On Sat, 2008-04-05 at 16:49 +0100, Ned Slider wrote:
>
> John wrote:
> > Alan,
> > I knew of the Dell article, as I have all of those saved for reference.
> > [1] I was just wondering if you knew of any that were for someone knew
> > to Linux. You know the Microsoft type tutorials that have screenshot
> > with them. That's the question I get asked a lot of times from around my
> > home area.
> >
> > In turn when these users that are new to Linux they get discouraged when
> > they can't visualy see pictures or have to edit some text file. They
> > just use to doing things the M$ Way. CentOS could have a much broader
> > user base (Huge), the biggest user base around if simple things like
> > this could be done. i realize though it take volunteers to do this on
> > the wiki.
> >
>
> Hi John,
>
> Apologies for not being Alan ;)
Got someones attention! That's great!
> As an occasional Wiki author, I thought I'd offer you my personal
> insight on this topic. I try to write articles/documentation that is
> broad reaching hence why it tends to be command line based - not
> everyone has a GUI installed, so any guide that relies on GUI methods
> instantly fails to reach a section of the community. I firmly believe
> well written command line based documentation can and should be easy to
> follow, even for the novice user.
Correct in ways; CentOS is more touted to a server based community. Yea
the GUI method instanly Fails the experianced part of the community.
My problem lies in this: People these days cant not afford or justify
the cost of Windows. Those are the ones that CentOS makes the biggest
impression on. Much less Microsoft Office. Who has a couple hundred
dollars for that?
>
> Also, IMHO GUI-based tools are not always a good thing. I remember
> struggling with the horrible up2date GUI interface in my Red Hat Linux
> days. It was only a GUI frontend to RPM (??) but it was buggy as hell.
> It didn't take me long to figure out it was far easier to manually
> download updates by ftp and apply them with 'rpm -Fvh *.rpm'. Things
> evolve and now we can simply do 'yum update'.
The Apache GUI tool is broken it never works. The samba one don't always
work.
A text user interface intimidates a Windows user. That's like a new user
installing CentOS to a machine that only has 128MBs of RAM. After
complete install. what happens? It gets booted into runlevel 3 and they
just said the heck with this.
Yumex has involded just as well as Synaptic and just as good but the
windows user knows nothing of it. Applications | Add Remove Software is
about the limit for the new user.
"Why add an additional layer of complexity where it isn't needed?" Apart
from new users Windows system admins are even terrified of a command
line.
>
> Whilst I sympathise with your observation, and I'm sure we all know
> users like that, CentOS isn't Windows and I wouldn't want it to be. I
> would rather we try to educate users to the Linux way of doing things
> rather than turn Linux into a Windows clone. I guess I feel the same
> about documentation to an extent.
The catch here is feeding the new user little by little. Ease them into
it and they will never know it
I am not saying turn CentOS into a Windows Clone. Yes, I agree educating
the user to the linux way of doing things
Idea: A separate Wiki for the new users. Don't have links on it pointing
external sites of how tos. Just have all the basic how tos; Burning the
centos cdrom in windows with a open source tool like Infra View, Nero,
or Easy CD Creator. Using the network GUI Config Tool for Dial Up Access
and DSL or Cable Internet and Local Intranet. How to add a user with the
GUI tool. Thing of this sort is like putting the iceing on the cake and
keeping them and not letting them stay to another Distro.
> Ned
>
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