Linked by Nathan J. Hill on Tue 24th Oct 2006 10:43 UTC
In the midst of the busy semester here at school, my fiancee's laptop, running Windows XP SP2, picked up some friends - adware, trojans, etc. It was a pretty nasty sight. I worked on it for at least two hours every couple of days, wiping it clean, doing my best to lock it down, and so on. Avast! and Ad-Aware had their limits it seemed, for only a day or so after I cleaned it, pop-ups and weird stuff would show up again. She was getting sick of it. I was getting sick of cleaning it, so I suggested, offhand, installing a different operating system that is a bit more impervious to those nasties. To my surprise, she agreed.
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Member since:
2006-10-24
First, I never tried Lispire. I must confess that I don't have a good feeling about it, but Distros are like religions, I never question about them.
You wrote "I didn't want to stray too far away from basic Windows-like capabilitie". The problem is linux is not windows in any way. I have the same respect for windows than with any linux distro (same religion point ;-). Ok, you have icons, keyboard and mouse on the screen, but that's quite all.
My fiancee also switched to linux, 2 years ago, and she's not a technical-computing person at all. But she switched cleanly the day I understood that I have to explain all the differences. When I gave up with my fear of "linux too complex for her, let's be simple". Linux is not that complex, and Windows is not that simple, from a new player point of view.
So I explained her everything from scratch. What is Linux way of installing a software, seeking information, storing documents, etc.. And from this day, she was not any more a "Windows person trying to figure out what was going one" but a "Linux user, following step by step her lurning curve in a NEW system".
The problem about "Linux Desktop" is that everyone really want it to be a "smooth move". But what is the point of moving from one system to another if you don't think it is a better one for your use ? And what is the point of using a better system if you don't learn first how different it is. Perhaps Linux is not a better system for her, perhaps MacOS is the right choice. I really don't know and I'm not judging. But one thing I know for sure. This "fashion" to turn a Linux into a windows to "help" user, is just not helping at all ! It's not helping Linux itself and definitely not helping users.
PS: About korean input method, I didn't try but it was quite easy to add vietnameese input to her laptop. It was just fonts, a package for input driver. And about Wireless network did you try ndis-wrapper, a good solution to use Windows drivers in Linux with same level of capabilities.
Edited 2006-10-24 12:13