"It just works"
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| jacog Jul 24, 2009 4:41 AM EDT |
Story time, gather 'round children. My ex wife, now best friend, moved back to Maine a few months ago. I bought her a no-OS computer from http://www.ibuypower.com/ which arrived yesterday. She's not used to setting up new systems, so I was on a call with her to talk her through the setup. The silly PC people forgot to attach a lot of the wires inside the box, so we spent a good two hours hooking it all up. She had a KUbuntu 9.03 CD handy, so we decided to install that. Here things got easy. My "talking her through it" basically involved telling her to set the BIOS to make the DVD drive bootable, and beyond that she didn't ask me any questions, nor did I give any instructions. 15 minutes later she booted it up, plugged in the network cable and I was expecting having to chat her through network setup at this point, but since it was all DHCP, well... her next words were: "it... just works... weird" The next person who tells me that Linux is a pain in the butt to set up is getting a dose of my new motto, "violence is the answer", and will be prompty strangled or otherwise brutally subdued. I may have to swallow those words though. My next subject is going to be my girlfriend's mother, who is the most computer illiterate person I have ever come across in my life. Some funny stories there. :) She's also impatient and doesn't read what's on the screen. Anything that pops up on screen makes her instantly go into a blank stare. The task will be to install Linux Mint on an Acer Aspire One, from a memory stick. She's in Wales, so we'll be doing this over Skype. If we can succeed there, then it's official... ANYONE can do it. I *might* actually skip a few steps and mail a bootable mem stick to her instead of explaining how to make one. Is that cheating? |
| gus3 Jul 24, 2009 5:54 AM EDT |
No, that is definitely *not* cheating. Install media are install media, no matter which medium is actually involved. Good luck! |
| Bob_Robertson Jul 24, 2009 8:15 AM EDT |
There was a call yesterday to a talk radio show that I listen to, kind of a "free microphone" show where the person calling can bring up any subject they like, by a Linux advocate. First, she tried the anti-Microsoft tack, that didn't last long. Then the pro-Linux side, and of the three show hosts, one uses Linux exclusively and agreed with her, one said "It's not ready", and the third said he tries it but keeps having problems. Such as, "Firefox, hit the down arrow and it goes woosh straight to the bottom." Giving back by submitting bug reports was asserted, and the "it's not ready" host said, "I'm not interested in beta-testing someone else's software. I want it to work, I don't want it to be my problem that it's buggy." Host 3, the one who uses Linux, pointed out that Windows is at least as buggy, but Microsoft doesn't want your help. That was a nice addition, but sadly they moved on to another topic. Oh well. There are simply people for whom F/OSS just doesn't work, for whatever reason. |
| jacog Jul 24, 2009 8:30 AM EDT |
Again I have to object to just saying "it [Linux] is not ready". There are actually dodgy distributions out there that are definitely "not ready". Someone form Windows land might not realise that a point 1 version difference between two releases of a distro can actually be a huge gap, and be trying out distributions that are 8 years old before proclaiming them not ready. Someone who wants to assess "Linux" should use a polished distribution, spend some time learning how it is different from what they are used to, and THEN only make their assessment. |
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