[Ubuntu-ch] Ubuntu strengths [was: Re: OT: iPhone]

[Theo Schmidt]

Dirk Deimeke schrieb:
...
> uncritical info is the topic in the last weeks. I had some very controverse
> articles in my blog ... Apple devices are religious stuff :-)

Link?

...
> My wife is a typical end user, not a techie. I convinced her to change from
> Mac OS X to Ubuntu. She is happy now.

Mine too. Dito from Windows to SuSE to Debian to Kubuntu.

However she never would have switched on her own. Most users need a 
person really nearby to consider a migration.

> Where are other "typical" end users?
> 
> Why do you (or me) use Ubuntu?
> 
> What do we tell our neighbours, colleagues, ...?

I think many of us like Ubuntu because it is fairly user-friendly and 
with the power of Debian (e.g. package management). Still it could be be 
more so, e.g. kcontrol isn't as comprehensive as SuSE's YaST. Newbies 
like something which is popular already, so that it is well supported. 
Ubuntu has reached that level and has relatively many community members 
who also are mostly not extremely geeky. Ubuntu works fairly well. It 
only takes one major-cockup to get some users to switch. E.g. I switched 
from SuSE mainly because one release had many bugs with USB-storage. I 
was happy with Debian but then preferred Ubuntu because I'm not really 
that keen on administration via terminal or text-editor as my memory 
isn't that terrific.

Regarding the papers: they do like human-interest stories. I.e. they are 
far more likely to a story of a sympathetic student helping neighbours 
with Linux that a review of a distribution release.

Theo Schmidt