[ubuntu-uk] 30 test drive of Ubuntu: PC world

[Barry Titterton]

On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 10:07 +0100, Barry Titterton wrote:
> > 
> > 30 Days With Ubuntu Linux
> > 
> > By Tony Bradley, PCWorld
> > @TheTonyBradley
> 
> Has anybody else been following this series? What are your thoughts?
> 
> Barry T
> 
> 
My thoughts are that on the whole the series was interesting, however I
was generally disappointed by the reviewer. He intended to spend each
day with a different feature of the OS but he seemed incapable of
spending half an hour on Google to do basic research. He seemed to give
up very easily when things didn't go exactly as he wanted. For example
he condemned GNUCash for the wizard not offering the option to import
Quicken files, it was pointed out by GNUCash users that this option is
available in File>Import. He (or more correctly his wife) also condemned
GIMP for not having an 'Eye Dropper' tool when this icon is clearly
there on the Tools menu box. It was sloppy journalism.

He made no secret that he was a die hard MS fan. This did seem to
blinker him to home truths that self evident to other windows users,
such as Windows does not 'Just Work' as he repeatedly maintained. He
kept mentioning the effort needed to learn a new way of working as being
a problem. Has must have forgotten the culture shock of jumping from
Office 2003 to Office 2010, or WinXP to Win7. I know this first hand as
my employer is doing both changes this year and the negative effect on
productivity for some people is quite marked: one colleague spent 20
minutes trying to find a formatting option in Word2010 that he would
have done in 30 seconds in the previous version of Office. At home my
wife prefers Ubuntu over Win7 precisely because the learning curve is
much smaller when coming from WinXP.

For a technology professional his understanding of the different
concepts was quite poor at times. He repeatedly laboured the short
comings of the default software while completely ignoring the fact that
the Ubuntu ISO file is a master piece of packaging at 650Mb: a Win7
installation disc can be approx 3GB without the office suite, depending
upon version. On the other hand he did give credit where it was due for
features such as security and the software centre.

Overall a good example of the reaction of a windows user who is happy
with what he's got and has no real interest in changing.

Barry T