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CBC Recommends Linux To Average User
rustalot42684 writes "The CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] has posted an article on its website promoting the use of Ubuntu Linux to the 'average computer user'. 'With the exception of gaming, which is limited, almost all of the average person's basic computing needs are well looked after with this package. I've used the last three versions of Ubuntu on my main portable web-surfing computer for years just to avoid viruses and spyware (as the vast majority of these nasty programs are written for Windows), and I have yet to be disappointed.' The author seems to have made some sweeping generalizations about the development of GNU/Linux, but that aside, will mainstream media coverage help more people switch?"
I disagree.
A awful lot of people have never heard of Linux nor do they know that there is anything other than Windows.
If they start hearing about something which doesnt have the pitfalls of Windows then it will be very interesting.
Also there is the people who think its a nerds only OS (e.g. my mother). When they start seeing in mainstream media they may want to look in to it.
As it stands right now, I dont have a snowball's chance in hell of getting my mum to switch.
It was hard enough getting her to use Firefox.
It will let the average Joe know that something other than Windows and OS/X exists. It's Linux. It's free. And know with Ubuntu average Joe has a shot at getting it to work. Most people don't know that Linux exists, so maybe this won't convince them to make the switch, but it will let them know what Linux is. They can then ask the friendly neighborhood geek a few questions and its all penguins from there.
They will be interested precisely up until the point where they find that they can't play the games that they just bought from their local CompUSA (or PC World, or whatever).
Or until they try plugging in an arbitrary device and find that it doesn't work.
Or until they install one of the rare Linux games and find that the open-source nvidia or ATI drivers are so insanely slow as to make the game unplayable, due to lack of proper 3D acceleration support.
None of this stuff is the Linux community's "fault", per se. In fact, all of it is due to the hostile and pro-monopolist (read: pro-Microsoft) attitude of the software and hardware industries.
That doesn't, however, make it any more tolerable to the average user.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
The CBC has been pretty good about open standards and open source. I, along with over 70k other people, download the 1 hour free podcasts showcasing canada's independant music. These podcasts come in OGG format too! Recently they started a second podcast and a track of the day feature. The french canadian (bap.fm) also has an hour of free music per week mostly showcasing montreal area and french canadian music.
s px
The CBC has been very responsive to complaints, comments, etc. Check it out at http://radio3.cbc.ca/podcasting/podcastplaylist.a
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Since CBC has a budget the same as most of it's viewership yearly income (yea rly), no wonder it reccomends Linux as a viable alternative to Window$.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
There are an awful lot of people out there who only know what they get from the mass media. This article, and others like it, will serve to raise Linux from "Mysterious and Scary" to "Mysterious, but Substantially Less Scary."
/usr/bin/pycentral. This is not something I want to have to explain to my mom, my girlfriend, or my neighbor -- nor do I want to do it for them.
My year of Linux on the desktop was 2002, but I've also had a lot frustrations along the way... including with the upgrade to my Ubuntu upgrade today. I eventually solved it by using vim to comment out lines 543 and 544 (not lines 541 and 542, like it said in the Ubuntu Forums) of
I had a sad realization today, reading an earlier Slashdot post. To beat Windows (much less Mac OS) on the desktop of people who are not early adopters, Linux does not have to be as good -- as I believe it is, on balance. Rather, it has to be better, and conspicuously better.
For some people, this will mean games. For others, multimedia. For still others, CAD, or other occupation-specific apps. But for everyone, it means "When I want to do _______, it better work on the first try."
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
No, they treat their computers like they treat their furnace: it should just work. Like it or not, Mom and Pop expect their computer to work like an appliance: it should do what it's supposed to do, and they shouldn't have to fiddle with it. Maybe it will break once every 5 or 10 years, but other than that it should basically do what I want it to do with a minimum of hassle. Mom and Pop are not tinkerers, they just want shit to work and not require any extra time or effort to operate.b
Microsoft's monopoly has actually made this sort of mindset easier to cater to, since hardware manufacturers and software programmers only need to deal with one operating system. Linux, meanwhile, has continued to lag behind in hardware and software support because of this.
