(I'm going to assume a medium to large business here, which actually seems to be where the business end of this argument has been focusing)
On Wednesday 30 March 2005 12:35, Dave Nebinger wrote: > Most folks, where work is concerned, expect to have the computer 'just > work'. Your boss wants you to show up at 8 am and be productive for 8 > hours, not spend time figuring out the innards (unless that, of course, is > what you're paid to do ;-) That's why the *IT people* set up the computers, which then "just work", and not the users. Sally Secretary doesn't have to install Windows on her own machine, does she? Or Office? If Windows spits out some cryptic 'I just ate myself' message, does she have to fix it? No. The business pays people who have a clue to do these things. Tell me that STOP 0x0000000A or IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL or how about the lovely 'Registry hive not found' is less cryptic than 'line 6: B: command not found'. With computers, shit happens. Somebody's going to have to fix it. Is it Sally Secretary? No. Is it Robert Repairman? Yes. Does it matter what operating system? No. Perhaps Windows isn't all that user-friendly after all. I'll agree with the point that in home and small-business environments, where it may not be cost-effective to have a full-time IT staff, Linux may currently be too hard to manage, unless the users themselves have a clue. But in larger businesses, there's no reason Eddie IT can't set the system up so that Ernie Executive and Sally Secretary can mindlessly point and click their way to productivity. They aren't going to be mucking about in configuration, because they won't be able to. They wouldn't be able to in a competently managed Windows system either. Anyway, my point is that I don't buy the argument that 'Linux won't work on the enterprise desktop because management isn't point-and-click and users don't like that' because the *users* don't care about *system management* (and shouldn't be allowed to anyway). Users only need the apps they need, and those should already be set up for them, and repaired by people who already have a clue. -- electronerd
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