No subject

Over a beer or two in the Bell, Stef was showing off her learning
material for a one week Linux course that she'd just been on over
somewhere Newark-ish or thereabouts ;-) From a drunken quick scan
through, the course material looked pretty good.

I was quite surprised for how big a volume was needed for what I
considered to be 'common' Linux/*nix OS knowledge. One full week and
that was the first steps to be able to navigate around the system and to
do some rudimentary system admin tasks. Admittedly, some of that also
covered superficially how things are put together in the Linux system.

So perhaps there is indeed a very steep learning curve to what is behind
the desktop in Linux and *nix...

But then again, even Windows doesn't fully automate all that away
either. You just get a confusion of dialog boxes to fill in...

Interestingly, one of the Linux mags this month has an article called
"The Girlfriend Test" to see how well a naive computer user can do
everyday computer tasks on a Linux system. No surprises, but interesting
as a good idea and comparison. Brief summary: Most bits were intuitive
and worked well, and some not. Any "geek-speak" dialogs were a complete
show-stopper.


Perhaps computers are just simply too complicated! Licensing issues even
more so!!

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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