Windows Rant

[Angus MacGyver]

On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 19:04 -0400, Nathan Bahn wrote:

> 
> A.MG.--
> 
> I'm curious as to exactly HOW you persuaded your mother to upgrade to
> Linux.  The reason I ask is that I have a whole SLEW of people using
> my router to browse (from Windows OSs, naturally) the web and I'm
> finding it quite difficult to get them to do their browsing from a
> non-administrative account.  Any suggestions on how to sell Linux
> would be greatly appreciated.


Mother had a bad habit of getting the latest virus and clogging up the
mail server with it's payload back in the day of mass-mailers.
(remember you have to have a virus before a definition, and once a week
updates for AV definitions were the norm)

The things that really cut it were lack of viruses, more secure, more
stable and all at either no cost, or very little (such as a cisco
wireless card that worked perfectly with linux, rather than a nasty USB
netgear that didn't), something that couldn't be said for a Windows
route.

I'm a little less worried by my mother's occasional forgetfulness when
updating her linux machine with updates than I was when there were
Windows updates.

I'd given her email on a linux server for a while by then, after
migrating from Windows, so she'd seen the stability improvement at that
end to help make the choice.

These days, one thing that mother sees when she does go to conferences
etc, is that she gets perceived as seriously ahead of the game when she
fires up her linux laptop.... it's the "wows" from the other
delegates :-)