Is Ubuntu safe to try

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 03:15:13PM +1000, Serg Belokamen wrote:
> You fail to understand that tech. support is just as much about
> teaching users how to do something they didnt know was possible or
> didnt know how to as it is about fixing things (if not more).

I work in tech support. I work one-on-one with customers all
the time, at their homes. I hate Windows machines for a
number of reasons that needn't detain us here. But my
clients with Macs have *never* needed to ask me how to do
something.

Take something really simple, like installing a new package.
How do you do it under OS X? You download a .dmg (disk
image) file, then drag it into the folder (normally
Applications) where you want to install it. It installs.
Most of the time you need to do nothing beyond dragging and
dropping.

Users should never have to worry about dependencies. This is
the job of the package manager, and I should never know
that, say, libc6 needs to be upgraded, but that upgrading
libc6 is going to break other packages.

Here's a totally off-the-cuff idea whose consequences I
freely admit I've not thought much about: how about if every
package contained all its dependencies? So instead of
downloading firefox, then libxml2, then etc., I just
download one big file that contains all of these? Then I
apt-get install it or whatever (preferably do something
graphical instead), and all the necessary files go under
/packages/firefox? When it comes time to remove Firefox, I
delete just that directory, and I'm done. Yes, there'd be
some (maybe quite a lot of) redundancy: lots of copies of
libc6 laying around. But disk space is cheap, and I suspect
that MP3s and porn will far outweigh the lost disk space
from redundant libc6.

I'm just trying to think of ways that we could eliminate
some of the messier parts of Linux -- parts that people
wouldn't choose to do, given the choice.

I'm reminded of an article linked from Tuesday's Slashdot
that's pretty interesting:
http://akaimbatman.blogspot.com/2005/06/linux-desktop-distribution-of-future_15.html

> There maybe a lot of reasons Apple doesn't emphesise "user community"
> but then again, they have such a small market share that they quiet
> possibly assume that if you get a Mac you know how to use it.

Sounds like you don't have much experience with OS X. It
behooves you to try it, just to see what we're up against.
I'd bet that after a few minutes of playing around with it
and seeing its level of *polish*, you'd admit that Linux has
a ways to go.

That said, I'm excited about all the X.org stuff that will
be coming down the pike in the next few months. It should
definitely improve our graphical polish.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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