[dundee] Linux on the desktop

[Andrew Clayton]

On Sat, 2004-01-10 at 15:19, alex mole wrote:
> I must confess that I, by and large, agree with his attack on too much 
> choice.
> 

I don't understand this fear of choice thing...


> 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 

eh?!

Linux doesn't just work?. Looked at Knoppix lately?



> 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

Debian asks tons of questions when it's installing software, Red
Hat/Fedora doesn't.

Pick the right distro for its intended audience.

Again, choice is good.


>  
> 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 

or just about:config in the url bar will reveal all.... or just open up
up the preferences.js file in $EDITOR


> be able to]. This is a Step In The Right Direction. IMHO anyway :)
> 

GNOME, for its sins is going this route, compare to metacity to sawfish
for example.... 


> 
> Alex



Andrew