So you're right, they may ask for Linux if they see enough coverage about it. But until Linux can (relatively) painlessly run everything people want to run on it, they will not stick with it, and they will certainly not evangelize it to their friends.
Agreed. IMO, the real power of Ubuntu isn't lowering the bar for average users, but lowering the bar for average IT professionals. I know several who have tried Ubuntu, and while they're not ready to give up their jobs doing Windows administration, Ubuntu is on their radar. However, the real power and draw of Linux is what we geeks can do with it. It's by far the worlds best platform for expressing our creative art of programming, and sharing our work with others. I've stopped worrying about what the rest of the world wants. Linux fills my needs like no other system ever built.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
The CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] has posted an article on its website promoting the use of Ubuntu Linux to the 'average computer user'.
No, David Conabree, a regular reviewer of new high-tech gear and longtime computer user has written a favorable story on Ubuntu that's been published on the cbc.ca website.
I'm a big fan of cbc.ca and most things Canadian (except for the beer, of course), but I doubt they have an official position of open source software, or are otherwise in the habit of recommending a particular Linux distro to their readers.
Most of that stuff simply isn't true. Hardware generally works and the proprietary 3D drivers have perfectly good 3D performance. It's true that Windows software like games doesn't work, but that should be pretty obvious - no one gets confused or complains when their Mac won't run some Windows app, an Ubuntu system is the same.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Since Dapper it's had a live CD based GUI installer, and Feisty is going to bring in easy installation of restricted codecs and graphics card drivers. Trust me, it's ready.
What is this fascination with saying that the problem lies in making Linux friendlier to "the average user"?
Like the article says, Ubuntu covers very well the needs of the "average user". He needs basic tasks done, and Ubuntu does that well. Will he/she have issues along the way? Of course, in the same way that Windows does, which is the very same reason that you need to go to the average user's house every to months to clean up all the crapware that's installed in their machine and install codecs. After all, VLC and Firefox didn't appear on their desktops all by themselves now, did they?
No, the obstacle for Linux now lies in the odious "power user": the person that has developed a relatively good skill set for using Windows but is too stubborn to port it to another operating system, be it Linux, OS X, or whatever. This is, interestingly, a group of users for which many of us have contempt: they can achieve complex tasks but only because or rote learning and memorized steps. They will get that pretty Windows theme or know all the shortcuts to the one application the use frequently, but god forbid they have to use something else and they're lost all over again. They're the people that have command line phobia and yet will have no issues with editing registry files, difference being that the CLI is immensely useful and the Registry is the spawn of Satan.
Addendum: Gamers are not regular users. Regular users don't spend $250+ on a video card to play $60 games. CAD and design app users are not regular users either: they're domain specialists in whatever their application is, and industrial CAD solutions do exist for Linux and Unix. Ask 3d animation shops that used to be IRIX shops what they're using now.
I have to agree with the bit about Average Joe and Ubuntu. While I skim /. daily, I am in no way technically inclined, and I just installed Ubuntu on my XP box. It did take me over a week to get it right (working in 2 hour increments due to my crummy schedule), but we are talking remedial level here. And what I was not able to figure out on my own, the community stepped in to fill the gaps for me.
There are four boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Ok so he says Linux is legit if you are not a gamer. The same pretty much goes for OS X. My question is, is anyone going to be able to even challenge Windows as the computer gaming platform. Personally, I cannot see it happening within a few years. At that time, the next gen consoles will be coming out soon. The next gen consoles probably finally close the gap between console and computer. To me, that means Linux and/or OS X will not be developed for unless some uniformity can be presented in how games are designed for the platforms
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Don't be sad. Look at it from a corporation's point of view.
#1. FREE!!!!!
#1a. No more money spent tracking licenses
#1b. No more time spent tracking licenses
#1c. No more threats of "license compliance audits".
#2. The package system means that upgrades are even easier than on Windows.
