How to Conquer the World for Linux 16810

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billwg

Really? What can you do with it? Not word processing, not database work, not development, a very limited subset of internet use... basically, it's minesweeper, solitaire, IE and OE. Hardly staggering usability.

It's not. Apart from a few who buy into the hype, and want it without any real clue why they want it, most folks, on the whole, are completely oblivious to it. You could stick an XP logo on a Mac and as long as they can run their apps, they'd never know the difference.

Apart from a comparatively small technically-oriented contingent, most folks simply aren't even aware, beyond maybe knowing the name of the OS, what the OS is, or does, nor do they differentiate between OS and apps. "XP lets me chat on IRC". No, mIRC does that - XP has *no* capability for doing that. To most, though, it's not mIRC and MS Office and whatnot, it's simply "XP".

You, however, know better. You know damned well what XP is - and what it isn't. You even admit that until someone - the user, the vendor, whomever - adds in a mess of bundled software, XP, as a product, is functionally limited. That Joe Sixpack happens to regard Word and mIRC and whatever else as "part of" XP doesn't change the reality of it.

Apart from the millions using it, the governments, schools, research insbreastutions, NSA, internet outfits, and more and more and more? You mean aside from all those "no one"?

How much time do you think is involved? Hint: not a hell of a lot. Most desktop distros these days are pretty much plug-and-play, even to the point of running off CD so you can try before installing. There's a small learning curve as you figure out things like using kmail instead of OE, Moz instead of IE, etc... but that seems to be more than compensatd by the effort involved in getting and keeping your Windows systems secured, the lost time due to infections, inexplicable failures and the rest which are way too common in Windows land.