Is Linux Out of Touch With the Average User?

MrSmith writes "Is Linux's less than impressive market share an indication that the movement is out of touch with the average computer user? ZDNet examines five reasons that could explain why people are still willing to pay for (or pirate) an operating system when free alternatives exist. One of the reasons seems to be that despite what many Linux advocates claim, Windows users aren't on the whole dissatisfied with their OS: 'Despite what you read on websites and blogs, newspapers and magazines, people on the whole aren't all that dissatisfied with Windows. There are millions of users out there who just get on and use their PCs without any real difficulty.'"

Comments

Re:Yes

[CastrTroy]

Since you brought car analogies into it, lets equate people's stupidity with computers to that with driving. The way most people act with a computer (something they use every day), and a car (another thing they use every day) is completely different. When the car starts to beep because it's running low on gas, most people pull into a gas station and fill up the tank. When you computer displays a warning that it's running low on disk space, most people freak out, try to figure out what it means (which takes 10 minutes), and promptly start to delete things like windows DLLs, because they've never used them before and don't know what all those files are for. Or they will just ignore it, and then start to complain in two weeks, when they can't save their latest word document, because they are completely out of space.