#3. Text-based config files means it's EASY to troubleshoot problems. Diff the files between a working box and the problem box.
and so on and so forth.
People will become familiar with Linux when it starts to replace their existing desktops where they work. That's going to take some time (years).
That will get the hardware support which is the REAL issue.
We're seeing this in some companies and governments. It's only going to accelerate over time.
Up to 2003, I think overselling linux was a real problem. These days I think many here are underselling linux - people are not complete idiots. They may not know how computers inside or out - but many just want a decent browser, a word processor, and many, with kids, want something that little Timmy can't mess up - the little kids not being able to install crapware and killing the computer is a big plus.
Is sweeping your computer for malware with several programs more tolerable? How about slowing it down in general with virus detection. How about running all these programs and still having crap slip through?
You can make Windows secure, but default it isn't. Windows is not some magical utopia where everything works - it is work but people don't recognize it as such - instead it becomes an "inevitable" task - like having to defrag the drive is normal chore on Windows given hardly a thought "why am I doing this crap?"
I think many in the Linux community are selling Linux short by problems that were issues 3 or 4 years ago but not so much today. The last few people I switched were people who had malware infested Windows computers almost beyond repair and they wanted Linux for several reasons - I was asked to help them put it on there, they even specified Ubuntu. These are not computer people.
Most of their printers work seamlessly. Their cameras work seamlessly. Their MFCs work for the most part - though there was one that was a pain in the ass to install for no reason (looking at you brother).
And games? Many don't play games in the first place though I keep their Windows partition around just in case. One guy plays flash games on line a lot - no linux barrier there.
Linux is truly good enough for a large segment of the population out there.
My grandmother rips her music in FLAC and Ogg Vorbis you insensitive clod!
And she even ripped her old vinyl collection to digital formats; a feat even I don't know how to do as cleanly as she did.
Besides, she doesn't watch porn (as far as I know), so WMV support is worthless to her (which is the only situation where I've seen WMV used frequently that isn't restricted with DRM).
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I've yet to meet a USB Scanner, External Disk, Digital Camera, or Name-brand Printer that didn't Just Work with Ubuntu. Maybe you've got some obscure edge case device that doesn't work, but they mostly just do.
I plug and unplug network cables all the time. This is probably a feature of Network-Manager - I'm pretty sure it was enabled by default in Edgy. Dunno, but it's definitely enabled by default in Feisty Beta and it's running great on my Edgy laptop and I don't remember any effort installing it.
Wait... which first person shooters run on Linux that you'd expect to work on an embedded 4 generation old Radeon card? Quake III should run fine with the "radeon" drivers.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
See for yourself in this blow by blow install and feature compare. Summary here. A lack of drivers and compatibility were only the start of the author's problems which digital restrictions greatly multiplied.
As usual, the Microsoft story is worse than you would expect.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Or until they try plugging in an arbitrary device and find that it doesn't work
I like the gist of what you're saying, but I think this point is a moot one. Vista has plenty of incompatibilites.
And sadly, it'll wind up being the best selling OS of al time, most likely.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
As a Canadian Linux user and advocate, I have handed out more than my share of Ubuntu and Kubuntu disks. To outline the problem that Linux is having in terms of actual adoption in Canada, the following story says it all.
A few days ago two studies were being discussed on both the CBC and CTV. The first study wanted to learn how many Canadians actually believed global warming was a reality. The numbers were high, and generally speaking believers numbered somewhere around the 70% mark. The second study wanted to learn how many people in Canada where prepared to do anything at all to help prevent global warming from actually happening. If memory serves, it was found that almost nobody ... effectively 0% ... would actually do anything themselves to help reduce the effects of global warming.
So, the studies show Canada to be a nation composed of a great many ardent believers in global warming, but believers who will do nothing themselves to prevent it. If you study our politics you would know that our actions in the last decade or so regarding Kyoto would certainly support that assessment. Simply put, we take great self-righteous pride in our ability to talk the talk, but anyone who pays attention soon learns that in the end we are completely incapable of walking the walk.
... back to Ubuntu ...
