20:35 6/24/98 -0400, Dale Leonard wrote:
> >If RH makes X windows a little easier to configure, then MS will have
> >NOTHING on Linux, as most people (esp. newbies) are uncomfortable with
> >the command line interface.
Here's a thought: There are already two "specialized" versions of Linux
coming out of RedHat: Extreme Linux and that shrinkwrapped secure web
server package. These are both good ideas, but not relevant to end
users nearly as much as to the commercial and research types. Caldera
has their SCO, er, I mean OpenLinux package, and I'm sure there are
others. The gist is that, here again, "Windows95 is not the metric."
These are all aimed at the people who make the choice "NT or UNIX or
Novell," not the people who choose between PC's and Mac's.
What if (and I won't be surprised if RH does this when the gnome and E
get a little further along) there were another "specialized version" of
Linux -- call it "Desktop Linux" -- that maybe came with nicely-tweaked
GUI settings, all tuned up to feature some productivity apps in a nice
clickable display fresh out of the box. It wouldn't be that different
from what you can already do, except that the package could come with a
lot of mods that are now thought of as personal tweaks. Not unlike what
VAR's do with Windows, except that the story doesn't have to end once
you get it home; it would still be Linux after all, with all the
flexibility intact, but with fewer of the decisions to be made up front.
Now, that does nothing to address the issue of Grandma setting up her
own computer, but I kind of think that if Grandma can set up 95, she
could set up RH5.1 (or even 4.2 for that matter -- fdisk isn't _that_
hard). What it would do, though, is take some of the slop out of the
VAR stage of the game. I think it's generally agreed that marketing is
a bigger obstacle for us now than usability. If more VAR's could be
presented with shrinkwrapped boxes that they could blow onto hundreds of
machines, quickly turning those machines into Grandma-compatible
desktops without ever having to run vi, they might be less nervous about
offering Linux.
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