Fun and games with 3TB hard drives.

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2011-10-01 at 17:58 -0400, David wrote:
> On 10/1/2011 5:39 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 06:12, Marko Vojinovic<vvmarko at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> As a natural consequence, Linux is a priori not designed for
> >> noobs and newbies who do not want to learn.
> >
> > I think this is a problem.
> >
> > When I started using Linux back in 1999 (Caldera OpenLinux before the
> > SCO fiasco, fwiw(, I expected the user-friendliness to eventually
> > improve. It did not. But my expectations were not related to myself,
> > but thinking about friends and family I wanted to convert to Linux.
> >
> > Back in the OS/2 Warp days, IBM also thought "SYS 3175" was an OK
> > error message and that end users didn' t need more human-friendly
> > error messages.
> >
> > FC
> >
> > PS: Just including aliases for common Windows commands the users are
> > expected to find would have helped a lot of newcomers, but actually
> > the general concensus seems to be "this is Linux, it's not designed to
> > please Windows users, windows users should learn Linux and how it
> > works, instead".
> 
> This is not meant as a Flame War starter. But...
> 
> I agree with you. Grandma and grandpa, mom and dad. Billy and Bobbie can 
> go to a store and actually buy a computer, in boxes, come home and 
> connect the pieces and *it just works*. *Everything just works*. Then 
> along comes a Linux Guru friend and he replaces their OS. And suddenly 
> things get complicated. And things stop working. Unless they get some 
> strange file from some man that lives in a cellar in some country with a 
> really odd name. Or perhaps things work but not quite as well.
> 
> As much as *I* like Linux it will never become a common desktop until 
> that happens. Until it *just works*. IMO of course.
----
I wholeheartedly disagree. 

Apple has never tried to make a Macintosh emulate or substitute for
Windows. Yes, they do implement methods to accommodate a Windows based
network schema and data interchange but so does Linux (in fact, I think
Linux does a better job of it).

A computer and its underlying OS stands on its own... based on its own
usability and merits.

Specifically, I worked at a company that had bought 2 batches of
different computers from the same manufacturer (memory says it was Acer
but it may have been Asus). Anyway, one of them only had support (ie,
driver downloads) for Windows XP and the other for Vista+ (Vista or
Windows 7). We wanted to swap hard drives from type of box to the
other... that wasn't going to work. A single image... forgetaboutit. Of
course Linux would have been able to run on either one without breaking
a sweat.

Then there's the absurd notions that seems to permeate some people's
thinking is that it is useful, important, necessary or even possible to
supplant Windows with Linux. That isn't the point of Linux, not the
mission of Fedora and thus the thinking would by all indications seem
out of bounds except to those who wish it were so.

A few years ago, I switched a non-profit corp over to Fedora (starting
w/ FC6) and they made the transition fairly easily and I would suggest
for the most part, they were casual computer users and the more
knowledgeable users transitioned rather quickly. For the most part, it
only required a little guidance on where there files were stored and
what the applications were named and where to find them.

Adults didn't intrinsically know how to use Windows - they bought books
or watched someone or spent time playing around and thus whatever
knowledge of Windows that they possess is leveraged already when moving
to Macintosh or Linux.

Fedora out of the box just works as well as Windows would work except no
one really has that opportunity since all of those computers out of the
box boot Windows so to actually get an out of the box experience for
Linux requires an initial hurdle (actually I think Dell sells some
rather pricey workstations with Ubuntu pre-installed but I don't know
anyone that has purchased them).

Craig


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