On 1 July 2012 22:19, Stephen Davies
<stephen.dav...@ultraconsulting.co.uk>wrote:
> As a professional software developer who has been writing programms
> since the days of Card Decks, George 3 , SOFOR and paper tape, I find this
> latest craze on desktops (Gnome 3, Unity & Windows 8) rather depressing.
>
> (Ignoring the 'touchy feely' of touchscreens that everyone seems to rave
> ove these days)
> If they had been around at the birth of GUI/Windowing systems I would have
> understood them.
> Now IMHO, this searching and every icon on the desktop idea is frankly so
> silly, it beggars belief.
>
>
Just to add some balance to the thread - I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04
on my cousins laptop. It had Windows 7 on it which for some reason can get
out on the network but none of the web browsers get a connection - I
suspect a virus is causing problems and this was borne out by a malware
scan. I offered to install Ubuntu in a dual-boot fashion. I then installed
Chrome and Skype (test call made and works using in-built mic and webcam),
locked them both in the left-hand launcher and job done. Suspend and resume
also works cleanly. All easy, quick and without fuss (I was thankful that
Ubuntu made it easy to create a live USB to install from). All in all
pretty damn good "just works-ness".
Her 10 year old son (separate user account created) also took to it and
found his way around (finding apps, changing background and even installing
things from the Software Centre himself without problems). I think it is
these guys that Canonical are aiming for and this is something Alan Pope
was trying to highlight in the other thread.
Anyway, now she has a working laptop and is happy (the only slight gripe
being lack of Facebook Connect in Skype which Windows Skype has).
I was glad that there was available a nice looking modern Linux,
easy-to-use distro to come-to-the-rescue of non-techie users ("fluffies")
like this. I could have installed my own distro-of-choice Debian Squeeze on
there and everything would also be fine... but then I'd have to fiddle with
installing a back-ported version of iceweasel to get smooth fonts back, and
faff around getting users to log-in without a password and a bunch of other
things to make it more usable for fluffies. This is stuff that we put up
with but many others will not.
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