el w00t0s! Lets take advantage of this short short period of time, which I hereby christen "time-in-which-I-can-blog-whenever-the-hell-I-feel-like-it", to finally make another post about linux!
And so I was sticking around some of my long-forsaken haunts, like the holy dota forums and linuxNUS, and stumbled upon this blog post about the Great Ubuntu Girlfriend Experiment and found it pretty darned interesting. Basically this dude went and made a fresh install of the latest version of UbuntuLinux (8.04 Hardy Heron) then sat his un-linux-y girlfriend in front of the newly setup box and charged her with a list of tasks to perform, presumably to discern Hardy Heron's usability for your run-off-the-mill windows user, and not because he had some sadomasochistic inclinations :P
Anyway, the results were pretty insightful, I think. Pretty interesting how little little things that veteran users overlook can end up being a big help (or an insurmountable barrier) to novice users. Still, it is evident that Linux (or at least Ubuntu) has come a very long way. I think the results of the experiment are actually pretty good (with the exception of YouTube and flash, that one is a pain alrite =.= I blame flash for being proprietary!! xD) and it actually looks easier and more intuitive than ever to just start using Linux for almost any common task. Of course, I guess it cannot be helped that some of the potential barriers that need to be cleared results from the virtual synonymous relationship between 'Personal Computer' and 'Windows'. It'll unfortunately take some basic knowledge of operating systems to appreciate why '.exe' files won't run on Linux =x
It may be because when I started using computers we were still fooling around in horrid ol' DOS, but I find I disagree with the author on his final comment : "Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do." I think that even now, any kind of computer usage - DOS, Windows or Linux - requires a little literacy training - people don't just appear in front of the computer and magically start single clicking things to select them and double clicking things to execute them. The problem is the literacy training you usually get is heavily windows-biased, and shifting to Linux ends up being precisely that - SHIFTING. I don't think it will be more difficult to teach a WHOLLY computer illiterate user to use modern Linux that to use Windows. In fact, I think that if everyone started out using Linux and had to shift to Windows halfway through, the list of complaints will probably crash through the roof (like how I cannot stand not being able to move windows by alt-clicking them now xD)
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