Problems Linux Enthusiasts Refuse to Address

[Liam Proven]

On 5 April 2011 19:13, Douglas Pollard <dougpol1 at verizon.net> wrote:

Um. I don't mean to nit-pick just for the hell of it, I'm just curious...

> I have been sitting here reading these post and concidering where I have
> come from in using a desk top.  I started out using a Texas instrument
> computer with no programs no hard drives only tape drives and almost no
> memory.

TI99/4a? I used them at school. Horrible things, great keyboard and
interesting CPU notwithstanding. The first 16-bit home computer, but a
minicomputer CPU on a chip with no onboard registers!

>    Microsoft came out with 3.0 and 3.1 shortly after. I thought they were
> wonderful I had an IBM machine with a hard drive and Windows was great.
> After I sold my buisness fooling with my desk top became a hobby. After
> windows 97

Um. There wasn't one. There was /Office/ 97. You mention Win98 later,
so do you mean Win95?

> I began fooling with Debian.  It was more than I wanted to
> struggle with. I did like the ( misguided ) idea that it was being done by a
>  bunch of hobbyists.

Actually, pretty true of Debian, especially way back when.

> Along came Ubuntu

Launched in 2004, approaching a decade after Win95.

> and windows 98

Windows 98 was in, well, 1998, obviously! A full 7 years before the
first version of Ubuntu appeared, 4.10 "Warty Warthog" in October
2004.

> I kept fooling with
> both. I now use Ubuntu and do video with it.  Works great I like Corel auto
> painter in xp.  Does a few things I want to do. Tried it in Wine without any
> luck.

Odd - I believe Corel stuff is normally pretty good in WINE. They used
to develop for it and test against it.

> MY point is wine would not have brought me over from widows. This is
> what Ubuntu needs to do I don't think wine will help.I have a good friend
> who has been using Windows from the beginning and he thinks I am crazy for
> fooling with Linux and he thinks that anyone that uses apple is crazy.  He
> will tell me that he is not wedd to windows but there is nothing else out
> there.

Ah, well, I have met many such people.

> This is the problem I think, It's one of marketing.  I can't help but
> admire Bill Gates in that he has been a marketing genius.   I have always
> subscribed to the you can fool some of People ,and so on.  Bill Gates has
> fooled almost all the people and done it for one heck of a long time.  Its
> not that he is crooked though he may be, it's that he is really smart.

He is very smart /and/ very crooked. The marketing genius has mostly
been other people's, though, that he's hired. Gates' brilliance has
always been in extremely hard-nosed business practice. He does
whatever he can get away with and that little bit more, and he doesn't
care who he hurts if it makes a buck.

Well, he used to. He's retired now and is buying himself a good name
as a philanthropist.

> Ubuntu's share may be 2% for ever if they do not market it better.  I am not
> sure that free is not a part of that marketing problem. In the minds of most
> people you pay for what you get.  So free may be worthless. I think business
> doesn't like free software because it's a slap in the face to them.  Movie
> makers do not use anything that is cheap, much less free how do you mark up
> a free item to make 30% a third of nothing is nothing.   A friend is mad as
> hell about creative commons cheapening photography. In no way, will he use a
> free program. He tells me with pride, I pay for what I use.  He says even
> Mandrake is based on free even if you have to pay a little something for it.

I think you have a good point there. Sadly, the company exploiting
that market is Red Hat, not Canonical. But Canonical do need to find a
different angle, I agree.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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