Ubuntu

[Jon Pruente]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 3:49 PM, feba thatl <febaen at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Honestly, for a linux newbie, I'd avoid comparisons to other software.
>  It's *like* it, sure, but it *isn't* it, and that needs to be clear.
>  They shouldn't expect it to be a clone of it, that will work the same
>  way. They should expect it to be an entirely new thing, that will take
>  a little bit of getting used to. Somewhat in the same way you wouldn't
>  tell someone that driving an SUV is like driving a moving van, but
>  they both use the same basic skills.

I put a Ubuntu Athlon XP system in a friends house as an upgrade from
their old K6 Win98 POS.  I didn't tell them anything much about it
except that "it's not Windows and doesn't run Windows stuff.  That
includes viruses and crap."  I pretty much only showed them how to
login (one for each adult in the house), that FireFox was how to get
on the web, and where Add/Remove Programs was and what it did.  It's
been many months and the only problem I've heard about was a problem
playing CDs. Turns out they were fairly well scratched, so it wasn't a
Linux/UI problem.  I know they use XP systems at work and they never
questioned me about how to do something "like on Windows".  They
aren't really computer power users or even particularly savvy but
Gnome was straight forward enough that they didn't have any big
transition issues because I told them up front that it was going to be
different.  For a new user stuff like popup tooltips are invaluable.
Anyway, I don't think they would have got along so well if it had been
KDE and setup to be like Windows.  They would likely have been trying
to find stuff as under Windows because there wouldn't have been a
significant visual difference between them.

Jon.