Everyone else is probably going to rip you to shreds for this, or if you're lucky try to give you a solution that by now you've discovered on your own anyway.
I won't do that. I'll say this instead: The stress you describe in your post is in no way related to "X being hard" or "Y being easy" or the technicalities of an install process or anything like that. What you experienced there was the fear of breaking out of your comfort zone and moving into the unknown. That's natural, it's part of what makes us people.
I remember that "are you sure?" moment from my first Linux install very well. I had to stare at that "Yes No" dialog for something like twenty minutes. Two or three cigarettes were smoked. I was petrified thinking of all the horrible things that could happen. And looking back on that now, that stare-down with my monitor didn't have a damn thing to do with partitions or installers or even the prospect of losing all my data. I was just scared of the unknown, as you were, and that's fine. Then we faced that fear and now we're more self-sufficient people because of that. So go us.
I do like it, and I think it's great branding. It's a color scheme absolutely unlike any other desktop OS. You know when you're sitting down at an Ubuntu machine, and I think that was the point.
I know enough medicine to take care of myself when I get the flu. I know enough law to not freak out if I get arrested. I know enough about my bicycle to at least limp to the shop if something goes out. On the other hand, I am completely unwilling (not unable, unwilling) to gain even that basic level of proficiency with automobiles. So I don't own one.
(Car analogy ahead!) No one's telling you you have to learn to rebuild your engine before you get your license. But you do have to learn to drive.
That's fantastic! I mean, if all you have on your computer are office files, I guess. What about the other 90% of the world's data? See, in the real world, people use their computers for lots of different kinds of things. A musician, for instance, would not find your solution to be terribly applicable.
That's great for stuff you created (a letter or a note or something of that nature), but I'm not even going to tag every photo I import from my camera, let alone every video clip and audio file and ebook and random image on my machine, there's just no damn way.
Don't get me wrong, I think hierarchal filesystems suck too. They were invented by the devil in the 60s to torment us poor saps and we still haven't freed ourselves of them. But until the much ballyhooed "semantic desktop" can operate independently of me with an absolute minimum of user interaction, it's not going to work.
Tracker. Strigi. Recoll. And on and on and fucking on. This has been a part of *nix desktops for years. Do some goddamn research. How many times will I make this same post in this thread? This makes twice, and I'm not even a third of the way down.
Your fanboigina is showing. *nix desktop users have also been able to do this for years. There's Tracker, Recoll, Strigi, and on and on. That's not the point of the article. You did read the article?
I wouldn't fret too much about the Russian economy. They're sitting squarely on top of the largest supply of natural gas on planet Earth. I think they'll make it through okay.
First, I apologize for my rudeness in my original post. I grew up pretty poor even though I'm not now, and I do get a little defensive when I hear things that I think are insensitive to that. But that's no excuse for me to take it out on strangers, so I'm sorry for that.
But to reply to your statement, I still disagree. I'm sure there are plenty of free software contributors who also work at the local store, or serve you your coffee in the morning, or fix the roads you drive to work on. I do understand that for you, going from (I assume) a fairly comfortable tech job to stocking shelves and ringing up cigarettes was a major life adjustment and you probably did not feel that you had time for your hobbies. But for a lot of people, that's just the way they've always lived, and they do manage to find time for other things. Poor people have hobbies too. How do you think we end up with things like the world's largest ball of twine?:)
What a piss-poor example. OpenOffice is about as far from a hobbyist project as you can possibly get. And as for charity, I really don't think that's the business Sun is in. If it wasn't making Sun (enormous piles of) money, they wouldn't do it.
When I was laid-off during the 1999-2000 dot-com crash, "survival" was the appropriate term to use. I even got a job at the local store just to cover my bills.
OMG!! The local store? Why, I never!
PS: You don't have a clue about the definition of the word "survival."
Am I the only person to notice that every time someone makes a post that includes a line similar to "I'm sure I'll get modded down for this," they end up at +5?
Agreed. Education is a must-have, and it's where the battle will be won or lost. Microsoft's damn smart to put so much investment into it. You are also right in splitting that up into two broad areas, technical (stuff like the UI, the available documentation, et cetera) and social (Joe next door who "knows computers").
On the technical side, there's a lot of great, inspired work going on out there, from wiki.ubuntu.com to the Gnome Documentation Project and on and on. The challenge here lies in making sure users can access that wealth of knowledge without necessarily knowing beforehand how to find it. Little things like a well laid out "front page" of the Help system or the "Ubuntu and Free Software Links" menu in the Firefox bookmarks are huge here, and we need more stuff like that. The documentation is out there, we just need to hook the users up to it. To add to the challenge, users that are coming from a Windows background are accustomed to thinking that the internal help is always worthless, and that's a fallacy in free software. Lots of people just aren't going to click on help because they don't think it will help. When I set up systems for people, I make a huge icon for help in the middle of the desktop and verbally hammer home the point that they are to use that thing if they get stuck.
On the social side we face a much bigger challenge, and there aren't as many "magic bullet" answers. It's just gonna take hard, hard, hard work, and it's gonna people making it a priority, and it's gonna take years. But it can be done.
Well, you sure made yourself sound like an asshole, didn't you? Other folks have covered other parts of this, but I'll focus on...
Drivers - Add all the drivers to the kernel? So the manufacturers of devices have to wait till the kernel maintainer decides on his own sweet time when to integrate patches. AND THEN wait till picks them up downstream. Nice solution. Doesnt scale, buddy.
Linux supports more devices than any other operating system ever has. And once a driver is in the kernel, it's never going away. It's scaled well for fifteen years. Let's talk about something that doesn't scale well. Expecting every hardware vendor in the world to remain in business forever, and update their own drivers forever. Massive fail.
You're right, but it doesn't really matter. Let me tell you why.
You say that "they don't want to put effort into relearning..." and you are correct, with regards to that scenario. But there are still more people who aren't familiar with computers than people who are. And I'm not even talking worldwide here, I mean here in America, especially in very rural areas and among the urban poor. Now, that's going to change really quick here, as hardware prices plummet, netbooks gain in popularity, and older P4-era machines are being put out to pasture by corporate America and resurfacing in all kinds of weird places where computers weren't very prevalent before.
Which means the time to really move is right about now, because in five years it'll be the same problem you describe all over again. Gotta get there first. I think it's more doable than folks realize.
Personally I can't stand Gimp because I very rarely need to edit an image and when I do my needs are simple. Why would I want to fire up that Sherman tank to crop a picture? Why doesn't Gnome have anything like KolourPaint? I mean, it seems like if your needs are more complex than Gpaint can cover, you're stuck using Gimp.
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Everyone else is probably going to rip you to shreds for this, or if you're lucky try to give you a solution that by now you've discovered on your own anyway.
I won't do that. I'll say this instead: The stress you describe in your post is in no way related to "X being hard" or "Y being easy" or the technicalities of an install process or anything like that. What you experienced there was the fear of breaking out of your comfort zone and moving into the unknown. That's natural, it's part of what makes us people.
I remember that "are you sure?" moment from my first Linux install very well. I had to stare at that "Yes No" dialog for something like twenty minutes. Two or three cigarettes were smoked. I was petrified thinking of all the horrible things that could happen. And looking back on that now, that stare-down with my monitor didn't have a damn thing to do with partitions or installers or even the prospect of losing all my data. I was just scared of the unknown, as you were, and that's fine. Then we faced that fear and now we're more self-sufficient people because of that. So go us.
I'm a user. I like it.
I do like it, and I think it's great branding. It's a color scheme absolutely unlike any other desktop OS. You know when you're sitting down at an Ubuntu machine, and I think that was the point.
I know enough medicine to take care of myself when I get the flu. I know enough law to not freak out if I get arrested. I know enough about my bicycle to at least limp to the shop if something goes out. On the other hand, I am completely unwilling (not unable, unwilling) to gain even that basic level of proficiency with automobiles. So I don't own one.
(Car analogy ahead!) No one's telling you you have to learn to rebuild your engine before you get your license. But you do have to learn to drive.
Yeah! So we need something like Tracker! Or Strigi! Or Recoll!
Wait a minute...
Yeah, but exterminating .doc files makes me sad :(
Not me. They're a plague, it's time for a final solution.
That's fantastic! I mean, if all you have on your computer are office files, I guess. What about the other 90% of the world's data? See, in the real world, people use their computers for lots of different kinds of things. A musician, for instance, would not find your solution to be terribly applicable.
That's great for stuff you created (a letter or a note or something of that nature), but I'm not even going to tag every photo I import from my camera, let alone every video clip and audio file and ebook and random image on my machine, there's just no damn way.
Don't get me wrong, I think hierarchal filesystems suck too. They were invented by the devil in the 60s to torment us poor saps and we still haven't freed ourselves of them. But until the much ballyhooed "semantic desktop" can operate independently of me with an absolute minimum of user interaction, it's not going to work.
Tracker. Strigi. Recoll. And on and on and fucking on. This has been a part of *nix desktops for years. Do some goddamn research. How many times will I make this same post in this thread? This makes twice, and I'm not even a third of the way down.
Your fanboigina is showing. *nix desktop users have also been able to do this for years. There's Tracker, Recoll, Strigi, and on and on. That's not the point of the article. You did read the article?
