Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• Control issues...
  2003-11-14 01:24:24  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Not quite sure I was being a zealot. I've never tried Lycoris or Lindows, so I can't speak about those two distro's. Never was much of a RedHat fan. RH6.2 was friggin' cool when it came out, though. Mandrake (from 8.2 anyways) worked well for me. And I've put Mandrake 9.1 on three other peoples desktops. The whole 9.2 - LG cdrom thing was a bummer. I know the fixes are out for that. Mandrake does walk you through things. It does make a lot of decisions for you (if you want it to).
  The parent post was talking about a handholding Linux.
  Still not sure where I was being a zealot.
• Control issues...
  2003-11-14 13:54:53  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  I have used Red Hat (now Fedora), Mandrake, SuSE, and even Solaris for Intel on my various desktops. And they all have their varying levels of installation ease. I found Red Hat and Mandrake to be the easiest to install since they did a lot of handholding on the installations.
  
  But what I was trying to say in my original post was that no distro does any handholding or prompting after the initial installation...
  
  Imagine you're a new linux user. Okay, so now that you've installed Red Hat, what do you do with it? Click on the Mozilla Icon? Okay. <Click> Mozilla opens. Now what? I see a Red Hat web page. What do I do with it? Click on redhat.com? Ok. <Click> Yeah, I know, Red Hat Linux page. I just installed it. What's next??? At this point, a new user would be getting bored, and would think that Linux is boring.
  
  Linux apps are written by and for people who look down on subscription services, online ads and spyware. But, at some levels of expertise, those ads and spyware can be a good thing. Now I am not saying that they are universally good. Far from it. I'm saying that they possibly can be good for some people.
  
  Linux offers much, much more choice to the end user. That's why it's generally thought of as a "geeky" operating system. For some users, though, there is such a thing as too much choice. For them, Windows will narrow the choices, or even choose for them, and those users will find that acceptable. To be competetive on the desktop, Linux must learn dial down the level of choice to meet the psychological needs of those kinds of users.