A really really bad idea...

[Lavene]

In my generation (late sixties) there is not a lot of female computer geeks. Most are happy as computer users surfing the web and sending e-mail with their Windows machine. But since my 'love affair' with computers started already with the first micros of the eighties I tend to forget that most of my friends belong the the above mentioned group of computer users. That fact, and a really bad idea (that seemed like a very good idea at the time) about Christmas cards last year came back to haunt me this morning.

The Christmas card idea was that instead of sending them traditional boring cards no one really notice I decided to send out some Kanotix Live CDs with the season greetings written on the CD cover. I also included some very minimal instructions on how to use it. Basically my instructions told them to just boot off the CD and enjoy a Linux dry-run.

Well, this morning I got a call from one of my friends. She said she had found the CD I had sent her for Christmas and that it had contained a virus. She had just reinstalled Windows but she had lost everything she had on her harddrive. I didn't believe her and told her that the CD for sure did not contain a virus and even if it did it would not affect her system. Well, to make a long story short, here is what happened:

She had loaded the disk when she was running windows, not noticing my instructions. When she couldn't make sense of what she saw she forgot about it leaving the CD in the drive for a couple of days. Then she did something causing windows to ask for a reboot and dang! Something strange happened. A lot of text flickered by the screen and when it finished booting Windows looked all strange and acted nothing like she was used to. Confused she called tech support where she had bought her PC and the guy she talked to could not understand what was wrong. After a couple of reboots he came to the conclusion that since her whole system acted so weird and Windows was looking so messed up it had to be a virus. Her only way out was to reinstall Windows.

The first thing would of course be to load the Windows install CD and when she did that she found the Kanotix CD in the drive. Without thinking twice about it she carried out the Windows re-install. So now she has lost everything, I have (maybe) lost a friend and the store where she used to buy computer stuff has lost a customer.

I did get a couple of other strange responds too but they were luckily not that bad:
- One of them returned the CD to me thanking me for it but, and I quote: “as you know I'm not gay!” (I'm still working on figuring that one out)

- Another one sent me an e-mail saying that her husband had said that she must never ever boot of anything else than her harddrive or the Windows install CD.

This year it will be traditional Christmas cards again, and I will never ever try to push anything computer related on anyone anymore...

Tina

[fos]

I'm a product of the sixties too. But I have a dimmer view than you. Outside of the narrow computer world online, most people are appliance operators. They just want to plug it in and have the time display set automagically.

When you get outside of the online computer world, most computer people are bound to Windoze and Novell.

I do my best to promote Linux and open source. My daughter is an EE major. Most of her project reports "must" be turned in in M$ formats. She had to learn LaTex during her fresman year. It was on a Windows system at the university. She did most of her work on one of my Linux systems here at the house.

I have most of my immediate family converted to Linux. Once they find out how much faster, efficient, and stable it is they are hooked.

Sorry about your friend,

fos.....

[bluesdog]

She had loaded the disk when she was running windows, not noticing my instructions

As an IT friend of mine says, 'Some people shouldn't be allowed to operate a telephone without training wheels'

I once tried to give a linux live cd to a MS-certified windoze sysadmin.
She literally backed away as if I were trying to hand her some crack cocaine.

Now I just give people a few weblinks, and tell them I can give them a linux cd and a few pointers, if they want to liberate themselves from the tyranny of MS.

[benjaminq]

I tried to convert my family and I somewhat succeeded partly. My parents in law use a SuSE machine and quite happy since it does whot they want (using it as a typing machine primarily).

My mother is hooked on a special Mahjongg game that runs under Windows and since she does not really go online more than once a year I limited myself and installed a Linux on a small partition for emergency cases. When I am there I have a CD handy with a fresh virus scanner and a new spybot for the MS. Also, she is very much accustomed to using her Windows Programs (photoimpact, Photoshop, acdsee). I am happy that she took the challenge and used a computer anyway! So I certainly won't force her breaking with the hard-earned habits ...

My wife has a dual boot system but she uses Windows. Although I had to re-install the system twice due to quirks and viruses. At least she prefers Firefox over IE. I'll try to install mepis6 as option for her. Interestingly it's me that does the scanning, printing, layout for greeting cards, photo-cd burning ... mainly because my computer is turned on most of the time.

So people tend to go the way with the least resistance, except those enthousiasts that use Linux ;-)

I get a headache when I think of updating my Windows partition ... my wife happily uses Firefox 1.0.7 and other outdated versions, she is just not interested in new versions unless either I point her onto them or the old version refuses to do its work (what generally does not happen ever). I told her, the next virus attack, she will have to figure it out on her own, since my next repair-kit would make her system a Linux-only system. I am not able to tell this wholeheartedly because she is smart enough to figure it out on her own and get her Windows running again.

So what can you do with people that WANT to use MS? Even if they know the benefits of Linux, even if they know that it works and is secure and reliable, even if they would have a husband that will do the updates??? They continue to use MS because of Word ... or the software that came with the camera. It's frustrating.

So the take home messages are:
1) (Bad) habits die hard.
2) Linux advantages are not percieved as significant so as to allow a change of habits.
3) When people are plugged in front of something new, they adopt Linux easily.

I stopped my trials to convert friends to Linux, whenever they moan over their Windows problems I just tell them that I never have those problems, never had a virus a backdoor a bluescreen that I update the whole system AND the installed programs with one single command, that I have four desktops and always enough screen space. When they talk about the stuff that works under Windows only (like synching their phones easily, or installing a remote control for their TV card ...) I stay silent.