I have given out dozens of disks, and each person really, really wanted to try it. Successful installs to date? You guessed it ... Zero. Not one person was willing to spend two seconds learning even the most basic information about the beige box under their desk. In talking to people over the years I have learned that the idea that they would 'change' their computer to be about the same intellectually as asking them the grow an extra limb.
So I keep talking to people, and I show them my nifty looking Linux systems, and I convert the occasional rookie Windows sysadmin who hasn't yet had a chance to be burned by the Redmond flame, but average home users? I am becoming more and more convinced that unless Virii and such get so bad they destroy the Windows platform completely, Linux will only make major double digit inroads into the 'average user' base when hardware comes with some flavour of Linux pre-installed...
...or a whole shitload of non-programmer advocates like myself do it for them free, in our spare time.
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Just curious, would it be correct to call a Windows rookie a Wookie? :-)
In B.C., our fascism is green.
Let me get this straight, you're suggesting Windows is like that? I can understand people not switching to Linux just because they read a glowing review on the CBC site, but I don't understand their not wanting to escape from Windows and from the shit they seem to regard as normal. I think it may be due to some form of learned helplessness syndrome.
Loose lips lose spit.
I have a desktop on a mobile cart with a UPS running Dapper. I unplug its network cable daily, and I haven't rebooted that machine in at least a month. Also I have three computers running Ubuntu (Dapper on the mobile desktop, Edgy on my laptop, and Feisty on this, my main desktop) and Linux compatibility was never a consideration in buying the hardware. In fact I hadn't even heard of Linux when I built the first two. As far as I know the only hardware I own that Ubuntu doesn't support out of the box is my Creative Zen Touch, which I was foolish enough to install the MTP firmware on (and it works just fine after a bit of tweaking).
It is not ready for your mom or your grandmother or your little sister.
My grandmother (both of them) is dead, you insensitive clod. My mom was programming computers before PCs were invented and my little sister is a software consultant.
Yeah, I think it's ready for them.
If you don't know what you're doing, then no OS is easy and you spend your time trying to figure out how to do the simplest things. Once you've done that, it's not difficult. OTOH, if you do know a bit about the OS (whether Windows or 'nix), it's generally a hell of a lot easier to do simple-but-multi-step things in 'nix than in 'doze.
I wouldn't recommend that somebody who knows nothing about any unix and doesn't know anybody who does should try to install it and figure it out on their own (unless they like that kind of thing). But I'd recommend that over someone who knew nothing about Windows and didn't know anyone who did trying to install and learn Windows on their own. That's the kind of thing that would have them running away with initial bad experiences.
-- Alastair
To be completely fair, a default installation of Windows XP will give you a very nice unaccelerated 16 bit colours in one resolution.
Anyway, most people don't use their PCs for games. Hell, I've got a really nice rig with a pretty high end video card, and even I mostly use my PS2 when I want games. It's simply easier not having to deal with Computer-isms. I pop the game in, it works. Windows can't compete.
It's been a long time.
not well enough sadly.
The screens aren't blue enough yet.
and they're still working on getting the security holes wide enough.
They're using their grammar skills there.
In countries where you are allowed a limited amount of download/upload per month/pay, using Linux can be a pain in the neck. Downloading the updates may consume your monthly broad-band account in a day or two. Lebanon is one example.
Many third world countries has download & upload limitaions on their broadband with no choice of a free unlimited option.
Back to the point: I'm a guy comfortable with Windows. One of the lucky few who doesn't have problems with it. But I'm tired of it. And if I let my friends know that Ubuntu is a good thing, they'll believe me.
My girlfriend was a typical "get frustrated first, ask how to fix it later" windows user; with just enough knowledge to make her way about excel, word, and a web browser. Her computer became horribly broken from trojans and viruses and rather than doom myself to an endless succession of repairs I /handed her an ubuntu CD/. I didn't install ubuntu, I gave her the CD and told her that she merely needed to restart her computer with the CD in the drive to install it, being sure to email her personal data to herself before hand.
