On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 01:34:46AM -0600, Justin Kremer wrote: > http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5101690.html > > Yeah, the company that in most peoples eyes IS linux (because they > don't know any better) is telling them that they should use Windows > instead. Well, they have something of a point (no matter how poorly they worded it) IMO, there's roughly four types of computer users in the world: A) There's the geek-ish types that can read, they have no real problem with linux that they can't work out on their own, or create a useful query for google to answer. B) There's the kiddies who can't read, they scream because you won't provide them with personal tech support, they aspire to be geeks but want to do it without going through the learning process (they eventually learn to rtfm, or go back to windows) C) There's the tinkering user who buys the 1,000 game SUPERPACK from wal-mart, plays with all the settings, clicks YES to every dialog box that pops up, and is always infected with at least 3 virus/worms/etc. (These typically are not capable of using linux, due to the solitaire megapack not running on linux. These are the people you overhear at denny's talking about how he optimized his tcp/ip stack by installing a program from cracks4us.com, and how his computer has 80GB of "memory") ^- These people are the ones that make tech support so costly, because they think they know what they're talking about, but usually do not. D) Then there's the web browsing, email using people who can get comfortable with their computer (no matter the OS) and as long as things don't change much visually between upgrades, they never really have a problem. (These are people like my mother, who runs linux, but always needs a little bit of initial behind the scenes configuration changes, like making /dev/cdrom a+rw) Corporate users are usually A B or D's, because corporate policy makes it so that the C's get fired, or learn quickly. This is why Linux will work fine for corporate desktops. For Linux to work on the home desktop it _will_ need a lot more windows compatibility for the 'C' users, the wine project has done a great job with the misc binfmt stuff (you can run './setup.exe' and it fires up wine) but there's still a little ways to go. Of course, everything will have to run as root to really make them happy, and nobody wants to do this. C & D users want the DVD that they insert to auto-play, they don't want to know what permissions are, or how to change them. They don't care what the executable name is for their media player. They don't want to be dropped to a fsck boot prompt, no matter how badly the filesystem is damaged. They don't want to see all that text flying by when they turn on the system. This is why there is not a single distro to fit everyone, it's the same reason windows is 'dumbed down', doing more things automatically (no matter how much geeks hate it). It's the same reason windows ships with so many things on by default. A & B users will use linux if they want to, because they can. C users should stick with windows, or move up the ladder. D users will take whatever the friendly neighborhood geek sets up for them, as long as it does what they need (and won't even know what OS they're using) <casual observations after spending years providing technical support for fun and profit on efnet #linux> -- Matthew S. Hallacy FUBAR, LART, BOFH Certified http://www.poptix.net GPG public key 0x01938203 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list