *NOT* ready yet. However, when Ubuntu Dapper comes out, i'll try again and compare.
Yeah, gotta make sure which version of the start button you're talking about. I read the previous post and thought, "Hmm, start button is pretty intuitive." Then I read yours and remembered that every time I deal with an XP machine I turn on the old school start button.
You hit the nail on the head. Not only is your story true of individual distros, but most of us like to try several distros before settling on one and have to go through this ordeal every damn time! I must have spent 5 hours trying to get my 802.11b NIC working on a distro for my laptop, only to decide that it was too clunky and the zillions of conf files were in nonstandard locations. So I installed another distro and all my previous tinkering was for naught! That's when I reinstalled XP.
The XGL Kororaa distro being taken offline for GPL violation really opened my eyes to this problem. They're being penalized for including drivers with the liveCD! Except for my NIC, that's the one distro that has given me OpenGL support out of the box, and now they're nerfing it! The GPL singlehandedly quashes the hopes of any prospective linux switcher!
1. Right-Click the Start menu
2. Click Properties in the context menu
3. Select the Start Menu tab
4. Select the radio button for Classic Start Menu
5. If you feel so inclined check out the Customize options
6. Once you are done, click the OK button
Next, organize your program folders, so that they make sense to you. Click and drag stuff where you want it. To alphabetize a folder, right click in it and click Sort by Name.
But then, like the author of TFA, I guess you just don't want to spend time at it.
That seems like an awful lot of steps don't you think? Do you consider that intuitive?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Fixed:
He decides he doesn't have time for this so he slicks the drive and re-installs Windows, then spends several hours installing drivers and patches, rebooting, and trying to stop the Windows wireless network support and the software that came with his hardware from fighting with each other.
After managing to disable one or the other of these, and getting most stuff working again, he sticks in a DVD to relax. Up pops an error about a "missing codec". He clicks the button to get it... and is directed to a site asking for his credit card details. (If he's lucky, his PC will have come with an install disc for some DVD playback software he can use instead. If he's not, time to pay up.)
Well, they're of dubious legality.
As Prof. Noveck has pointed out in her Peer to Patent project, there is no prospect, politically, of getting rid of software patents in the US. Patent system administrators and policy makers don't listen to economists any more than Creationists listen to biologists and the situation is made even worse when profound economic policy changes can (and have been) made in the courtroom. In Europe, the chance of restoring sanity to the patent system - and other areas of "intellectual property" - is much higher now than it has been (cf. the Gowers review, the RSA's Adelphi Charter etc.) but it is a hard struggle. When economists can petition economic policy makers and be largely ignored, one can see that the disease is severe indeed: http://www.researchineurope.org/policy/patentdirlt r.htm
My wife uses Linux and she has never opened a console.
My wife uses Linux and she always opens a console. She's not a computer geek; she surfs the web, checks email and imports photos from our digital camera. She confessed to me one day that she hated clinking icons and fishing through menus, and wanted me to show her how to use an xterm window like I did. She finds this much faster.
Interesting... I was under the impression that even Windows XP couldn't play DVDs until you installed something from a CD when you get your DVDROM drive.
Point being that if the computer comes with a DVD drive installed it will have the DVD playing/burning software installed already, or if you buy a drive separately you do get easy to install software on a CD... for Windows. Mac OS X has the software built in, even if it doesn't come with a DVD drive initially. With Linux, even the most user-friendly distros like Ubuntu, it's still unlegal for them to include the CSS decrypting componenents, so even if you do manage to have some kind of DVD player installed you will have to somehow learn that you also need a package like libdvdcss, then you have to somehow find that package which of course can't be hosted on the usual US package servers. I am a knowledgeable Linux user and it still took me hours to get this task accomplished when I tried the latest Ubuntu just a few short months ago. This is 2006, people, not 1996. Between 2000 and 2006 I have seen basically zero improvement in this department with desktop Linux.
