> In the first place, what does your friend’s email client have to with the email client you use? I think > I’m missing your point.
I was thinking about how most non-business people end up trying Linux: because they've got a friend who uses it. So now their friend goes 'oh, I use KMail for my email - I can't help you set that up', and they discover that KMail doesn't like to work under Gnome, or works but not quite as well as it should.
I still think that for your average non-technical user, lots of choice is a bad thing. It's nice for you or I to be able to pick which distro suits our style of computer use, but J. Random User just needs to be told to install Distro X because it'll work. Unfortunately, even for the same target audience there's multiple competing distros, so it ends up being 'Distro X if you want to use KDE, Distro Y if you like Gnome' - at which points they're now completely lost.
This kind of choice is both Linux's strength and its weakness. It makes it really popular for geeks (and for server usage), but it hurts widespread adoption with home users.
Mac OS X actually defaults to logging the user in without a username or password - for a system with just one user, it's a sensible default. (If someone's got physical access to the machine, your username/password aren't going to slow them down much anyway.) It's easy to switch to different models of login, though (the normal username/password text fields, selecting users from a list then typing a password, or even using US Government-issued swipe cards, apparently). And it supports fast user switching, so you can have multiple users logged into the GUI at one time, which is really nice.
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Date: 2006-03-18 07:49 am (UTC)> I’m missing your point.
I was thinking about how most non-business people end up trying Linux: because they've got a friend who uses it. So now their friend goes 'oh, I use KMail for my email - I can't help you set that up', and they discover that KMail doesn't like to work under Gnome, or works but not quite as well as it should.
I still think that for your average non-technical user, lots of choice is a bad thing. It's nice for you or I to be able to pick which distro suits our style of computer use, but J. Random User just needs to be told to install Distro X because it'll work. Unfortunately, even for the same target audience there's multiple competing distros, so it ends up being 'Distro X if you want to use KDE, Distro Y if you like Gnome' - at which points they're now completely lost.
This kind of choice is both Linux's strength and its weakness. It makes it really popular for geeks (and for server usage), but it hurts widespread adoption with home users.
Mac OS X actually defaults to logging the user in without a username or password - for a system with just one user, it's a sensible default. (If someone's got physical access to the machine, your username/password aren't going to slow them down much anyway.) It's easy to switch to different models of login, though (the normal username/password text fields, selecting users from a list then typing a password, or even using US Government-issued swipe cards, apparently). And it supports fast user switching, so you can have multiple users logged into the GUI at one time, which is really nice.