[Gllug] Linux config suitable for everyone...

[Mark Preston]

Tethys wrote:
> Pete Ryland writes:
> > >>>Mozilla. Definitely.
>>
>>Why not galeon or konq?  (not wanting to start a war here but a reason for
>>the choice would be nice)
> > > Again, not wanting to start a flame war, but... Konqueror is crap!
> No I don't believe in beating around the bush :-) What I'm saying,
> though, is that is has far too many rendering bugs, it does a poor job
> of handling css, and gives the user an overall worse experience than
> Mozilla.

Having spent a few hours of the the last two weekends setting up a Mandrake 
based PC for my parents who are in their seventies and have absolutely no 
computer experience at all I would say that KMail and Konqueror are probably 
a better bet for most real newbies. The K desktop could certainly be improved 
by replacing the K button with a "Start" or "Begin clicking here" button. The 
advantage IMHO is that Kmail is a better email client than Mozilla composer.
My dad "I don't want to worry about all this email stuff, I just want to be 
able to look things up on the web when I hear 'for further details go to 
www...'" and my mum "well, my idea is to get your dad to look things up so I 
can come along and look at the websites once he's set it up". Once I had 
convinced them that an email address and system was desirable I then set up 
Kmail for both of them. However, when using Mozilla (which I had also set up 
for them) you go off surfing the web and you click onto an email button and 
up pops the Mozilla composer - leading to massive confusion. The other 
advantage of Konqueror is that you can actually set up websites. So I 
utilized this to set them up with up a very basic web-page at ukfsn.org. The 
first weekend left them with a set-up for surfing the web, but when I 
returned they hadn't got that far. I asked them to show me what they were 
doing and it was interesting to see my dad happily clicking away at the 
Kdesktop items as they flash up on booting. Saying I keep doing this,but it 
doesn't seem to work.
Then as this central image disappears he is left bewildered. If the K button 
said begin he may have made more progress. The "Linux in easy steps" book 
which I also left with them seemed a bit too difficult in retrospect. So last 
weekend I left them surfing with Konqueror and when they clicked on an email 
button up pops Kmail. I still haven't received an email from them yet though, 
so I guess there are some more teething troubles to be overcome.
For slightly more advanced users I would think that installing Gnome and 
KDesktop would be better and setting up IceWM may be an idea. I have found 
this separates the various programs quite well.
Mark Preston

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