Wally Balljacker wrote:I don't know about that. Installing applications on OS X is about as easy as it gets.
Well, my mom surely wouldn't know how to do it, and since both Windows machines from Dell and Macs from Apple come preloaded with the OS and are basically ready to go, I think it's fair that I promote myself as OEM in my mom's case, and I preload SUSE Linux, and it works better than both Windows and Apple for her, even just a default install of SUSE worked great without the multimedia tweaks, she was perfectly happy, so if Novell gets Dell to preload that SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 product they have coming up, and if it's possible for people like us to purchase them, I think it'd be a great solution for a lot of people.
Wally Balljacker wrote:KDE might make more sense to Windows users
Something I noticed, KDE seems to be like Windows in a few areas and GNOME like OS X in a few areas, but as you said, KDE makes perfect sense for Windows users.
Wally Balljacker wrote:but for older people who have never owned a computer before, I think OS X is alot simpler to use.
If you're a first time computer user, and you havn't learned the basics of neither Windows, Linux or Mac, I think either one is as complicated to learn as the other one are, but once you learn to use either one of them, you're fine.
Frankly I think Linux is the best solution for people completely new to computers, because it just works, and it does it's job very very well.
Wally Balljacker wrote:Too simple in fact. That's why I got frustrated with it, fast. I like changing my icons, theme, window border, and just tinkering with things. Doing that in OS X is damn near impossible without extra 3rd party programs.
Which is why I'm installing OpenBSD on this Mac mini, gonna put a nice sticker on it too
Wally Balljacker wrote:For people with kids like us, who can administer their computers for them, KDE or GNOME might be a better choice, but for non geeky people who need to manage their systems themselves, OS X can't be beat in terms of sheer ease of use. I can't imagine my mother adding repositories to her apt sources.list file, or hacking an xorg config file.
Dude, you're sounding like if we just traveled five years back in time! Or if we're using Debian, Slackware, Arch or whatever distro that you have to be experienced to use. If you go to Fry's and buy SUSE (I use SUSE as an example in this case because it's the only distro I know of that has a retail version other than Linspire, and Linspire is insecure IMHO, if you make your distro so that users run as root by default, you don't understand UNIX security period!) you'll get a good manual that guides the user through the installation process, and all the way through doing stuff like setting up KMail, Firefox and so forth, heck that's even better documentation than you get from Microsoft, and you'll never even have to even come close to messing with xorg.conf or adding repositories, you just pop the CDs in the drive and you install the distro, and to not be like a total SUSE fanboy here, Fedora and Mandriva does a great job in this area of making it transperant to the user as well, I actually have a Mandrake 10.1 retail box, and it's great too, good manual and good selection of software included.
For old-time Mac users, of course OS X makes the most sense, it's the culture they're used to, but for Windows users I think Linux makes a heck of a lot more sense in a lot of cases, not necessarily all, I don't wanna be a zealot and say it's the best solution for everyone, because it isn't, but what I am saying is that it makes sense for people to use Linux in A LOT of cases. But hey, if you believe that Linux is mostly for the techie type guys like us, and "normal people" should go buy a Mac, be my guest and take that belief, but I believe that despite all the crap people like Leo Laporte, and ITWire or whatever site it was, throws out there about Linux being hard to use, and not being good enough for the average Joe and blah blah blah donkeys can fly blah blah blah, I think Linux is a great OS, I think it's very easy to use, I've tested it's ease of use on my mom, my aunt and my uncle (I have several sets of uncles and aunts, I've only tested this on one of the sets
), all of them was able to do everything they wanted to do with their computer for day-to-day stuff, it almost also worked for my sister, but she wanted to play Sims 2 and was a bitch about learning to use OpenOffice, ohh it's not Microsoft ohhhh, so she uses Windows.
