Next release

[Joel Goguen]

On Fri, 2007-24-08 at 19:56 -0300, Richard Seguin wrote:
> I love it!!!!!  How many people do you have in your group? We are at a
> slight disadvantage out here in the eastern provinces as our population
> is a lot less and spread out more...  I have thought of designing
> systems based on compatibility... I have also thought of the black box
> idea where you
> push the power button and up comes a screen... No configuration and
> really no flexibility (great for people who only want something for web
> surfing and email and such)... It would be money in our pockets...  The
> geographical area around here though makes it so that idea is a bit hard.
> 
> I guess it goes back to the post I made a few minutes ago...  WHY should
> people use Ubuntu...  any semi-geek knows that Windows and Linux are
> competitors... For my own efforts anyway I want to take that out of the
> equation...
> 
This is close to what I keep coming back to.  Our culture is so in love
with money that when we see something totally for free, the immediate
reaction is almost invariably "something _must_ be wrong with it".  If
you say that nothing is wrong with it, or if you say that nothing is
wrong but... then you'll turn people off.  If you agree with them, it
doesn't matter what you say after that.  

The other curse (or a blessing depending on your point of view) is
choice.  People, contrary to what most F/OSS advocates say, do not
always want lots of choices.  Some of us (like me) prefer to have lots
of choices, but other people (like one friend of mine) want to have just
one way of doing it that just works.

Less technically literate people also want things to stay familiar.
That's a big reason why a lot of people are staying away from Vista -
it's not familiar to them.  I have no problem adapting to different
interfaces on different systems (but going from Gnome to KDE to FVWM can
throw me for a loop :)) but the biggest complaint I get from people is
that it's not familiar.

Finally, people don't like the command line.  I work for a university IT
help desk, and all the time people call in asking for help and decide
they would rather deal with their problem until one of us can do all
that "DOS stuff" for them.  There's nothing they can click on to do the
job, so it must be too hard for them.

Anyway, I know a lot of that is off topic, but after that first
paragraph I needed to say it.  At the very least, it's good things to
keep in mind when telling people about Ubuntu, or Linux in general.

-- 
Joel Goguen
http://jgoguen.net/
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange
protein -- it rejects it.  -- P. Medawar
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