Online article: "Microsoft funds African PCs amid open source debate"

[ulrich steffens]

Am Freitag, den 07.10.2005, 08:01 -0400 schrieb Eric Dunbar:
> Of course, you're a "fiddler". Most people who use computers aren't.
> They're limited to the basics of internet and word processing and the
> occasional game. The beauty of the commercial OS is that it offers
> relatively straight forward troubleshooting. No need to head off to an
> obscure wiki, fire up a hyper-intimidating terminal and enter archaic
> commands to a CLUI (and, that, my friends, is Linux troubleshooting in
> a nutshell).
> 
_i_ have to disagree here.
while i'm doing a lot of support for people running many os's, i can
tell most people are lost regardless of the os when things go wrong. 
the big minus on the windows side of computing is that the os comes with
pretty crippled or simply no build-in tools to recover. you simply rely
on third-party software which in most cases costs money. and when things
really go wrong and you really need some help from outside, most linux
support you find for free on the net is in way more efficient than for
windows. the ressources for win (the ones you find if your not a
geek/fiddler) are pretty meaningless in case of solutions to your
problems. the typical 'reinstall and everything is ok' is not a
fairytale written by linux zealots, its reality. sadly.

and the tools to get things to work that are under the hood are way more
accessible then the ones in windows for example. not all problems can be
corrected through the GUI. if in windows something really goes wrong,
you also have to go CLI. and everyone who had the joy to use the win CLI
will agree that this is _not_ accessible.

even if average users are afraid of the CLI, and they have to fiddle
around with config-files, its way more accessible to the user than
having a gui for editing 
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Blah\{66543S32889DSERT6543434D5G555656}.

since ubuntu i normally try to convince people to ditch windows and go
with alternatives if their needs allow this (think software). i get 3
times more support requests from windows users than the ones running
ubuntu. and _all_ of them are non-geeks. and windows is much harder to
fix than linux, cause its in no way straight forward.

this is _no_ propaganda, it's just also part of the _very_ colorful
reality ;)


just my 2 euro cents

ulrich

sorry if my english s*cks, me is kraut ;)