Anything for home user and not the technical one??

Christofer C. Bell christofer.c.bell at gmail.com
Fri Jul 23 15:44:56 UTC 2010


On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 6:34 AM, Parshwa Murdia <b330bkn at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 2:29 PM, g <geleem at bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
>> as for friends and *their* families, complaints do occur mainly with
>> children because they can not play their games, get emails and use
>> twitter and facebook.
>
>
> correct.

I can certainly see "playing games" as an obstacle, but only if it's
specific Windows games you have in mind.  For example, you'll be able
to get World of Warcraft running under WINE (with some effort), but
you're unlikely to ever play something like EverQuest II.

I don't see reading email, and using Facebook and Twitter as
obstacles.  There are dozens of mail clients for Linux, both command
line and graphical.  Not only that, but Evolution is able to connect
to and participate in a Microsoft Exchange environment. As for
Facebook and Twitter, Fedora integrates with both Twitter and Facebook
out of the box without installing any additional software (Pino and
Firefox for Twitter, Firefox for Facebook).

In all honesty, for normal desktop use, the only "hoop" Parshwa should
need to jump through is to setup RPM Fusion on the system[1].  Then,
when his wife or kids visit some media serving website, or try to
listen to their iTunes music in Rhythmbox, the system will prompt them
to click 'OK" a bunch of times to automatically install the correct
codec support.

The use cases where Linux in general (and Fedora specifically) is not
appropriate for a home desktop are few and generally hinge on only 1
or 2 applications.  Please don't cast doubt on the capabilities of the
software where those doubts are unfounded.

[1] http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

-- 
Chris


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