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Re: choosing software applications

In general I agree with Gavin. I thinks he makes very good points from a admin stand point. At this point in my life, I am administering a small business network with users that for the most part are not computer savvy. Too many choices have been a headache in that scenario. Things were not much better in the educational sector. There are still many teachers whose computer skills and comfort level are lacking. It does not mean they are bad teachers, but that they have not as yet embraced computer technology. We could make it easy to embrace it!
I would even go one step further than Gavin and suggest that Skolelinux should give applications that have win32 versions priority in the choice process (assuming every thing else about equal) in the name of "guaranteed file interoperability" or compatibility, and application interface commonality. If students have access to computers outside of class, by the sheer number of windows boxes out there, it will probably be some version of MSWindows. (Sacrilege, they shouted!)
The other thing I agree with Gavin about is that it is likely a touchy subject. I love debian for the choices it allows me, but as an administrator, sometimes those choices need to be initially made by me for unsophisticated users.
I know people will come back and say, "Well you can do that now by doing thus and so." I do have other things to do besides reconfiguring default installs. How about a menu choice at install time "Normal" or "MS Compatible"
I do think the more sophisticated user, or the ones with special software needs do need to be listened to however and accommodated by system administration as well as possible. 

My 2 cents

RRP


Gavin McCullagh wrote:


Hi,

this is very likely a touchy subject but I think it's worth pointing out
and seeing what people think.  This is a suggestion and I guess not
everyone will like it.

I have recently installed Ubuntu Linux on several machines and given it to
others.  It's a very nice, clean, free desktop.  Several people have
mentioned and I myself have noticed one very effective aspect of the
design.  That is the lack of choice by default.  There is one desktop
environment, one web browser, email client, word processor, spreadsheet,
etc, etc.  You can of course choose to install others but they are not
there by default.

For this reason, the menus are clear and brief.  In large non-technical
networks it is a very common practice to choose every application for the
user and remove all else.  This makes support much easier.  If support get
a call saying "I'm having trouble writing an article", that means they're
having trouble with MS Word (usually), not staroffice, wordstar,
wordperfect, or wordpad.
One of the points made by this article 
http://osdir.com/Article4389.phtml

which I agree with is that ordinary, non-technical users do not want choice
(not initially anyway).  It simply causes confusion.  The technical person
should make the (initial) choice for them.  If there are several hundred
such users in a school, it will simplify everything greatly if everyone
uses one office suite.  On top of that, they need to be guaranteed file
interoperability which KWord and OOo Writer don't make obvious (by
defaulting to different formats).

In a skolelinux school, I think that means skolelinux making the choice.
That means making a choice of application for each task and disappearing
the others. There are at least two means to achieve this: 
 - remove the other applications.
 - don't put them in the menus or toolbars.

I favour the former because:

 - it saves cdrom and disk space and speeds up the installer
 - if a school admin chooses to use an alternative, it should get
   installed and linked into the menus automatically

Of course I don't mean not to package (or necessarily support) the other
apps, but just to omit them from the default install.  The main debian
archive is usually the package source anyway.

Now the hard part.  We would need to choose the applications, drop the
others and configure the desktop environment to advertise the choices.  I
see no reason to have KOffice *and* ooWriter.  In fact I have seen this
cause confusion.  I also see no reason to have Konqueror and Mozilla;
gnumeric, kspread and ooCalc.  If we're talking about more specialist apps
like astronomy then this is not so important but I would vote for one
office suite, one browser, one email client.

Making the choices may cause arguments.  The desktop environment config may
not be a trivial amount of work either but I believe both would be truly
beneficial to the users of Skolelinux.

Any comments?

Gavin
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