total population 150,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit
Yeah. don't they make Quicken?
since we have used to hold books in our hands for hundreds of years
Ahh, but we've been holding tablets for thousands of years.
Exactly. It is the "not good with tech" people that we would need to work on getting to switch. They are the ones with problems.
My opinion (I'm sure many will disagree) is that for desktop use, Linux is garbage as far as the masses are concerned.
Reasons uninitiated, not technical people don't like it:
It looks like crap out of the box. Linux needs to get some graphic designers with actual talent to make it look better. OpenOffice may work, but it look like crap.
It is confusing.
It works like crap for standard stuff like watching flash videos, movies, and other day to day stuff the average person expects.
There are no commercial versions of popular products available for native Linux (Adobe CS, MS Office, and lots of smaller apps people buy online. WINE is vastly improved, but you still have to introduce great instability.
The interdependencies on packages means that you have to upgrade EVERYTHING each time there's a new release. You should have applications and the OS separate from each other in that sense.
The installation process is crap. Sure "dependency hell" is no longer such a program with automated package managers, but compare other OS's. You just download an executable, double click and install. There are rarely dependencies to worry about.
I may want to install Amarok 2 and leave at that until they come up with a newer version that isn't as dummed down. Sure I can install from source, but isn't that missing the point of package management? And if there is a way to do that, it is not obvious.
I could go on with more examples, but my main point is that the majority of people don't LIKE LINUX as a desktop (statistically speaking, so don't bother telling me about how your grandma just loves it).
How is it that Apple was able to take BSD and make it look and work so well and gain wider acceptance in a shorter amount of time? I would be copying them in terms of the experience a normal user wants to have, and for the "not good with tech" people, I would be telling them to go buy a mac.
Maybe Apple did better because they all focused on one vision. Maybe Google is secretly already working on something that will improve things.
In the mean time, I have given up on Linux for desktop purposes. I have been disappointed for the last 13 or so years and have better things to do with my time now than try to compromise on functionality when I have a job to do.
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"