[KLUG Advocacy] A User Leaving

[Dirk Bartley]

Being somewhat busy at work, I wanted to get involved with this thread
but I chose not to.  I wanted to state some gut feelings.

Gut feeling 1)  CHANGE IS F'n HARD for the average user.  If you move
one menu or put some field 1 over, users will female dog and moan till
they are blue in the face and then wake up the next morning still
moaning from yesterdays use of this different feces.  I may be
exaggerating a little here, but my point is that even small changes are
hard for the average user.  I guess after implementing a business
software switch at our company I cannot put enough swear words in this
and get my emotional feeling across so I won't even try.  Just bear with
me on my not wanting to fill the page with intercoursing this and feces
that and person born without the benefit of wedlock who have certain
tendencies toward the desire for no changes what-so-ever.

Gut feeling 2)  I can empathize with this guy very much.  I made 1 point
about how in gnome v. kde, kde will give you an hourglass until the app
starts letting you know that you can set and relax for a second and WW3
attack came right in my face about how ignorant f'ks like me should not
talk about these things and that what I was talking about was
soooooooooooo0oooo0oooooooooooo easy to configure and I would like to
think of myself as no dummy and I still have not found how to configure
this.  I tried for 1/2 hour and trying any more just is not worth it to
me to continue trying.  My email was even an invited reply for examples
of differences.  Until the distributions make the kind of studies out of
how to create the "Fischer Price" version of RH or the upcoming United
Linux distro like M$ made XP out of NT/2000.  The open source desktop
will not be able to obtain the mindset of the consuming public from the
devil.  Most people would rather reboot and complain about the support
they cannot get from megacorp than deal with bombastic bastards, insults
of their intelligence and flame wars they know and care little about. 
They also just want to get what they want done done.  I am sure though
that A Fischer Price version is not advisable and not what the community
wants.

Gut Feeling 3)  Most open source software comes from people tinkering
and doing it for the love of it.  'Most' open source programmers want to
get what they want done, done.  They are not so interested in making
understandable graphical configuration tools for complicated services
and configurations.  Only programmers that get salaries for performing
such tasks do so (for the most part).  This morning I mounted a couple
of iso files created from catting a cdrom device to a file by editing
fstab with a loopback configuration.  Now I did not do it by
understanding every item I put into fstab, I found a machine at work
where I did it before, copied and pasted and wala, mounted iso file.  I
am not going to create a nautilus style gui today and submit it to parse
and edit an fstab.  I was lucky I had an fstab I could ssh into to see
to save me time.  Try doing that today without doing things that Sally
Someuser would not do.  Try getting Sally Someuser to evan understand
that this kind of thing is possible.  Mounting iso files is one of the
many things that make OSS powerful.  No graphical admin tool for this
yet and definitely no read your mind kind of wizard.  I'm not advocating
read your mind wizards, just saying that would be required to satisfy
most.

I tried with relative lack of success to get my Father to use Linux for
a desktop and failed.  Maybe I did not spend enough time next to him
solving issues or maybe I think from my perspective a little to much.  I
like Xterm and someone like my Dad does not really want to type at a
command line.  One time it took me ALOT longer than I wanted just to get
him to Xterm over the phone and tell me what his ip address was so that
I could proceed with sshing into his computer.  I failed at this attempt
and I still love my Father and he just wants to get done what he wants
to get done.  I guess I have come to peace with losing this battle now.

Gut Feeling 4)  Linux on the desktop has it's best chance in the
corporate setting where CFO's like the savings and IT personnel are
there every day to solve issues that would have to be solved at the
command line.  Let's face it.  Sally Someuser does not want to type at a
command line.  Linux REQUIRES at least a little understanding of some
problems to solve them and a certain percentage of those solutions will
require the "antiquated" command line approach that I use 9 (or more)
hours per day.

Gut Feeling 5)  Our best chance at the home Sally Someuser desktop is
with the user who uses it at work and finds they like it.  Then they may
be willing to put up with the insults to their intelligence to save the
money they would have spent on M$.  Wait, let me reconsider that.  Most
people would not put up with that kind of treatment at alllllllllll in
any way shape or form, not even to save $500 from a 500lb used car
salesman who has the car of their dreams.  They just won't take it.

Let me end my rant by saying I hope you guys know I'm on your side.  I
like Linux on my desktop and my wife likes her win98 and my dad likes
linux on a server he does not use and 2000,98,XP on his other three
machines.  I'm OK with that.  The community will not succeed at some of
these conversions unless mindsets change dramatically.  I truly can
empathize with the writers position.


Dirk



On Wed, 2002-07-10 at 22:17, Adam Williams wrote:
> Slashdot has this story about a user leaving Linux and going to expee.
> http://members.optusnet.com.au/~knigits/articles/switched_back.html
> 
> I thought it was pretty level headed and made some good points.  Alot of
> this same thing applies to putting Linux in schools,etc....  I'm curious
> is anyone has any comments.
> 
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