So many geeks seem to be totally blind to the fact that wrestling with one's computer for weeks just to get it to do the most common tasks like playing video and audio is NOT FUN for non-geeks. Hence, people like this guy do not, and will not, use Linux as a desktop OS because there are currently bet^H^H^H easier alternatives like Windows and Mac OS X. Of course, Linux is made by geeks who mostly don't understand what the problem is, and consider recompiling the kernel to be no big deal. This is the main thing holding Linux back as a desktop OS. As long as I see web tutorials 20 pages long (all text) with instructions to go to the command line (what the hell is the command line?, the common user asks) to do something simple like setting up audio or multimedia, Linux will never be able to conquer the desktop.
I say this as a former desktop Linux user (Debian/Mandrake/SuSE). Linux just isn't there yet and never will be as long as geeks don't listen to people like this and take their needs utterly seriously. Not wanting to invest dozens of hours configuring one's computer to do the most basic of desktop tasks shouldn't be a subject of derision. It should be a wake-up call, one of about a hundred thousand wake-up calls that have been completely ignored by the Linux community over the last decade.
The short but accurate answer (I know that's not at all popular on /.) is that people will switch when it's time to replace their old system and when they go down to WalMart (or wherever) and they have a choice to buy a system that has Linux preinstalled and it comes with monitor, printer, CD/DVD reader/writer/player, fully multimedia capable, etc. Until that happens, switching to Linux is simply not going to be a common occurance. Period!
Heard any good sigs lately?
First of all I admit that there are things that are a PITA on Linux... it certainly ain't perfect, and could stand growth in many areas. And your point is totally valid, so I don't want to make it seem like I don't get the point of what you're saying... there are some things that could definitely be done easier / better.
Having said that, in my experience multimedia stuff is the exact opposite. On my Gentoo desktop every single file I've tried to play has just magically worked... quicktime, divx, xvid, crazy mjpeg avi weird stuff from my digital camera, asf, wmv, etc.
Now, on Windows on the other hand... I try sending movies or video clips to my friends and they're like "All I get is audio!", or "The video is all skippy and jerky!", or "the audio is out of sync!" And so then they have to go hunt down and install codecs and other stuff... and try playing a dvd in Windows... all you get is stuff pointing you to pay for something you have no idea what it's for.
Where as in Linux, everything just works... no configuring, no setup. With the exception of DVD menus... They generally work, but aren't anywhere as good as what hardware dvd players do.
You're definitely right about the browser plugins though. Again though, it's one of those things where you just have to know the right process... instead of going to adobe's web page and downloading flash, you open your package manager, search for flash, click install... it could definitely use some integration... like how are new users supposed to know that? If you know that one simple thing it takes 5 seconds to install... but if you try to go about the traditional windows way you'll likely bang your head against the wall for days.
I mostly wanted to mention my extremely positive experiences with Linux media players... auto-sound synch fixing, extreme flexibility with subtitles, it's all way way better than what media player does.
But, I also wanted to touch on your point that while some things are different, others are just plain more difficult. True. Linux certainly isn't perfect, and I think _everyone_ will agree that Windows isn't either.
One thing I won't submit to though is that general every day tasks are beyond the reach of the average person.
So if it doesn't work out of the box it's broken?t ml
Seems like all the Windows and Macintosh users want instant gratification with no work. And why not the admins are used to clicking on things and so are the users. No knowledge required.
Sure, computers should be easy to use and for the most part are. But my god maybe a little bit of reading wouldn't kill you.
http://yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialVideo.h
I think that Linux could be easier if you take the control away and simply guide the user through preset options with no alternatives. Put the user in a complete moronic bliss that every user on Macintosh and Windows is accustomed to. And at the end of clicking on things you can say WoW! it works really really well.
You make it out that the linux geeks are just snobbish that newbies don't know as much as them. While there is a bit of truth to that, I think that's mostly perception. Say your an American whose had no overseas experince. Then you go to live in France for a year. If it was just a tourist stay (like you were using linux, but someone else was doing all the work for you) than it wouldn't be a problem, but once you really try to live there, things become a whole lot more complicated.
First, you don't know the language. You try to learn it, but you're not much good, so all you get in reply are the french equivilant of "My English not is good?" followed by suppressed laughter. You go to the market and much of the food you're used to is either missing or looks slightly different. On top of that they all have different names. When you ask around, a few people help, but most of them end up telling you to RTFM.
