If you are a regular visitor here, you most probably would have read the article discussing the user friendliness factor of Linux. The most interesting part of the article was the response we got from our readers in the form of comments(nearly 90 of them and still counting). A lot of them are very well written and quite thought provoking too. We are featuring the best of them here. Thanks to all active readers of Tech Drive-in. This is a tribute to you all. Read on.
Featured Comments
"That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it." Morpheus ~ Comment by Andrey
"It's a point of view, you’re either a windows user or a linux user. My brother is a windows user, runs XP (that’s like 10 years old) he uses a pirate copy of Office 2000. He gets viruses and spyware and has to register and activate software and save product keys. I’ve installed openoffice and firefox on his computer and he doesn’t like them. I explained he gets more viruses through IE (although I don’t think you can install the new IE on XP) but he’s waiting until next year to buy a new computer with Win7 pre-installed because he thinks his computer is running out of memory and he doesn’t want to pay $200 for the new OS, he may pay $150 for the Student Office. He thinks that’s how computers are suppose to be.
My wife got a netbook with linux pre installed. The OS was old so I upgraded it to linux mint, never had to activate or find a key. She has no idea what a terminal is and I’m not a terminal fan. It had a wireless driver issue where I had to plug the netbook into an ethernet cable for it to automatically download the drivers (on my old xp desktop with the OEM disk I had to search for and download drivers and patches). None of my linux computers have antivirus software running, I never buy software (wait that’s not true, I spent $5 for World of Goo) I never have to buy a new computer because I want the new OS or because it’s running slow. I buy a new computer because the old one died. and that's how I think that computers are suppose to be" ~ Comment by Daniel
"I started out using Linux as a replacement server for a broken windows 2000 server. Win Server would crash DAILY and I spend hours of my life fixing DAILY. So I asked my boss if I could change one service to a Linux server. It worked perfectly. Never crashed and saved my boss money. So two weeks later, I switched another service. Same thing. Flawless. 3 months later, we had all windows services replaced by Linux, and the company had no down-time anymore.
It took until Fedora 12 to convince me that "it" was ready for me... not the other way around. I was ready 4 years earlier. It was during one of those 30 minute windows boot times that I said OK that's it. Linux here I come. It took about 3 weeks. Leaving Windows explorer was the hardest part. But I recently tried to use a windows XP computer, and forgot how long boot times were... then waiting for programs to load, and waiting for tasks to get done. I actually tried looking for ways to do my everyday Linux tasks in windows and felt crippled because I couldn't do them! I love Fedora." ~ Comment by Hunkah
"Here's a simple statement to help you realize just how easy Ubuntu is to use compared to Windows. All options and applications can be reached with two clicks or less. Everything. Preferences, System Options, preferences for anything, it's all there in Applications/Places/System. No need to go through a Control Panel, look for your extra Places (you can just add them to the Places Menu by dragging it), and you can get 99 percent of the applications you'll use from the Ubuntu Software Center. Also, if you don't use Wine, soon that'll be 100 percent when they include freeware and commercial software, not just FOSS. (they already have Flash in there, for instance)
My Grandparents use Ubuntu, and they didn't need anything to be explained to them. Just showed them around for about 5 minutes, reassured them that it's not easy to 'break' anything, so not to worry about crashes or instability or security issues or slow downs- just use your computer, and explore if you're curious. It's very friendly.
And they like it A LOT MORE than Windows, because they're new to using their computers any further than opening a browser, really.
If my Grandparents who are entirely computer illiterate can figure it out in 5 minutes, what is everyone whining about? It really is just different, and in a VERY GOOD WAY. I do NOT want a control panel. It's unwieldy and impractical compared to having everything right in your face.
Everyone knows you can just use Gnomenu and DockbarX, so it's not really hard to make it all Windows-ey. Heck, you can even be silly and go to websites and download DEBs/RPMs if you want (it'll just inform you a version is already provided in the repositories to make you feel stupid). Also, KDE4.4. If you say that's less friendly than Windows, and you're a Windows user, you're just fooling yourself." ~ Comment by MurdersLastCrow
There are other good comments too which have been excluded from above listing because of the sheer size many of those comments. You might want to check them all anyway. Link here.
There are other good comments too which have been excluded from above listing because of the sheer size many of those comments. You might want to check them all anyway. Link here.