Lets face it, people want the computer to perform tasks, Windows provides these functionality to 100% Linux gets a 80%-100% from me (depending on what your requirements are I would rate myself 90% but I can do without the last 10%). The disadvantages of Windows never appear on this calculation.

Linux on the desktop? Maybe if all the manufacturers of consumer products add Linux in their supported OS list. Hardly ever before that.

May be a different situation for companies, administrations and so on.

Benjamin

[danieldk]

I think that the problem is that we want to make Linux to look like Windows. It will always be inferior in some people's eyes, because Linux is not Windows. Unix systems have their own strengths, think about command line techniques, such as redirection and piping, and the integration of regular expressions in many applications. The thing is that it takes some time to learn it, but it is very effective for many workloads. E.g. someone who knows the Unix shell can make fast mechanic changes to a LaTeX file, or preformat thousands of numbers, you can't do the same thing with most GUI programs. IMO it would be better tot grab 15% of the market in a Unixy way, than 30% of the market as a Windows/OS X copy.

Anyway, in the end will all not matter too much. The world is rapidly moving to web applications, it started with plain old sites and search engines, nowadays most people are using webmail, and it is only a matter of time before people will write documents via the web. In such a world the browser becomes the operating system, and we have a browser that people understand, and that works on most platforms. On the server-side LAMP and Linux + J2EE works very well. mod_mono, RoR, et al. will probably be there too. I think the concept of a "Desktop OS" will go away, and the web will be the application.

[krp]

Another thing pertaining to GNU/Linux adoption, at least in my area (S.E. New Mexico), is perception. I think that I and my family are the only ones in the whole blasted county who use GNU/Linux.

Why? Perception. If something is 'free' then that something must either be of very low quality or built by the communists. I'm not kidding about this either. Additionally, back here anyway, folks tend to be slight stubborn on occasion (a prize understatement, indeed) And that is only talking about the folks who have heard of GNU/Linux.

The web very well may become the OS of the future. However that future is a very long way off in this neck of the plains.

krp

[Lavene]

The only 'non-geek' I have successfully converted 100% to Linux is my significant other and she is strictly a GUI user. I have tried time and time again to make her grasp the consept of the CLI but to no avail. She is now a fairly competent KDE user but even that took some doing due to a high level of uncertainty. It looked a little like Windows, it felt a little like Windows but she knew it wasn't Windows. So every time she did something she really was not sure what to expect. And that was a problem I wasn't prepared for.

She could ask: "How do I open a file in Firefox?" so I would tell her "Click on file... open file..." and she would go: "Oh... just like Windows!"
Another time I would have to tell her why she couldn't install the exe file she had downloaded and then show her how to find and install programs using Synaptic... for the 3rd time.

Then there is the file system. For someone that don't know what a file system really is, just that they for years have known that their files is stored under C:\documents and settings\.....\my documents\whatever it's not easy to grasp that there are no C: or D: or any other letter colon.
And the root contra user permissions...

She really like her Debian box and enjoy it's stability and free software, especially OpenOffice and Gimp which is way better than the dodgy pirated Office95 and ditto old PaintShop pro she used to have. But I really doubt she would have managed it on her own. She would probably have chosen the easy way out and gone back to windows.

As for the desktop OS to go away... maybe some day but I think it's still quite some time into the future. So my guess is that the desktop 'war' will carry on for years to come. Another guess of mine is that *nix systems will loose the battle for the average user. Simply because the average user don't care about things like security, stability etc as long as they can take the lazy route of sticking with what the know.

But hey... I'm still famous among my friends for making the following statement after trying out a demo of Windows 2.0 ages ago: "This is just stupid! It will never take off. Why do you think hardly anyone uses Macintosh?" I thought the mouse/ GUI way of using a computer was utterly stupid...

So much for my ability to predict the technological future :P

Tina

[danieldk]

The only 'non-geek' I have successfully converted 100% to Linux is my significant other and she is strictly a GUI user. I have tried time and time again to make her grasp the consept of the CLI but to no avail.

Hmmm. My girlfriend started out with Slackware Linux 4.0 about two and a half years ago. She had an old Dell with 64MB RAM, like the FOSS philosophy, and wanted to support such a good effort. I could have installed a newer Slackware Linux version, but she was not connected to the net at that time, and Slack 4.0 made the machine look like a porche.

After some time she switched to Libranet 2.8, because Adminmenu made life much easier for her (on her old Dell, and later on a new IBM). But on one day a glibc update broke TextMaker, causing hangs, in the middle of a period when she used it extensively to get in time for some printing deadlines. I gave it a spin on one of by boxes that was running Slack, and it worked fine there. So, she didn't care what distro she had to run, as long as TextMaker worked, and it worked well on Slackware. So, I helped her installing Slackware on her computer. Since then she got hooked, she uses the Slackware Basics book when she has some problem, and uses the console when needed (e.g. for mounting stuff). Now she does not want to switch to something else, because Slackware is simple and does not get in the way.

My dad also uses Linux. He has used it on and off the last few years. I have installed Fedora Core 4 when it was fresh, and it has worked without too much hassle. The Firefox/Thunderbird/GThumb/OO.org/MS Office combo does most of the work. He also uses Quantum to edit HTML files.