Linked by Mystilleef on Mon 29th Sep 2003 06:30 UTC
Linux will become ubiquitous in the year 3000. Okay, that was a horrible joke. Linux is just a kernel, the engine that runs an operating system. By itself, it is essentially useless. Kernels shouldn't be discussed or noticed by normal users. And as such when providing these users with reviews, previews and "professional" opinions, computer consultants, computer reviewers and computer journalists should not spew headlines like "Linux is not ready for prime time", "Linux on the desktop by XXX", "Linux to takeover Windows", "Linux is not ready for desktop" and so on.
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When I installed my first Linux distro, a couple of years ago, the most intimidating part was partitioning the hard drive. Luckily the distro in question was RedHat and at that point it already had a graphical partition manager. I can only imagine the horror of people who as their first experience of Linux meet cfdisk. Linux really needs better partitioning software. I've heard good words about QtParted, but at the moment its NTFS support is allegedly not that good.
Of course, there are live CD's from most leading distros and these may be a good introduction to GNU/Linux world. It's asking people quite a lot to make them install an OS that they haven't tried out before. With a live CD people can play around with Linux, discover its capabilities, and if they like it they may even decide that it's worth the trouble to install it permanently on their hd. :-)
Good documentation is always a positive thing but my experience is that people usually decide whether they want to use a specific piece of software by first launching it and just playing around in the hope that they find out how it works. The time for reading documentation comes when people want to use some advanced features. Programmers, who have no idea how people actually behave, expect that users first read carefully all the available documentation and then launch the program. This, I'm afraid, is wishful thinking. :-(