You know what? She prefers linux. Can use linux. Doesn't become frustrated with Linux.
She scoffs at Windows now.
I don't know this average computer user you speak of, but the one I know well coped just fine with using Ubuntu.
As another user mentioned, the proprietary drivers aren't installed by default in windows either. Under Ubuntu you check a box and have 3D acceleration. I do agree it is silly though, why would anyone want to run WITHOUT 3D acceleration.
My 70 y.o father runs both linux and windows. He has tried to switch to just linux, but he finds that he is missing certain things (in particular, lotus home organizer is holding him back). So he currently runs both. He is not a geek (airforce/airline pilot, rtd), but he is not stupid.
:)
What is interesting is that he has installed Linux on computers of over a dozen other friends of his. Most of these ppl are also retired pilots who were using windows for simple web surfing, and handling of bank and retirement funds. They have no desire to spend their hours managing windows. They do not want the security hassles that MS is. They all love the Linux price and the lack of admin time. Once it is installed, it just works. ALL OF THEM are apparently happy.
What amazes me is the opportunity that companies like the geek squad are missing. Apparently, several of these folks called geek squad and asked to be ported to linux and were told that they did not do that. Nor would they support it. Oh, well. I guess that Airline pilot's money is no good
Now, if IBM (esp lotus), and Intuit would just port their damn software, then you would see a HUGE exodous off windows. A couple of thse ppl have moved off Quicken onto GnuCash and can work it. But they have reported liking Quicken better. Interestingly, only a few of them had used Office and loved using Office. Basically, Linux, GNU Cash, and Open Office can trump from windows 2000 on back. XP appears to be battle except for the fact that MS has created a security nightmare.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Before I start, I'm not a Windows fanboy, I use primarily Linux at home (Kubuntu to be precise).
Quote: "no one gets confused or complains when their Mac won't run some Windows app, an Ubuntu system is the same."
You've obviously never met someone who's used only windows and switches to anything else for the first time. I worked in a school for two years, while there I was repeatedly asked why application XYZ wasn't installed on the mac laptops the school had. They have quite a surprised look on their face when I inform them that without emulation software there is no way to run windows applications on mac's (and then I have to explain what emulation software is and why we didn't have it... but that's a longer story).
Same goes for Linux. Principal hears "school ABC is running their Terminal Services network on Linux and having less problems than we are, why aren't we doing that too?!?!". After getting in contact with the school and finding out exactly what they were doing I found out they didn't even have Terminal Services, and they only had one Linux box. The PDC was Linux with a bunch of fat XP clients. But that's not the point is it? The point is that roughly half of the uneducated users I have every met don't have the slightest clue that there's any more difference between OS X and XP than there is between XP and 2000, so why on earth would they expect that their applications wont all run Linux?
For further proof just look at Linux is NOT Windows. If everyone knows that Windows applications will not run on Linux why did that ever need to be written?
I live in Australia, I suppose it is possible users are better educated elsewhere in the world, but I doubt it.
Yeah, off topic, I know. But seriously, can we consolidate the "Yes" and "No" tag to one simple, "Yes/No". Every time I see one the other is nearby... stalking and waiting to pounce.
Back on topic, Does anyone seriously have any idea on how to get developers on OpenGL/Linux? I'm crying here at so many missed opportunities to get games on Linux! Are we so ingrained to DirectX that nobody is willing to change directions? Would Linux people pay money for games published in Linux or are there those that think everything that touches their OS be henpecked by hundreds of developers in some open source orgy?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Boy, I wish that were true. I've done somewhere between 30 and 60 Linux installs in the past 10 years and I have NEVER had every hardware device work in the PC without tinkering. But Unbuntu has fixed all that? No, it has not. I installed Kunbuntu last week on an AcerPower 1000. It detected the Broadcom wireless, but installed a generic broadxx driver that does not work. Took me about 9 hours to find, deceipher, and install ndiswrapper and Windows drivers -- which at this point work only from the command line.
Nothing against ndiswrapper. It's a wonderous program and can be pretty straightforward once you have it down. But I don't see many non-geeks managing to get it working.
