Thanks for this Tim One thing this story illustrates is that new users react to the "desktop" or graphical user interface, not the underlying GNU/Linux distribution. This concept of alternate desktops is foreign to Windows and Mac users, since those OSes come with only one desktop.
Gnome and KDE, the two predominant desktops used in GNU/Linux distros, are not marketed as separate products; as such they are "invisible" and to newcomers, the desktop is assumed to be part of the system, whether "Ubuntu" or "Fedora" or "openSuSE" or "Mandriva" or $yourfavedistrohere. As new users assume that desktop=distro, a lousy experience through e.g. not knowing what a package manager is or does becomes "I tried Linux and couldn't do X". Never mind that Microsoft has very carefully and diligently worked on making Windows play nasty with other systems... I contribute to a children's education project with a kid-friendly "desktop" based on GNU/Linux which has over a million users in thirty countries. We may be nonprofit, but we are not "hobbyists". Mr Cellan-Jones knows about this project, having reported on it in Rwanda two years ago and again recently. He might be surprised to learn that he could use Ubuntu (or indeed most distros) with the Gnome desktop, the KDE desktop, the Xfce desktop... or Sugar, the same "desktop" he saw on One Laptop per Child hardware in Africa. It's interesting to note that Windows, like all traditional "office-desktop" paradigm GUIs, is confusing to young children and kid-friendly alternate desktops for Windows are perhaps the only exceptions to the vanilla interface approach. (An excellent alternate desktop for grownups from Xerox called TabWorks actually came standard on Compaq hardware in the mid-1990s, but fizzled.) In his comment on Popey's blog, Mr Cellan-Jones repeated a tried and true adage of broadcast journalism: "Never work with children, animals or technology." My co-contributors and myself manage to do 2 out of 3, and only the openness, security, reliability, flexibility, standards compatibility, networking, and low cost of GNU/Linux makes it possible. It's tempting to condemn the BBC for Mr Cellan-Jones' statements; after all, Microsoft's illegal efforts to impose and sustain its desktop PC monopoly are a matter of public record. And GNU/Linux's tiny PC market share (servers and supercomputers are another story) hides a multitude of vibrant projects. However, the BBC does get the story right, too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8117064.stm Sean. On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Tim Dobson <li...@tdobson.net> wrote: > http://popey.com/blog/2009/10/21/bbc-breakfast-talk-up-windows-7-dismiss-rivals/ > http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/10/24_hours_with_ubuntu.html > > I have a feeling Popey is on this list... :) > > Read, comment, try not to hurt each other etc... :) > - > Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please > visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. > Unofficial list archive: > http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ > - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
