Re: Question about Desktop Environments
On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 07:34:04PM -0500, Jonathan Jacobs wrote:
> GNOME and KDE are the ones that I have. But, is there one out there
> that looks like XP. I am going to install Debian on my mothers
> computer and she is running...slowly...XP. Every other comment out
> of my mom, about the computer, is that it is running slowly. I have
> already removed any spyware and whatnot and I have cleaned the
> reg. It is about time that I upgraded her pc to Debian. Just need a
> desktop environment that looks like XP......any suggestions?
You may be underestimating your mother. This is a common problem.
Think of all the new things she has seen in her life (don't know how old
you are or how old your mother is). My mother started out picking up
lumps of coal that had fallen off the truck to take home to heat the
house, wrote with a nib and inkwell, graduating to a fountain pen when
the family could afford __one__, later to the ball-point-pen.
Then, all of a sudden, her son (me) decides that he wants a computer
instead of a car and in 1987-8 goes out and buys an IBM PS/2-70-A21, a
database called Paradox, Word Perfect, Fortran compiler, AutoCad...
(spending more than on a new Pickup Truck) and says something like "you
know mom, you don't have to keep the church records on scraps of paper
anymore". So my then 60-year-old mother learns WordPerfect and Paradox
(with a handy cheat-sheet).
Mothers are surprising creatures.
Take a page from any change-management and system-design textbook.
Identify the problems. Conduct market research (ask your mother).
Engage her in what she wants.
Perhaps she doesn't want a Desktop Environment at all. Perhaps she
wants Enlightenment window manager.
I'd suggest you save copies of the screenshots for all the DTEs and WMs
into a directory and perhaps burn them to CD then give the CD to you
mother to see what she likes the __look__ of, and watch how she works to
see which features she would use most and which she would miss the most.
Create a short-list, then install them all on a Debian box, allowing her
to choose which to start on login.
Doug.
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