[SLUG] Digital Scarborough

[David Webster]

Bob Garrood wrote:
> Hi
>
> At the last meeting Digital Scarborough came up.  If we want to organise for 
> this, then I suggest we start by settling the theme, and then some general 
> ground rules for organisation.  Here is an idea.
>
> Theme. Last year it was 'Freedom'.  How about 'Alternatives' this time, 
> perhaps organised as, say, 3 examples,  "Alternatives to Office",  
> "Alternative Browsers" are possibles.  I am sure there will be other 
> suggestions ("Alternatives to crashes and viruses").  Each alternative would 
> each need an A4 poster listing possibilities.  "Alternatives to Office" might 
> be OpenOffice, Koffice, Abiword, Gnumeric and even editors like Gedit and 
> Kate, and these could be available for inspection on the 3 machines we set 
> up.
>
> Ground rules.
> Rather than give out handouts, we could try to point people at helpful 
> websites.  Only people with the initiative to look things will want to 
> install linux anyway.
>
> Bob
This is rather tricky ground. In the past the Linux community as a whole 
has compared Linux to Windows, with a bit of Windows bashing. As we have 
discussed in our group, Linux is not a free version of Windows. There 
are a number of things that Linux doesn't do that Windows does. 
OpenOffice does not feature a lot of features that Word 2003 does, for 
example. What I'm getting at here, is that perhaps Linux shouldn't be 
pushed onto home/family users. Instead, what we could look at is:

"How can Linux benefit a power user or a business?"

Just my thoughts.

Dave