[CS-FSLUG] "Final" answer from PowerNotebooks.

[David Aikema]

On 6/25/05, Nathan T. <celerate at gmail.com> wrote:
> It may seem to those stores like they aren't going to be able to sell
> Linux no matter what, but I think if they went to the same trouble to
> sell a good Linux distribution as they do to sell Windows they
> wouldn't have any trouble finding willing customers, many of which
> with the help of books which the store could put right next to the
> Linux display would probably find it a nice OS. It would help if the
> books were written specifically for that distribution and were at
> least as current as the version of the distribution that is shown on
> the computer and on the shelves. Perhaps Mandrake and SUSE should
> invest in having such books written for them just like Linspire did,
> not thick manuals, but instruction books like one might read to learn
> electronics or how to program.

A lot of Linux distributions have a fairly high turnover rate in terms
of the number of new releases being shipped out they door.  As far as
the typical end user is concerned, with Microsoft there's only been
one release in the past few years (XP).

Additionally, there are many different flavours of Linux out there and
you simply can't support all of them at the retail level in a single
store (different admin tools, themes, icons, preferred application,
etc.).  Thus if one user buys a computer from store A selling (eg.)
Mandriva and a second user buys a computer from store B with SuSE, I
think that the typical end user will have problems executing some
tasks on his system that the other user is able to execute on theirs,
and just get generally confused as a result.

David