Mandrake disappointment 1739
Consistency is not a must, but it is a huge advantage. XP does not offer this, and it seems in general Linux does not either - though the new GNOME may very well change...
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 15:26:26 -0700, Snit
Is consistency such an absolute necessity? IMO, most apps these days on the main plaforms, ie Windows, Linux, MacOS, work in fairly similar, and usually fairly obvious ways. There are odd exceptions where the GUI interface is unusual enough to throw even an experienced user (blender, parts of the GIMP, for instance), but in most cases, they aren't terribly hard to work out.
Basically, there are toolbars and menus and some sort of panel or dock or taskbar on the desktop. They're all pretty straight-forward, whatever the platform, even though they aren't exactly the same.
Questionable. If nothing else you have many decisions as to what distro you want when you get Linux... and that is simply overwhelming for the new Linux user. It...
I agree - but it seems to be hard to find a good version (distro) that I can be confident to point my students clients to. Of...
A Windows user should feel reasonably at home with KDE or Gnome, or even Xfce, in Linux, after a short while. I recall my own experience as a newbie linux user. At first I was a bit tentative, but gradually, trying this and that to see what it did, I grew more confident. A non-root user can't do too much damage - that's the idea. Learning to get around the Linux desktop should be regarded as a voyage of discovery, not an arduous task. It should be fun.
Stanrdard apps like Mozilla-Firefox and Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org should present no problems for anyone who's browsed, sent email, or written a document in Windows. A DVD player like Xine is not at all difficult to use, not is K3b the best, IMO, CD burner in Linux, nor the mp3 player Xmms. That about covers what a lot of people want to do. The rest can be explored at leisure.
-- Kier
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