[CS-FSLUG] Why You Might Be Using Linux in 2009

[Ed Hurst]

Jon Glass wrote:

> Taking your arguments together, I fail to see why these people are
> using any computer but Macintoshes.... Great advertisements. ;-)

So, you are saying no answer I offer would be accepted? :-D

Mac never appealed to these people, never made it's way into their 
circle of experience. Yes, your experience is apparently different from 
mine, but I'm willing to bet mine is closer to the big answer to all 
this advocacy of Linux for the masses. For you to suggest Mac shows you 
aren't even on the same sheet of music. So let me tell you what my 
clients all say: Mac costs too much, always comes bereft of an office 
suite, and thus costs even more just to make it what they have when they 
buy a Windows PC from their vendor of choice.

Most of my clients did not have to reinstall Windows annually, but may 
have run across it once in three years. When they did, they were able to 
keep all their settings, all their customizations, which *do* matter to 
them. I can't count how many times a single upgrade from one minor 
version to another of any Linux distro didn't give me trouble because my 
settings wouldn't migrate. And I have read the same for literally 
hundreds on forums all over the Net.

It isn't the upgrading that's the problem, it's having a painless 
upgrade. It's an upgrade which apparently changes nothing, because they 
don't care about new features for the most part. These are people who 
probably could not tell the difference between OpenOffice 1.x and 3.x, 
except the latter is much slower and takes a lot longer to download. 
These are people who get along fine with MS Office 97 or Word Perfect 6 
for Windows. That includes me, BTW. How come I can't run WP8 for Linux 
(which I bought) on any modern distro? They can all run their WP8 for 
Windows on XP.

If Windows failed and had to be reinstalled once every year, that's 
still easier than most distro upgrades every six months. More features 
is not always a good thing. I'd be happy with the same desktop I had 
when I installed RedHat 7.2, with WP8, Applix 4.x, and only a few 
applications have gained any features I appreciate: Joe, Cream-Vim, and 
Nedit. Until recently, most of those would run, or could be compiled to 
run, on at least RH 7.2 (same as RHEL 2). RH 7.3 was *very* good, but it 
broke things moving from GNOME 1.x to 2.x.

Without me telling them I felt that way, most of my clients told me they 
did.

-- 
Ed Hurst
------------
Associate Editor, Open for Business: http://ofb.biz/
Applied Bible - http://soulkiln.org/
Kiln of the Soul - http://soulkiln.blogspot.com/