[plug] Newbys guide

[J Michael Gilks]

>
> You see Tim, this paragraph actually highlights to problems many/most of
> us newbies have.  I'm not, never have been nor ever will be a
> programmer, either hobby or professional level.  Good grief, I can only
> spell "C" 2 out of 3 times!!  The entire preceding paragraph might as
> well be greek to most of us - and I don't speak greek either.  It seems
> that if I'm not able to understand what you've said there then I can't
> even reach to launching pad for Linux.  Windows users (and I've never
> been one of those either) want to able to download an application,
> install it and play with it.  It's really that simple.  Expand that
> simplicity into the rest of what Windows useres are used to and you'll
> be approaching the mark.  It's that simple for Windoze users, Mac users,
> OS/2 users, eCS users, BeOS users et al.
>
> his is NOT a flame, just an attempt to explain the reality of the
> problem.  I, for instance, want to move over from OS/2 (coz the
> writing's on the wall for OS/2) with a minimum of fuss, without having
> to understand "compile", "make file", "tarball" etc.
>
This should not be a problem for a mainstream user who just wants to do what 
they were doing on another platform, eg Microsoft, OS/2 etc.
I use Mandrake because it will do an almost automatic install of a basic 
system, even including Windows dual boot with read/write access to My 
Documents.
For any normal applications everything is already there, Office Suites, 
Internet stuff, GUIs to tie it all together. Never touched the CLI but it all 
works. Can run into problems with exotic hardware etc, but this is not what I 
am talking about so far.
All the GUI apps on the desktop are frontends for CLI apps. Using the CLI may 
give more control or extra options, but there is very little reason for a 
newbie to have to use them these days, until they are ready to explore the 
environment and learn how much trouble they can cause themselves.

The range of software for most distributions seems to be very extensive so it 
would probably be a while before a newbie had to play with ./configure and 
friends. I know I don't dabble in compiling software, eveerything comes as an 
RPM fairly quickly, then I choose the package in the GUI, dependencies are 
resolved, binaries are downloaded and installed, then I play.
Can be done the hard way, with manual effort and lots of finetuning later, if 
you want to do that. For starters probably best to stick to the easy way.

Since Linux is a completely different platform, you will have to learn Linux 
stuff, however it is all presented on screen with a GUI and this is generally 
fairly straight forward.

I have redently started my Mother using Mandrake and she is happily converting 
her spreadshhets from Excel to OpenOffice.org (still calls them Excel 
spreadsheets, but they look and work the same so it doesn't bother her), is 
loving kmail and coming to grips doing a family tree using Gramps.
She would probably faint if I said she had to use a CLI but is very happy 
using Linux.

In closing I guess I am saying the CLI is there and very useful, however for 
most normal user stuff you may never need to use it.

"Use the GUI Luke"

This has been a large 5c worth to excercise my fingers, please direct all hate 
mail to /dev/null (another term a newbie should not need to be exposed to)

Love
Mike.