[Bradford] The BBC and Ubuntu

[hudsonjr at ntlworld.com]

Hi.

I had an interesting experience last weekend when a relatively naive user of Windows asked to get on line to show me some photos on Flickr.

I use KDE4 and the only comments were on the wallpaper and 'Why do you use Firefox?' I don't think there was any idea that I was using something completely different from Windows.

I suspect that one of the problems in getting BBC correspondents to comment is that they come with all sorts of Windows pre-conceptions of how a computer should operate whereas the more naive users lack these pre-conceptions - other than, as in my example, that people use IE.

John

---- Andrea Ryan <andrea at phluidity.net> wrote: 
> I don't know if any of you saw BBC Breakfast's coverage of the Windows 7
> release last week, but it basically consisted of 'Windows 7 is great and
> shiny, Mac is also available, and by the way there's this thing called
> Ubuntu which is coming out soon (!) and it's free but no-one wants to bother
> with that'. I paraphrase, obviously, but you get the idea!
> 
> It turns out I wasn't the only Linux user that spotted this, and at
> LUGRadioLive/Oggcamp at the weekend I found out that other Linux users had
> written to, and had further dialogues with, the BBC about their somewhat
> biased coverage. I came across this article (
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8326264.stm) on the BBC this morning -
> perhaps their attempt to placate some of the people they'd upset with their
> Breakfast segment?
> 
> It's nice to see that Linux (Ubuntu particularly in this example) is being
> recognised outside of 'the community' but on the other hand there is still
> some way to go in getting Linux widely accepted as an alternative to
> Windows. The events of the weekend were great, with 200+ linux geeks coming
> together to demonstrate and celebrate the work that's going on within the
> community, but I believe that Linux's best advocates are us - the users. We
> have to get people talking about Linux, and demonstrate that it really is a
> viable alternative. If I can convince my slightly technophobic dad of this,
> surely between us we can convince hundreds, thousands of other people too?!
> 
> Now discuss ;)
> 
> Andrea
> _______________________________________________
> Bradford mailing list
> Bradford at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/bradford