[Sussex] Dell Precision 650

[Geoff Teale]

Mark

That is a really good point.  

I am the "helpdesk" for my family and friends (and indeed my wife and her
colleagues whilst at work, because it's quicker and more likely to suceed
than calling their own helpdesk!).

When I get my new computer my old one will be a hand-me-down for my sister
Louise and her two sons.  This is a process I have been through several
times already.  The difference this time, is that the computer they recieve
will have Linux as it's primary OS - I say primary purely because my nephews
have several games, some of which will not run in WINE, Win4Lin or even
VMWare.  

Now, I didn't think Louise would accept a Linux box.  I've been trying to
talk her round for quite some time, and she has been of the opinion that her
friends know best and _they_ have never heard of Linux, so it can't be any
good.  However a couple of things have happened in the last few months:

0/ 
My sister and my oldest nephew, Joe actually used both Linux and Mac OS X at
my house.  Louise used Gnome 2.0, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org and Evolution on
my Gentoo box.  Joe happily played TuxRacer and Chromium for a while and
spent some time mucking around with tuxpaint.  She also spent a little time
on the iMac, and out of the two she found the Linux machine more comfortable
to use - now I think this had a lot to do with Gnome

2/ 
Louise experienced a number of problems and annoyances with her machine
(nothing unusual there), some things were easy to fix, but increasingly she
is getting annoyed about things like Internet explorer periodically deciding
to go off to the Microsoft update site rather than her homepage.  Now that
is in the sphere of what I'd call a minor gripe, but it bugs her, and I've
told her that I don't really have the time or the inclination to work out
how to stop it doing it.  More than that, I've told her that in some cases
it may not be possible for me to fix it.  Louise see's that I do not suffer
from these annoyances and that when something does bug me, it can _always_
be fixed, or turned off.  She actually told me if she was going out and
buying a new machine she would have demanded Linux!

So there we go, the secret to getting people to look at Linux seems to be
not trying to hard to support Windows :)


-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be
regarded as a criminal offense." 
 - Edsger W. Dijkstra (from "Selected Writings on Computing")



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