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Member since:2005-07-11
I think you are in many ways right, but let's not forget that this computer has no hard drive. This probably means that the OS sits locked down on some kind of flash device. I can't imagine it needing much configurability, but if you do screw up the configs, you zap the RAM. To upgrade the software, you go to your school's computer lab.
Member since:2005-11-26
Member since:Redhat bought their way in with a $2,000,000 "donation" to the project. That's why their are many equal or better choices for the default OS; yet they weren't chosen.
There's a place for cynicism but there's also a place for understanding the bigger picture.
"Buying their way in" is a very strange way to look at the situation. The project wouldn't exist without the financial support of folks like Red Hat. It's not like this was all ready to go and the devices ready to ship and then some company stepped up and bribed their way in because, oh, that $100 laptop charity program is going to be so profitable. The reality is that Red Hat has been one of the major funders of the project, making it possible to develop these devices from the ground up in the first place. If Novell or Canonical want to throw wads of cash at similar projects, they're more than welcome.
This is a good thing that Red Hat has done. Will they benefit at all, other than through good karma? Sure, they're going to stick a desktop variant of their product in front of hopefully millions of users, making this the largest usability test for Linux on the desktop in history, which will allow them to improve their products even more. And since that product is entirely made up of free and open source software, we will all eventually benefit from those improvements. I just don't see how it's possible to spin Red Hat as the bad guy in this.
Member since:
This ought to give RedHat an interesting crash course in usability. Linux certainly passes the "grandma test" in performing user tasks, but there are still occasional administration tasks that require going to the command line prompt or are otherwise not posted in an obvious place. Most of these today involve getting various kinds of hardware to work (e.g., PDA syncing, sound cards), so they might avoid that problem by simply refusing to support such hardware.
But Windows users will be used to the idea that absolutely anything that can be done to the system can be done and undone from a GUI. Advanced users like the idea that they can easily do sophisticated things from the command line that are actually quite difficult to accomplish in Windows, but new users will not have this perspective.
I'm really not trying to start a RedHat-vs-XP flame war -- I'm a Linux user myself (Ubuntu on the desktop, RedHat on the servers) and I think Linux is ready for widespread desktop adoption in corporate environments where it is administered by more knowledgable people. I think it still needs polish before it's as easy as XP for a novice user to administer. (It's already easier to administer than NT though.) The network manager, for example, at least as recently as FC4, didn't handle ethernet connections in the automagic way that XP does. Little bits of polish like that will go a long way. Hopefully this rollout will make such little problems more obvious and cause them to be fixed quickly.
-Tavis