[members at lugog] Introduction:

[Damian]

On 25/11/2010 12:00, glastonbury-request at mailman.lug.org.uk wrote:
> It goes back to when *buntu first came on the scene and lots of people
> I knew who had been staunch Debian users abandoned it for *buntu for
> no apparent reason. I still don't understand why they did so as
> *buntu didn't seem to offer any benefits over Debian or any of the
> other offshoots at the time.
I think one of the main reason lots of people went to Ubuntu was because 
lots of people went to Ubuntu!

There was suddenly one distro with a huge user base that was trying it's 
best to be a purely GUI experience.

Also, Linux had been getting better and better for years, but I never 
stayed with any version because they were just too geeky. In Windows, I 
considered myself a geek. If anyone had a Windows problem, I was the one 
they called on to fix it. In Linux, that was out of the water. Anything 
that went wrong needed the command line. And what do you put into the 
command line? Who knows! It's all very simple when you know how, but 
mind bogglingly impossible when you don't. Your average geek doesn't 
mind poking around a system to tweek this and that, but having to user 
the command line for everything was just too much.

I use the command line a fair bit now, but the less it's 'needed' the 
better *IF* the end goal is to compete with Windows. If that's not the 
end goal, then the uber-geeks can keep happy on the command line. 
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but that's never going to 
impact on Windows. No one wants to 'upgrade' to an OS where they will 
need more support than they used to, what's the point of that?

Replacing Windows isn't my end goal. I just like the feel of good open 
source software and while ever the work involved in using that is within 
my available time and capabilities I will stick with it. I've had a 
MythTV home cinema system for years now, but a couple of times with a 
couple of the really nasty problems that have taken weeks of forum 
support to iron out, I have been VERY close to packing it all in and 
installing Windows media centre. Why, because for £XX I can get a system 
that pretty much just works, and the bits that don't are well within my 
grasp to fix. I'm getting to that point with Ubuntu now. I'm sure the 
other distros have caught up in terms of 'GUI for everything' and the 
end user in mind, but I certainly think that Ubuntu lead the way and it 
was a very important growth for Linux as a whole.

My god, that turned into a rant! Who's side am I on?

The main point I was wanting to make was the first one. Suddenly there 
was one distro with a huge user base rather than hundreds of distros 
(way too much chose for someone starting with little/no knowledge) with 
much smaller user bases.

Back in my box.

Cheers all
Damian