Hi. I'm Anne, in England. I dabbled with Red Hat 5, long ago, but had to
give up through hardware problems and lack of cash at that time to replace
unsupported hardware. It was 2000 before I discovered Mandrake 8, and
dual-booted for about 6 months. Linux has been my working environment ever
since.
I'm retired, a home user with a fairly wide range of interests. I look after
all the computers for the 3-generation family, including the mixed
architecture LAN.
I'm a member of two LUGs. In the biggest one, I'm the only woman member.
I've thought a lot about this, and about the reluctance of other women in my
family to consider linux. I think that the truth is that most women are
task-oriented, when it comes to computing. Writing a letter is much the same
in any environment. Photo editing, camcorder output editing, or creating a
DVD just looks that bit harder than in Windows, and it's frightening to
someone who has little tech understanding, and no interest in gaining it. 'I
just want it to work', is the reply. I suspect that there are lessons to be
learned from relatively cut-down Windows programs. For instance, Gimp is
powerful, but many Windows-users will prefer to use a much simpler program
such as iPhoto Express which leads through a wizard that says something like
'move the two boxes until the eyes are covered, then click "Continue"'
when
they want to correct red-eye.
I would love to get involved in projects aimed at winning these reluctant,
frightened users. I have no programming skills, but as an ex-teacher my
communication skills are quite good. If such a project was started I would
like to be involved from the start, in the belief that you need to be very
familiar with every aspect if you want to write good, non-geeky
documentation.
Anne