New users - possible problems

[Larry Hartman]

I am a fairly new user myself.  I tried Linux three years ago (libra) and it 
was very robust at the time, but completely overwhelming due to the things 
that I had to learn all at once.  Ubuntu/Kubuntu has made that learning curve 
much more managable.  I am not afraid to get my hands dirty with technology, 
so I jumped right in and promptly, unintentionally, and inadvertantly 
destroyed my MS partition!  I wanted to run dual boot for a while, but was 
forced by these events to take on Linux all at once.  As a result, when I 
introduced a friend on mine to Linux I was able to walk him through how to 
install dual boot properly.

I spent lots of time on various forum pages getting gadgets and gizmos on my 
laptop to function, and not only function, but function farely 
transparent/automatically to me.  Afterall I did not spend money on a 
computer to serve it, but to have it serve me.  I still have a ways to go, 
but have learned enough to determine that Kubuntu is a keeper and I am once 
again back to doing productive work with my computer.  

I did note one difference between Dapper and Edgy that is subtle but 
significant to new users.  Edgy did do a better job at my hardware 
recognition and setup, and as a result I had much less manual tweaking to do 
with shells, scripts, and *.conf files.  I can not speak much about other 
distributions, but with Ubuntu, nearly all of the answers I needed was on the 
Ubuntu/Kubuntu forums and WIKIs with a little digging.  Perhaps a good early 
lesson for new users is how to research topics on the forum and WIKI 
pages....

Right now it would be very hard for me to return to MS after what I know about 
the strategic directions MS is taking and with the quality of opensource 
software that is available in Linux.


Larry Hartman


On Friday 05 January 2007 14:12, Michel wrote:
> On Friday 05 January 2007 14:12, Neil Winchurst wrote:
> > There has been some discussion recently about getting computer users off
> > Windows and on to Linux. I think that is a great idea. However I suggest
> > that some help and hand-holding will be required. Here are some thoughts
> > that I recently set down.
> >
> > *************************************************************************
> >** *
> >
> > Setting up Kubuntu Edgy.
> >
> > There has been some chat recently about getting Windows users to migrate
> > to Linux with particular reference to Kubuntu. I have used Linux for
> > years  I installed Edgy the day that it came out and I have been pleased
> > so far. It might be interesting to look at the changes and tweaks that I
> > have made so far. My point is that as it installed out of the box so to
> > speak, it was not yet ready for me. It worked, of course, but I had to
> > do quite a bit of customisation before I was happy with it. What will
> > people new to Linux think I wonder.
>
> <snip>
> a list of linux programs that can replace windows programs
> eg. nero == k3b
> m$ office == ooo
> ......
>
> --
> Google: your number one source of not sounding retarded.