Re: Users ready for Debian on the Desktop
On Fri, 18 Apr 2003 12:35:35 -0600,
Jamin W. Collins wrote:
>
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2003 at 12:53:59AM -0700, Vineet Kumar wrote:
> > * bob parker (bob_parker@dodo.com.au) [030417 11:58]:
> > > Linux was ready for the desktop quite some time ago,
> > > especially Debian. OK it's not that wonderful to install
> > > but how many Windows users install their own system? Very
> > > few I'll bet.
> >
> > This is a very important but seldom realized point. I invite
> > anyone who claims that "Linux is hard to install" to attempt
> > a ground-up install of any version of windows.
>
> Sorry, but if you honestly think Windows is more difficult to
> install than most Linux distros, your missing something.
The latest version?
> I'm certianly pro-Linux, and prefer it to any MS release, but
> the MS releases are a fair bit more "hand holding".
I think that statement needs to be qualified by version numbers
and the purity of the box at the time of the installation. Take
Win95 and, say, Redhat 8.0, and a computer without an operatin
system. I can honestly say that Redhat 8.0 is easier to install
on an OS-less i386 than Win95. And Win95 was the OS that turned
M$ into a monopoly.
To be sure I haven't tried any version of M$ Win later than 98r2.
But that's my point. Have people's expectation of what's easy
changed? Any recent commercial GNU/Linux distro is easier to use
than Win3.1 and possibly Win95, and yet we still have reviewers
saying that GNU/Linux is not ready for the desktop. The same
thing could be said for Win95. And that was the OS that turned
M$ into a monopoly.
Give Redhat (or Suse, Xandros or even Mandrake) a billion-dollar
marketing budget to promote just one release and we'll see M$'s
piece of the desktop shrink dramatically.
> > > If you look at the most common user needs; word processing,
> > > simple spreadsheets with just row/column sums and maybe a
> > > little date display and arithmetic. Add to those a web
> > > browser and email client and you've covered 90% or more I'd
> > > bet.
> >
> > Precisely. Shockingly, they're all convinved that they need
> > a 2+GHz Pentium 4 to run such a terminal.
>
> With the extra MS software on them, in many cases they do.
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