On the positive side, everything else (well, everything I care about anyway) works, and, for the first time ever, I actually got correct test page printed out of CUPS without days of tinkering.
(K)unbuntu looks to be good enough for a non-gamer who doesn't have important unsupported peripherals. Slackware 11 seems to work OK also, but -- predictably -- is taking some configuring. That's OK, I'm willing to tinker quite a bit if it means that I never have to type "sudo" again.
The good news: Desktop Linux has come a long way in the past decade. The bad news: It still has a little way -- not all that far I think -- to go.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Linux's day is coming. Live CDs will be a big help. It's one thing to just pop a CD in and boot without risk and quite another to do a complete install that wipes out your personal data. Live CDs will allow average people to take a look at Linux without risk. Most will like what they see.
Microsoft fans will be quick to point out that gaming isn't there and some will even try the ol' "Plug and Play doesn't work" card.
For gaming it is true that there hasn't been a large enough adoption of Linux for most companies to make the investment. As Linux continues to be adopted I suspect that more companies will feel that there is a market to be tapped.
The "Plug and Play doesn't work" card is a farce. The vast majority of hardware works right out of the box. Most of the time I find it easier to get hardware working with Linux than with Windows. With Windows I always spend a lot of extra time loading drivers that came on separate media (If I can find them). More and more manufacturers are including Linux drivers and as the popularity of Linux grows it just gets better.
So for Windows fans: You may not like Linux but Linux's time is coming. So if you don't want to join the party fine but stop trying to throw a turd in our punchbowl.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
And even there it's pretty warm! Look to Winnipeg, then look up -- Waaaaay up, and you'll see me, praying on my pillow every night for global warming to bring summer in faster.
Anyway, I'm done with the whole Global Warming thing on my end. The whole phenomenon is turning into a way for would-be ascetics to peddle misery when there are solutions which don't require living in a cave. For example, both the Pulp and Paper industry and the lumber industry are moving to burning the waste wood from their processes, or gassification it to create natural gas, both of which are carbon neutral since trees grow back. With a carefully managed forestry program and an efficient power boiler, these massive industries can not just achieve energy independence from the grid, but can start selling relatively clean, carbon neutral, sustainable energy to the grid. The answer to global warming is the same answer that turned cars from 3mpg guzzlers to vehicles like the 50+mpg Toyota Prius(though I'm not sure that the batteries used actually let the life of the car be any less polluting).
More science, better environmental regulations to entice polluters to put the capital into less polluting equipment that also happens to be more efficient, and overall just speeding up the implementation of newer, cleaner technologies is what'll work. Asking people to become hermits, to give up their nice cars, their nice houses, to go wander the desert for 40 years, it's just a bunch of self-righteous pricks who think that ascetic solutions are the only solution.
It's been a long time.
The article does a decent job at introducing Linux and letting unaware people know that there is an alternative. However, it seemed to me that Linux was painted a little too much like a "hobby OS", light on functionality and not as powerful as commercial OS's. The whole "Linus Torvalds and a growing group of volunteers eventually did the highly improbable..." may show Linux as someone's project and nothing more serious, specially for people who are not aware of how Open/Free Software works. I would have liked to see reference to companies such as Google, IBM, HP, etc investing in Linux in terms of using it for their own purposes as well as pitching-in with the development. It may have put things into perspective and show how serious Linux really is in the technology world today.
[alk]
Check Epson brand scanners. They seem to change their interface more slowly than the other manufacturers and therefore release a lot of scanners that are immediately supported with no extra work by the Sane developers.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Pinko commies.
3/5 of my family are female. We use Linux (Ubuntu 6.10 for them, 7.04 for me).