Also, for some reason, people seem to act weird (of course, they all think it's you who acts weird). They don't establish eye contact when you expect them to, they stand closer to you than your confortable with, they talk at breakneck speeds so you only understand about half of what comes out of their mouth, and some of the things they say seem outright offensive.
So after one month of 'braving it out' you back up and return to the US, were people act 'normal'. Your impression is that French people are snobs, uncharitable, have peculiar like unnatural foods, and a few other distastful things you can't really make out. To the Frech, they would have seen you as another ignorant tourist or outsider.
The reality is that you would both be very wrong. It's a classic case of culture shock, and Windows users entering the Linux world will have to overcome it or return back to Windows. It's not that Windows users are stupid, or that Linux users are snobs; it's just that they don't see eye to eye and mistake differences for definancies.
Come on! A stupid person will lose to a smart person every time!
Let's put a smart tech, even though not a Linux pro, a non pro like myself against that user.
Let's start from the beginning....
Tech Guy: Here, Mr. User, we're going to give you a new operating system and a completely new set of applications with which to perform your duties.
Mr. User: OK! Tell me, what does it do that's new or useful?
Tech Guy: Well, it won't crash like Windows!
Mr. User: Well, but I've been using Windows XP now for about the last three years, and it doesn't crash much if at all. What else does this new OS do?
Tech guy: Well, you're one of the lucky ones then! Seriously though, it will let you do the same thing you do now, it is different though, so it will take a while to adjust.
Mr. User: You mean it doesn't have Office 2003?
Tech Guy: No it doesn't. It has this other application suite that's just as good! Maybe even better!
Mr. User: But it looks very different to me! The user interface will require me to get used to it, which will reduce my productivity for a little while. My existing documents might look different in this new suite. Further, all the advanced features such as macros probably don't carry over to this new app. That's a real bummer because I depend on those features to do my job. Does this suite do anything any better than Office 2003 that would allow me to offset this loss of productivity? In other words, is it giving me anything new to offset the costs of moving to it?
Tech Guy: Well, that's true. We are trying to avoid future fiascoes like when legal upgraded to 2003 as soon as it came out, remember that? Once they edited a document all the office 2000 users, the other 95% of the firm, couldn't open them. So we started upgrading everyone, finished just in time for MS to release the sp1 patch that fixed that. And management thinks there is a lower TCO compared to MS products. We also have had a development team that incorporated all the macros you use into the office suite itself! Because it's open source they could tailor them to the software better. The old macros took too long right? On the new suit the functions take less than half the time!
Mr. User: I remember that Legal thing, whew, you guys were here all night around that time! Less than half time for all my macros? Awesome! But lower TCO? Hey, bud, I work in accounting. We saw the invoices for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the office suite. You're paying for support for this stuff. It's not free.
Tech Guy: True, but it is cheaper. The OS, office suite, and Acrobat we won't be paying for make a big difference. The initial upgrade will be expensive, productivity will be lost to start, but the stability of the platform and the over all lack of downtime will save us tones long run. The projected cost to upgrade to Windows Vista are off the scale! We would have to replace 80% or our hardware! And we won't really have to worry about viruses!
Mr. User: You said the same thing about the Mac's down in the art department, yet they're running anti-virus software, aren't they? And your buddy on the helpdesk told me that last week Apple patched 43 separate flaws in their OS, many of which allowed complete takeover of the Mac much like a Windows virus. Do you honestly think your new OS/app combo is going to be immune to all viruses over time? Besides, you bought anti-virus software for all the Windows PC's several years ago with annual subscriptions to virus patterns. We haven't been hit by a virus in a long, long time because of that. So, explain to me again what the advantages are here?
Tech Guy: You can never be immune to viruses. As more firms switch to Linux there will undoubtedly be more viruses, but the basic nature of Linux make it's more robust. Remember how I had to make you administrator of your machine so you could run that accounting package? About 30% of the machines in our branch have some software that requires that. Those machines are more susceptible t