Comment Re:A fine post and everything but... (Score 2, Interesting) 958
Hear, hear!
Our story sounds the same. My wife and I share a PC at home. She is an advanced computer user, with no technical backround, though.
First, she was impressed with the "Linux" "design" - she found the desktop and the distro (I'm not saying which not to start yet another rivalry) much more appealing than the Windows one. Next, she moved on to the features, quickly discovering greater possibilities (she did FrontPage, Powerpoint and Excel courses and even knows how and dares to use the stuff...) while exploring different tools and menus.
A phase of nagging followed since some things needed either:
- explaining: to eject the CD, use the "User mount tool" or something;
- or tweaking: hold on a sec, lemme have a look ... after a minute or a day ... ... There ya go!
She always had an option of rebooting back to windows if a file or a site didn't open. But this very step, rebooting, was a limitation in itself so windows was being used less and less often and at the same time, eventual complaints about Linux gradually stopped.
Once, I had her do a preview of a large collection of digital photos in both Win and Linux to compare the speed. Another point proved.
It turned out that in her Economy post-grad class, where they exchanged a lot of .doc, .ppt, and .crap, she was far from being the only one importing the files, editing and saving them back into Win formats with OpenOffice; took'em quite a while to figure out that not all of them are Windows slaves.
At her new job, the in-house geek, amazingly, offered to install whatever OS she wanted on her PC, but openly admitted, that she would be a "linux-first". To make sure she is in sync with the team, she opted for XP. Funly enough, they both had the same idea what browser to install - and again, I leave to your imagination what replaced the IE.
Her computer woes were mostly due to the fact that she had the false expectation that everything on the box has to understand what she is thinking - a common preconception of the computer illiterates mislead by Gates and company. The fact is, that while clinging to that concept, Windows software gave her as much pain as the next, because she improvised at everything instead of RTFM and understanding how things work. So her migration to Linux was plagued with similar aches and pains as her windows work, i.e. -why is this page number constantly shifted?-
Linux now works for her just as well as Windows, if not better.
Our story sounds the same. My wife and I share a PC at home. She is an advanced computer user, with no technical backround, though.
First, she was impressed with the "Linux" "design" - she found the desktop and the distro (I'm not saying which not to start yet another rivalry) much more appealing than the Windows one. Next, she moved on to the features, quickly discovering greater possibilities (she did FrontPage, Powerpoint and Excel courses and even knows how and dares to use the stuff...) while exploring different tools and menus.
A phase of nagging followed since some things needed either:
- explaining: to eject the CD, use the "User mount tool" or something;
- or tweaking: hold on a sec, lemme have a look
She always had an option of rebooting back to windows if a file or a site didn't open. But this very step, rebooting, was a limitation in itself so windows was being used less and less often and at the same time, eventual complaints about Linux gradually stopped.
Once, I had her do a preview of a large collection of digital photos in both Win and Linux to compare the speed. Another point proved.
It turned out that in her Economy post-grad class, where they exchanged a lot of
At her new job, the in-house geek, amazingly, offered to install whatever OS she wanted on her PC, but openly admitted, that she would be a "linux-first". To make sure she is in sync with the team, she opted for XP. Funly enough, they both had the same idea what browser to install - and again, I leave to your imagination what replaced the IE.
Her computer woes were mostly due to the fact that she had the false expectation that everything on the box has to understand what she is thinking - a common preconception of the computer illiterates mislead by Gates and company. The fact is, that while clinging to that concept, Windows software gave her as much pain as the next, because she improvised at everything instead of RTFM and understanding how things work. So her migration to Linux was plagued with similar aches and pains as her windows work, i.e. -why is this page number constantly shifted?-
Linux now works for her just as well as Windows, if not better.
