[plug] Linux ideology

[Sham Chukoury]

On Mon, 2003-05-26 at 12:12, Craig Ringer wrote:
> > How would you rate CinePaint nee FilmGIMP?
> > 
> >     http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/
> > 
> > ....while it's targetted at moviemaking, it does actually address some of 
> > your issues (e.g. CMYK, 16/48-bit colour etc).
> 
> I'll have a look, but the FAQ doesn't look promising:

I think what happened here (i.e. Leon mentioning an application that
Craig didn't even know much about) is a good example of why Linux is not
considered *mainstream* (yes, a fair bit of generalisation there..), as
opposed to, say, Microsoft Windows...

It's the variety of options available to Linux users that seems to make
it all the more confusing to those who are not 'technically inclined'.
While we see this variety as a sort of 'freedom' to choose how we build
and operate our systems, others simply get confused...

The decentralised nature of information about Linux and Linux
applications probably makes this worse, since there is no single place
where users can go to get the information they need. (Yes, Google is
nice, but some people don't even know how to search the web effectively,
ending up with millions of (irrelevant) hits quite often.) A lot of the
relevant information circulates mostly through mailing lists such as
this one, bulletin boards and IRC channels.

In comparison, Microsoft gives Windows users all (or almost all) the
information they need to get started and use the system effectively to
get what they want done. It's true that no one can do the same for
Linux, unless everyone uses the same distribution (RedHat?). What needs
to be done, to get more people to use Linux and/or Open Source software,
is to re-educate them about the nature of computers. Microsoft has had
people believe that computers are just cool appliances to use for office
use, browsing the Web and playing multimedia... This has had more people
buying computers and starting to use them, but most of these people
wouldn't have a clue as to what their computers are doing - they just
want to hear their MP3 playing when they click on the Play button...

$0.02 :)
-S