Ultimately, it is more surprising that things even managed to remain this peaceful so far. Windows holds a huge home advantage simply by being the operating system almost everyone in the bureaucracy invariably uses at home. Many of the employees probably already invested years of painstaking trial-and-error, frustrated tech support calls and offering of incentives to more computer-literate relatives and offspring to get where they are in terms of being able to navigate a Windows desktop. No amount of corporate training is going to be able to make up for the feeling of frustration that those people will feel from the realisation that much of that was moot and they will have to relearn the basics.
So I've stopped doing it.
I've explained politely but firmly that I'll be happy to help them transition to a Linux or Mac desktop because I use those in my daily life and am familiar with them, but I'm not helping them with their Windows 8 PC. I do not use it, don't plan to, and have no interest in it.
Anecdotally, the relative who is the most cautious seems to be the one who causes most of the problems by trying to click on all of the "helpful" messages that pop up. This came to light after they got a new laptop that only one of them had been using exclusively.
This happened to me after I switched to mac. Not on purpose, I just stopped knowing how to troubleshoot.
Recently, my parents had to upgrade their old XP computer. They bought a mac. They were worried about learning Windows 8 without support.
There would be a huge market for something like that, as this situation shows.
At the end of the day, any OS that requires some command-line at any point has failed to appeal to the mass market. Instead of Windows, Linux would be better off mimicking Mac as it tries to be as unobtrusive as possible while still leaving the command-line power intact.
Linux needs to escape the Uncanny Valley of general purpose computing to become more mainstream.
I think its good enough since I've managed to convert at least 42 user from Windows to that. Its been almost 2years and they still stick with that.
I guess I should just be proud of the genius that is my sister who figured it all out on her own. I think I've answered 2-3 questions about Win Phone and one, my favorite, about their old printer.
Her: "What do we have to do to get it to work?" Me: "Have you plugged it in yet?" Her: "Daaaamn. It just worked."
One was for a grandma in her 70's. It just worked. Of course... she basically uses it for facebook so there was no chmoding to be done. This was nearly 2 years ago and she hasn't complained once.
"...I would never, ever want to have to walk (elderly neighbor who has asked me for tech support help in the past) through this".
Having worked in support, there's nothing magical about Windows that makes tech naifs work well with it. Windows still needs experienced people to fix it for you.
Out of curiosity, what was the software you had to chmod for? Was it the kind of software that a tech naif would be interested in?
Yeah, I know there's nothing magical about Windows; I think a large part of it is that most of the basic user functionality 'just works', without additional knowledge. If you understand the difference between click, double click, right click, and click and drag, and the idea of a folder system, you can figure out how to do everything you need in Windows with some minimal experimentation.
With Linux, that's oftentimes not enough. It's not even clear -when- it's not going to be enough, and what other knowledge you're going to need.
I guess it basically boils down to, in Windows, the kinds of things I ended up supporting were generally regressive in nature, "this thing used to work and now it doesn't" or "My computer is running slow now", etc, and between an antivirus and system restore, you have a pretty good nuke it from orbit option.
Linux, it's both regressive (every Linux admin has pain stories where they botched a command in the terminal and destroyed their system), and progressive "how do I make it do X?" issues. Which can be extremely painful (I still don't have a good remote desktop setup between my work and home Mint VMs. Is it because I picked the wrong windowing managers, the wrong RDP client/servers, etc? Who can say! I got tired of trying to deal with it after a couple of hours).
Now, if the person is, yeah, just using the machine for Facebook and email, Linux is probably a better option. But for the types of tasks needed in an administrative bureaucracy, I can why Windows would be easier.
I often dream about how nice it would be to replace crufty sharepoint with some web apps on a Linux server do our own in house mail.
I guess the grass is often greener on the other side of the fence.
But for me personally.... I chose Linux. It just works better for what I do and doesn't annoy the bejeazus out of me at every turn with push buttons and hidden stuff like MS products seem to. Maybe I am just more tolerant of open source stuff. But push buttons and hidden settings do annoy me. Text file configuration and the command line. It's fast, it's simple, it's what I like.
The best of both worlds would be Windows running on a *nix system I suppose, but that seems really unlikely.
They're all right. But it's also exactly the problem with Linux in a corporate environment. For better and worse, Microsoft have made Windows a single, predictable entity. While we developers see the myriad of Linux options out there as the result of freedom, customers see them as evidence of confusion and lack of focus.
