On Fri, Sep 16, 2011, Guy Tetruashvyly wrote about "Re: Linux is ready for the
desktop!":
> a few years now. reminiscing my first Linux days, 4 years ago, the
> most frustrating part was " why isn't it working 5 seconds after I
> installed it ? " , so, I do agree about the part of having a
This is why I was thinking that if Linux was installed at the computer store,
you *could* get something that is working 5 seconds after you open it.
I believe that 90% of the Israeli newbie users (not programmers and gamers
and other people with specialized requirements) share 90% of the needs,
and if the system supported, out of the box, playing audio and video,
Hebrew keyboard, connecting to ADSL or cable, and other typical needs of
typical users, it would indeed work for most people 5 seconds after they
first turn the machine on.
> themselves for the first time. I do agree with Oleg that an FC15
> or Ubuntu 11.04 are ready for use 1 hour tops after the first GUI
> login, ( with 2.5 Mbps downstream ) .
I didn't see Oleg's mail (I don't know why), but I definitely do NOT agree
that a vanilla FC15 is ready for actual use one hour after install - unless
you've already done this 10 times. It took me almost an hour to figure out
how work around a NetworkManager bug and get ADSL to get reconnected during
boot ("service network restart" worked perfectly, but it simply didn't
work during boot). It took me about an hour to set up all the "not-so-legal"
yum repositories and figure out which packages to download to enable playing
of music and video. And so on, and so on, and these hours add up.
But once you know how to do it, doing the same thing for a hundred or a
thousand people is easy. This is why I think Linux should be installed in
the computer store. Heck, this is what they do with Windows (who installs
Windows on their own nowadays??), so why not with Linux?
> * My trouble with Fedora 15 was its lack of performance on older P4
> systems, ( like the one I'm using at this moment), I suspect is
In my opinion, at a time where a brand new desktop computer costs around 1,000
shekels, reusing an old P4 system is probably does not represent the typical
newbie. If you consider that this old P4 system probably had too small a
disk for modern needs (such as holding tens of thousands of photos of
the grandkids, or hours of videos), and probably lacked a lot of other modern
things, buying a new computer might not only be smarter - it might actually
not be that much more expensive than trying to "upgrade" the old computer.
In light of the latest economic protests, I hope what I wrote in my last
paragraph doesn't sound filthy-capitalist. It's not that I think that 1,000
shekels is peanuts. But it's that 1,000 shekels is much cheaper than what
typical computers used to cost (5,000 shekels 10 years ago, 10,000 shekels
20 years ago if I remember correctly), and when you consider other costs,
the cost of the computer is dwarfed. Just as an example, I looked very hard,
and the *cheapest* Internet connection I could find in Israel costs 46
shekels a month (for 1.5 Mbps download). This comes out to 552 shekels a
year - and over the lifetime of the computer (probably at least 4 years)
it comes out to much more than the price of the hardware. So trying to save
on the hardware, of all things, won't save you all that much in the long run.
Nadav.
--
Nadav Har'El | Saturday, Sep 17 2011,
n...@math.technion.ac.il |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |May you live as long as you want - and
http://nadav.harel.org.il |never want as long as you live.
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