[plug] LINUX IS ONLY FOR SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS

[Nick Bannon]

On Wed, Feb 10, 1999 at 10:55:07AM +1100, HILL Walter wrote:
[...]
> It is going to require a maturation of the
> product in order to succeed in the wider market place.

These days, for (and perhaps because) of all the money that's poured
through it, Windows is the immature product, constantly being pushed
out of the door before it's ready. By contrast, there's a track record
of reliability to look to when people install a modern, stable Linux
distribution.

> People don't want
> to know about IRQs, DMA, LBA or whatever.

These are the limitations of running on the PC architecture and people
delude themselves if they think that the current Windows can hide them
any better than its predecessors. Linux will run on many systems where
these problems simply don't arise.

Personally, I've spent far more time cursing Windows' inability to plug
and play on demand, or in any controllable fashion than for anything
Linux has done to my hardware. Recently, I've had a 3Com and a D-Link
pair of 10/100 ethernet cards which simply would not install correctly
under Windows, yet the same machine would reboot into the Linux partition
and run perfectly without any explicit configuration at all.

> They simply want to print out
> their documents or spreadsheets, whose pages they've manually number
> because they don't' realise the software can do it for them!

The good news for them is that if they have simple requirements, a
change won't be a problem to them. Unfortunately, things never seem to
go completely smoothly for someone's who's gotten down and dirty with
their system and learnt all the little tricks with their current programs.
Of course, the solution for them is simply to stick with what they have,
and to delay an upgrade until they see real personal value in it.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal