I recently installed Ubuntu on an old box just to se what all the hype was about, and I’ll have to say having installed 3 other flavors of Linux (I tried Debian and Fedora, before deciding on Suse back when I first decided to give Linux a try) and XP from scratch before, that Ubuntu was by far the easiest and least technical of them all. The tutorials to get Ubuntu to play common media files were on par with those for Suse and fairly straight forward, but still that definitely starts to approach technical. So I’d say it’s a stretch to claim that Ubuntu (or any linux distro) has “out of the box media playing capabilities. Yes I realize that’s for solid legal reasons and it does just fine with open source CODECs, but most of us don’t have and our entire music collection in .ogg so we have to jump through that hoop. My big beef with Ubuntu came when I attempted to add a Samba share. Using the “Share Folders” GUI was simple enough, but when I went to access the share from a Windows box I was prompted for a password. I tried my Ubuntu login which failed. I went back to Ubuntu and attempted to find a GUI to managed Samba users and found nothing. Ubuntu help just pointed me to the Samba manual (talk about technical). I went to Google and found several forum posts on the subject all of which involved hand editing smb.conf, which of course involved going to the command line, because there was no GUI to run gedit as root. My initial impression of Ubuntu as compared to Suse is easier to install harder to manage / configure.

The biggest hurdle I see to Linux for general home use is setting up a simple home network. The interface in Ubuntu is simple and great, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work (at least not reliably). Suse’s works but is definitely technical and requires going through multiple interfaces. Neither OS’s GUI seems to be able to add a network share to fstab so that it’s mounted on startup; a requirement if say you want Amarok to manage music files stored on another box. (And it took over a month of forum posting to figure out how to get Suse to do it without putting the host on a static IP).

Oh and I can’t stand Evolution either, I’d really love to see Mozilla write a nicer address book app and then bundle it with Thunderbird and Sunbird in one “organizer” package.

On one hand, I loved OS/2, too. I bailed when IBM came out with those psychedelic “Warp” commercials absolutely blowing the marketing potential of that word. My brother was a Team OS/2 member and did all that stuff. I started running Linux in 1991 but just for learning and hacking. OS/2 was my desktop.

On the other hand, as for mothers and in-laws and such, check out Interview with a Grandmother on Linux Journal. There are some other articles at http://www.webtrek.com/joe/articles if you’re curious.

On the gripping hand, the people who have the most problems with Linux in todays world are the Windows Power Users. Techies have no problems with Linux as a desktop (I’ve been using it exclusively since 1993 or ‘94). Grandma and Aunt Tilly users can get systems all preconfigured so that they’re basically plug in and go.

In the FOSS, GNU/Linux, *BSD, world, each user is allowed and permitted to find and use the tool that works best for their purpose, on their machine, at the moment it is needed.

Most of us run multiple machines, in different OSes, to get work done fast and secure.

I find that all the children of K-12 grades in the schools I support, take to FedoraCore7, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS, immediately.

None of the “issues” noted by Mr. Mossberg exist for the average student, teacher, or administrator, or the parents who get free LiveCDroms.

Perhaps Mr. Mossberg’s mother is not able to function in a computer environment at all and learn new tricks, and Mr. Mossberg has no clue that there are free help forums, Linux Users Groups, and other free services in his community.

Someone stated that computers are the most complex household appliance man has ever owned.

Folks, if it is a new, different, most complicated machine, then you might have to invest some time in learning it!

John, what do you mean? Other tools could rape RFC’s standards more efficiently? :} Like changing the separator between e-Mail addresses and embracing non-permissible hostnames? Mangling headers of received e-Mail more effectively?

I still think that as far as Gooey goes the WPS was IT. Nothing else ever came close to its functionality.

“I love linux, but I can’t imagine the nightmare it would be to install it for my mother-in-law that calls every three months because she can’t remember how to attach an email.”

Honestly? How odd - since I replaced the Win2K
install on my mother-in-laws PC with Slackware 2 years ago the number of support calls has dropped to about a quarter of the initial rate, and my maintenance work is done remotely, and takes up a twentieth of the time ever since …

Cheers

Nevertheless the complaint that Grandma and Aunt Tilley can’t use it is obsolete. It is in the past. Perhaps they can’t be power users yet, they probably can’t be corporate desktop users yet, they can’t diagnose and fix some common problems, but email, web browsing, typical office suite usage, and many other mainstream activities are perfectly viable now. Installing Ubuntu is by no means out of their league either.

My teenage non-geek daughter swapped Vista for Ubuntu on her laptop months ago. After an annoying issue with headphones was resolved, she is quite happy. She also is used to switching among her Linux laptop, some Win2K and WinXP boxes at home, and a variety of Windows and Macs at school, each with preferred activities.

We should distance ourselves from the idea that OSs are like religions, and you belong to just one in contraposition to all others. Computer usage isn’t like that at all.

FOSS probably ought to consider doing Exchange one better while still being an IMAP compliant tool. A lot could be learned by looking at several CMS tools like PLOne before diving in though. But Exchange could be beat at it’s own game.

In the space of a week he was pretty much familiar with the tools. I now can sys admin the box remotely. Several scripts are used to do a local tar of the critical files. Son version is kept local and copied to my home server. All father, grandfather backups I keep on the server. So far we have save $$ for not having to have some Geek do a XP security fix.

Life is good.