This message is the result of conversations whith newbies that tried to use Mandrake 9.1/9.2 and after having been conviced and happy with the distribution are re-using Windows more and more for a couple of annoying and easily solvable problems.
My point of view about newbie difficulties (which I heard FROM NEWBIES themselves) with Mandrake is that there are roughly four issues: 1. The package 2. The menues 3. The language 4. The license 1. The packages are a good thing but there should be a frontend to the package systems where we talk about apps and plugins. The apps should be organized in a tree that should be understood by the end-user. A typical end-user doesn't know what the "graphical environment" category could contain, as an exemple. Even "desktop" or "Bureautique" or "Network" should not be seen. More over, only major apps should be shown, with a comment that only says something like "Open Office is the leading text writer, spreadsheet tool under Linux", or "Abiword is a text writer that is lighter than Open Office"... 2. The menues should be nearly empty, with only newbie oriented apps in it. A First level should only contain the labels "Internet" (netwok doesn't mean much for a user, and less correctness on language is sometime a good thing), "Programs", "Multimedia, Sound" (A newbie doesn't think about sound being multimedia), "Close The System" (session is har to understand too). Typically a user only needs a multimedia player, a sound player, a desktop suite, a web browser, a mail reader, tools for burning CDs and rip CDs. 3. I focused hear on the french translation but it also applies to others. Every term like "réseau" "environnent graphique" "bureautique" is technical for a newbie and shouldn't be used. Maybe whe should have a "franglais" mode where we read "plugin" and not "greffon" and so on. I understand that it is not such an important thing. Such a mode would only be usefull for "mid-newbies" that know what is a plugin, but not a greffon. Total newbies doesn't know what is a plugin. 4. A newbie doesn't know PLF, and as a consequence can't make as many things as with windows with is Mandrake. Lincensing and Patent issues are a mess for newbies that aren't aware of that problem. Here there is no technical solutions, only poltical ones...