But I definitely don't see Windows as being tightly focussed nor a single predictable entity. The differences, nuances, and upgrade paths between 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, 7, 8 are as fragmented and confusing as possible.
Linux isn't any better, this is true. But I don't buy that it's because of singular vision that Microsoft continues to dominate. Today Apple has the strongest composed experience, in my opinion. Too bad they have basically zero corporate presence.
This is perhaps because you know about the topic. The average user, because MS dominated most computer interactions that they've had, psychologically feels quite comfortable with it.
But I don't know if Linux is ready for the desktop yet. IMHO it's place is in the back-end.
Because Linux has more freedom it attracts developers/coders/programmers that also value freedom over vendor support. Any *nix flavor offers more hackability than MS.
And I think you'll find that the folks who use it think more freely when designing solutions as well.
Very few normal user "I don't know how to do this" problems on Windows or OS X require sys admin level skills. These days most things you want to do either just work, or are discoverable just by poking around in menus and trying a few things. When something doesn't just work in Windows or OS X there's usually a GUI somewhere that solves it.
As soon as you hit a problem in Linux, it almost inevitably requires you to fire up a terminal and start editing config files, dealing with permissions, building from source. And half the time if you screw it up, you're left with an unusable system.
If you don't believe me, pick a distro, and start reading through the help forums for that distro, questions that involve normal user type problems like "I don't know how to share this folder on my network" or "audio doesn't work". As soon as a user has to open a terminal to do something, they've become a system admin.
For example, here's the instructions for backing up and restoring a hard drive (Keep in mind, this is 2014) http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2234758
Again, in 2014, here's the "fix" to keep your windows on the correct monitors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwJl3ohmmqc&feature=youtu.be
Or, "I can't browse a windows share on my home network" http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1169149
Here's the instructions for "getting a list of software that's installed on my computer" http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=261366
How to install a scanner http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2166420
A fun drinking game you can play with Linux tutorials intended to solve normal user-level issues:
- count the steps until a terminal is open, drink that number of shots.
- for every sudo command, drink a shot
- every time a file has to be edited or redirected, drink a shot, pipes are two shots
- every time a permission has to be changed, drink a shot
- if the user has to run a script, drink a shot
- if the user has to apt-get (or equivalent) something that has a completely non-discoverable name that you just have to "know", drink two shots. If it's an apt-get for something with a guessable name, 1 shot.
- if the user has to concern themselves with overwriting files or making backups of something, drink a shot
- if the user has to compile something, drink a shot
- every time the user has to 'ps' or 'kill' a process, drink a shot
- if the problem is the result of the distro updating a library, drink two shots
- if the problem is the result of an arbitrary compatibility issue with something that has an incompehensible name (like pcmanfm), drink a shot, if the problem is because of a minor version difference, drink two shots
- if it's a problem that only exists on Linux because the rest of the world is ignoring it (like access to streaming media sites), drink 2 shots, if the solutions are complex and require multiple shots to get through (see all of the above), then don't work, drink 2 more shots
- for every page of follow up in the forum that's proposing the solution, drink a shot.
Here's an example of a simple game. An answer to the question of "how do I watch netflix in Ubuntu"
> why don't you just inst all netflix
> To install on Ubuntu / Mint -
> Start terminal 1 shot
> $ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ehoover/compholio 1 shot for sudo, 2 shots for nondiscoverability
> $ sudo apt-get update 1 shot for sudo
> $ sudo apt-get install netflix-desktop 1 shot for sudo 1 shot for apt-get
> and then find the NetFlix Icon under Video click to install and you are done. no shots, but why couldn't this just be done via a gui?
Total Damage: 7 shots of hard liquor. Congratulations, installing netflix has just made you an alcoholic.
Here's a 33 page discussion on installing the ePSXe playstation emulator. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=612021 Congratulations you've now died of alcohol poisoning.
The Windows version of this is
1) download the install file 2) unzip it 3) run the epsxe.exe file
Also, there's not really anything available in the open source world that provides precisely the features that corporate sysadmins look for in Exchange (and Sharepoint, Active Directory, etc.) in an in-house system. I didn't enjoy switching to Exchange from Google Apps post-acquisition, but I don't know of any self-hosted alternatives that provide vaguely integrated email and calendar that don't suck equally as hard as Exchange.
Old location: http://osm.org/go/0JBO8dB-?m=
New location: http://osm.org/go/0JBKuNE-?m=
"Free" also can has a big cost.
