Is Ubuntu safe to try

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 05:04:50PM +1000, Peter Garrett wrote:
> No OS is perfect. In the end it comes down to personal preferences, as long as the functionality is adequate to one's needs.

Sure; I absolutely agree. And if you're looking for my Linux
bona fides, I've written a heck of a lot of thoughts about
it here:

http://laniels.org/weblog/tech/free_software

I'm a free-software guy through and through: politically,
pragmatically, and ethically.

I would suggest, however, that if you were to sit newish
computer users down in front of an OS X box, let them play
with it for a bit, and sit them down in front of a Linux
box, they'd find OS X more usable. So we should take
whatever's good about OS X and incorporate it into Linux.
Problem solved. :-)

One bit of trouble is this: in order to figure out whether
software is usable, you need to sit actual people down in
front of it. Getting bugfixes and UI ideas from the
community isn't enough. You need beta tests and usability
tests. The free-software community has mercilessly few of
those. As far as I know, GNOME went four years without any
testing at all:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/usertesting.html

So we need to do more of these. Hopefully corporate support
-- Novell, IBM, maybe Sun -- will help fund these.

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