3/5 of the computers in my family are running Linux. One is a Mac Mini (G4) running OSX and the other is a G4 Powerbook dual-booting OSX (clean install solely for music production) and Ubuntu 6.10 (for everything else, chat, e-mail, web, games). I've been running Ubuntu since Breezy Badger (2004 or so, soon Feisty). I had been running XP up until then (it was installed on the HP I purchased from my job) and was debating dual-booting XP and Ubuntu, but figured I would spend more time in XP since that's where all my music production was being done. I moved all my music production to my Powerbook and took the plunge. I figured that would be the easiest way to learn everything (I've been using Linux (Debian,and more recently Gentoo) on servers (both play and work since 1997) so while I was comfortable with Linux, though I had never used it on the desktop. Luckily I have my Mac Mini and (soon-to-be) Ubuntu desktop on a KVM switch, and the xorg.conf problems I ran into with my Nvidia TNT2 M64 and later Radeon 7500 (RV200) were resolved easily.
The other two computers in my household are also running Ubuntu. My fathers Dell laptop is running Dapper, because for some reason, Suspend-to-RAM and Sleep-on-lid only work with the 2.6.15 kernel in Dapper. The 2.6.17 kernel in Edgy does not work for some reason at all. He is incredibly pleased with it. Both he and my mother use it for IM, e-mail, web, and my mom uses it for games. They're also running Quickbooks (in wine) for their business as well as Photoshop 7. It also goes on the road to trade shows twice a year and their friends (craftspeople) are all quite impressed with it. He has a Linksys WPC11v4 PCMCIA wifi card (using the Windows XP RTL8189 driver in NDISwrapper, which wasn't difficult at all to setup with the GUI) which he connects to the home wifi network as well as on trips.
My fathers desktop is also running Edgy. Both he and my mother were sick of how long XP was taking to boot up, the constant running of av and spyware scans, and the fact that it simply took forever to do anything on it. Their bookmarks were exported out of Firefox to Edgy as well as their e-mail copied over to Edgy from Thunderbird. They used a really, really, really, crappy desktop publishing program (Serif Publisher if you've ever been graced with its presence), which we migrated out as EPS files (the program has almost no export function, and writes broken Adobe Illustrator files) into Inkscape. They're also using Quickbooks and Photoshop in wine.
The kicker was my sister. She kept coming home with a Thinkpad constantly messed up with spyware and trojans and broken internet (switching from ethernet to dial-up in Win98 seemed to be the most convoluted process ever). She finally got the "Let me install Linux (and teach you how to use it), or start taking your laptop to a shop and pay for the repairs" speech, and caved. We found a better laptop and I installed Edgy. As I was demoing software (OpenOffice (she needed Word and Powerpoint capability for her job at a preschool), KMyMoney, Digikam/Picasa, Inkscape, GIMP, the slick (IMHO) Add/Remove Programs applet in Kubuntu) the very first words out of her mouth were "Wait, how much does all this software cost?" It took a bit of convincing that it was all free. She and her husband started playing with it and fell in love. I ended up getting a card from them a while later thanking me for installing Ubuntu and how much easier it made their life.
I also helped a friend from MO. install Linux. She too got sick of windows, and ended up wiping her HD. The installer for her was very simple. Automatic partitioning, (click next), and she was done. I had her create a user account for me to SSH so I could add some more repositories, install NX Server, Automatix (for codecs), and help her get her 2G iPod nano working in Amarok. She IM'd me a few days later and said she was in love.
Linux isn't that
As for end user re-installs of windows they are even worse, and I will only spend the hours required to fix them if I am paid, honestly it is far quicker to do a full Linux install and configuration than it is to fix a 'default' windows install.
The question people should be asking is which is easier to use and maintain. The answer to that is of course Linux, usability is far simple because you can set up the Home/User directory for the end user to play in, install software in there (as long as it doesn't network), you can even set up simple backups from their home directory to another directory they can't touch via a cron job.
If necessary you can stick the toy operating system in another partition for playing games where, thankfully, it can't touch the Linux partitions. The hardest thing about learning Linux is once you install it, you just use it, no fiddling and nursing it along, a couple of years latter you want to try a different distribution and you find you have forgotten everything you learned ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Tech support. I switched to LINUX and my browser won't work. Hello? Tech support??
cursethedarkness