Open Source Software...

[Jun aka Pekto]

For instance, my own enthusiasm with Linux intrigued my colleagues well enough to for them try several distros I have in my collection: Mint 5, Knoppix 5.3.1, and Puppy. Their verdict: Puppy is the easiest and friendliest. I can guess why. Puppy always runs on root and can put the whole of itself to RAM for tremendous speed boost without installing to hard disk. Despite its obvious size limitation (Puppy is only 80MB or so) users arent bothered with "denied permisssions" and similar stumbling blocks. Whats more, Puppy can read and write to Windows partitions without any second thoughts. Try running live cds of Fedora, Zen, Centos, and the like and see if you can peek inside your Windows partitions. You cant unless you do some terminal work by hand. Of course, you know this already=)

Hmmm. I haven't tried Puppy yet. I'll have to give that one a go. Linuxmint can also access Windows NTFS partitions.... I think.

My point being that for the "average user" (meaning one who simply wants to browse the Net, email, chat, maybe shop online, download multimedia files and play them, do some research using OpenOffice, organize and edit pictures) he can find distros that can do that out of the box. Trouble comes when a newbie got one of those that cant, become frustrated and leaves Linux for good. for example, Ubuntu cant play mp3 by default; it needs to connect to the net to pull codecs, extra work which is a piece of cake by the way. While I have the latest Gentoo and Slackware, I have yet to dare myself to install them.

Linux distros should provide some "hand-holding" or a least a checklist of what's needed for newbies on a "Getting Started" screen. That should make transition much easier. The average users are of the Windows or OSX variety as said earlier. They expect nothing less than what they're used to. The burden falls on the distro maker to ensure that's the case. Unfortunately, I haven't seen that yet. Maybe if more OEM computers came preloaded with Linux, that would go a long way.

As for the lack of uniformity... I think this is the side effect of the software being open source. It has very liberal public licence to copy, modify and distribute as you wish. I read somewhere there are organizations who try to "standardize" some GNU tools. But for the most part, yep, Linux distros are so diverse.

The distros could at least come together and have a common preloaded set of codecs similar to most distros having KDE/Gnome.

There are aspects of the way Linux works that requires patience on the part of the new user. But the rewards for you taking the time to learn it cannot be under estimated. The knowledge is yours to keep and apply to more new distros to come. And linux distros are free (there are commercial ones though.) For me, I truly appreciate the work of open source developers. Microsoft and Adobe wont be making any money from me anymore... my employer will.

The free part is what will attract most users. The technical aspects of Linux is what will turn most users off. I guess Linux will have a much bigger following if most open source software are available only for Linux. Unfortunately, open source software such as Open Office, VLC, Firefox, Celestia, and even Gimp are also available for Windows. It's simply easier to have Windows as the OS and use open source software with it.

I still have a Linux pc, though. I'll stick with Mint for now....


Hmmm. That images window is from my XP NTFS partition.