[dundee] Linux on the desktop

[alex mole]

I must confess that I, by and large, agree with his attack on too much 
choice.

Bear in mind he's not talking about people who love Linux, he's talking 
about general people who have no passion for computers, they just want 
to use the internet and get their work done. Most people just want a 
system that works. Currently there aren't really any systems like that, 
though I suspect that Linux would come at the bottom of the pile of 
pretenders [with Mac OS X quite possibly at the top, though I've not 
used it enough to really form an opinion]. Any mucking about with 
command line interfaces or drivers, or even any configuration beyond the 
level of Themes and skins is too much.

IMHO, there is a major sticking point here: OS's and programs are made 
by people who enjoy computers, people who can be bothered to google for 
an error message to find out how to fix it, in short, people like us. 
But the majority of users are not like this. These are people who aren't 
sure what Mozilla means when it asks "Do you want Mozilla to be the 
default mail application?". And why on earth should they be? This sort 
of thing should be set up for them by someone who knows and cares about 
it, like Dell or Packard Bell for instance. [Of course there is always a 
danger of restricting choice too much, but we're a hell of a long way 
from that].

Programs such as Mozilla FireBird and ThunderBird are starting to take 
that on board. There is substantially less in the options boxes for 
these; most of the less important choices have been removed, leaving 
only the stuff people most people care about. And even that is presented 
in a much more straightforward way. [hackers can always still install 
the "Preferential" package and get access to all the stuff they used to 
be able to]. This is a Step In The Right Direction. IMHO anyway :)


Alex


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