I wouldn't fret too much about the Russian economy. They're sitting squarely on top of the largest supply of natural gas on planet Earth. I think they'll make it through okay.
Thats why Linux is kicking Microsofts ass right now amirite?
Yes. Youareright.
In America, homeownership, like college, is a capitalist trap designed to force you into lifelong slavery. Fuck the house, own your life.
First, I apologize for my rudeness in my original post. I grew up pretty poor even though I'm not now, and I do get a little defensive when I hear things that I think are insensitive to that. But that's no excuse for me to take it out on strangers, so I'm sorry for that.
But to reply to your statement, I still disagree. I'm sure there are plenty of free software contributors who also work at the local store, or serve you your coffee in the morning, or fix the roads you drive to work on. I do understand that for you, going from (I assume) a fairly comfortable tech job to stocking shelves and ringing up cigarettes was a major life adjustment and you probably did not feel that you had time for your hobbies. But for a lot of people, that's just the way they've always lived, and they do manage to find time for other things. Poor people have hobbies too. How do you think we end up with things like the world's largest ball of twine? :)
What a piss-poor example. OpenOffice is about as far from a hobbyist project as you can possibly get. And as for charity, I really don't think that's the business Sun is in. If it wasn't making Sun (enormous piles of) money, they wouldn't do it.
When I was laid-off during the 1999-2000 dot-com crash, "survival" was the appropriate term to use. I even got a job at the local store just to cover my bills.
OMG!! The local store? Why, I never!
PS: You don't have a clue about the definition of the word "survival."
If you can "install it on any computer you want," it is in no way a "completely legal version of Windows."
Am I the only person to notice that every time someone makes a post that includes a line similar to "I'm sure I'll get modded down for this," they end up at +5?
So uh, yeah. Mod me down?
Sure. 0 (not 0). Wow, that was easy.
If I had $20 billion, I couldn't make it legal for me to murder anyone.
Dude, you really don't pay that much attention to politics, do you?
Agreed. Education is a must-have, and it's where the battle will be won or lost. Microsoft's damn smart to put so much investment into it. You are also right in splitting that up into two broad areas, technical (stuff like the UI, the available documentation, et cetera) and social (Joe next door who "knows computers").
On the technical side, there's a lot of great, inspired work going on out there, from wiki.ubuntu.com to the Gnome Documentation Project and on and on. The challenge here lies in making sure users can access that wealth of knowledge without necessarily knowing beforehand how to find it. Little things like a well laid out "front page" of the Help system or the "Ubuntu and Free Software Links" menu in the Firefox bookmarks are huge here, and we need more stuff like that. The documentation is out there, we just need to hook the users up to it. To add to the challenge, users that are coming from a Windows background are accustomed to thinking that the internal help is always worthless, and that's a fallacy in free software. Lots of people just aren't going to click on help because they don't think it will help. When I set up systems for people, I make a huge icon for help in the middle of the desktop and verbally hammer home the point that they are to use that thing if they get stuck.
On the social side we face a much bigger challenge, and there aren't as many "magic bullet" answers. It's just gonna take hard, hard, hard work, and it's gonna people making it a priority, and it's gonna take years. But it can be done.
Well, you sure made yourself sound like an asshole, didn't you? Other folks have covered other parts of this, but I'll focus on...
Drivers - Add all the drivers to the kernel? So the manufacturers of devices have to wait till the kernel maintainer decides on his own sweet time when to integrate patches. AND THEN wait till picks them up downstream. Nice solution. Doesnt scale, buddy.
Linux supports more devices than any other operating system ever has. And once a driver is in the kernel, it's never going away. It's scaled well for fifteen years. Let's talk about something that doesn't scale well. Expecting every hardware vendor in the world to remain in business forever, and update their own drivers forever. Massive fail.
You're right, but it doesn't really matter. Let me tell you why.
You say that "they don't want to put effort into relearning..." and you are correct, with regards to that scenario. But there are still more people who aren't familiar with computers than people who are. And I'm not even talking worldwide here, I mean here in America, especially in very rural areas and among the urban poor. Now, that's going to change really quick here, as hardware prices plummet, netbooks gain in popularity, and older P4-era machines are being put out to pasture by corporate America and resurfacing in all kinds of weird places where computers weren't very prevalent before.
Which means the time to really move is right about now, because in five years it'll be the same problem you describe all over again. Gotta get there first. I think it's more doable than folks realize.
I've worked at several places that were used to paying more than they should for things. They never seem to apply that philosophy to personnel...
Personally I can't stand Gimp because I very rarely need to edit an image and when I do my needs are simple. Why would I want to fire up that Sherman tank to crop a picture? Why doesn't Gnome have anything like KolourPaint? I mean, it seems like if your needs are more complex than Gpaint can cover, you're stuck using Gimp.