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,
You're right about that, with my insisting on using this used P4 , that I bought used, for 80$ , and when it's mother-board broke, a few weeks ago, getting a replacement from E-bay, instead of just buying a new PC ! , - I'm the joke of plenty folks here, and a classic case of " shoemaker walks barefoot " , Prior to leaving the holy-land I bought a very nice PC , and I'm trying to fly it over here, rather then pay the 500$+ that it will take me to re-build it here. True, my old system does not reflect the what's going on out-there.
On 09/17/2011 02:01 AM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
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 aThis 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 isIn 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.
_______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
