

HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux - IsaacSchlueter
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

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Jem
I love this part: "Don't treat women stereotypically" ...and yet further up
the article: "since they have low self-confidence to begin with".

Total crap. I can't believe this was written by a woman.

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axod
Sorry but this is mostly bs. It's not like anyone knows what gender you are
online anyway. Girls and Boys like different things regardless of society. Get
over it. We're built differently, and have different strengths and weaknesses.

"We all know that most computer games are written by and for men."

Maybe true a few years ago, certainly not now - "Petz" "hamsterz" "animal
crossing" "Wii fit" "Nintendogs" etc etc. Nintendo probably makes more 'girl'
games than they do 'boy' games.

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michaelneale
It seems that the single-mindedness of the male "hunters" mind suits working
with computers quite well. You focus on annoying trivia to the exclusion of
all else for a while and that is exactly what is needed. Females seem to be
more balanced, and capable of many concurrent tasks, which makes them slightly
less likely to allow themselves to be as obsessed as males are with computers.

Of course all this is generalisation and doesn't apply to great chunks of
people..

One other thing that seems to happen in the programming language world is
testosterone charges debates/arguments. Thats not terribly attractive to 60%
of the population, so that can't be helping either.

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Prrometheus
You almost have to be a hacker to use Linux. Linux demographics will mirror
hacker demographics.

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cabalamat
Really? My brother's a businessman, not a programmer, and uses Linux on a
daily basis (in fact, he started using it before me). I have lots of friends
who use Linux; many of them are not programmers/hackers. Quite often my non-
technical friends mention they are thinking of trying Linux (I advise them to
go with Ubuntu).

So while many, perhaps even most Linux users are hackers, many are just
"normal" people using it to get a job done.

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Prrometheus
It took days of forum diving to get Ubuntu up and running on my desktop. My
wireless networking still doesn't work after following a handful of 20-step
installation guides, compiling a few kernel modules, editing a few
configuration files and the like. Eventually I gave up and strung a 100 ft.
Cat 5 cable to the house router. If I weren't already so determined to use it,
I would have given up and spent $99 on an XP disk a long time ago.

That said, Ubuntu works great on my Lenovo laptop, not that you would know
that from the gargantuan and labyrinthine hardware compatibility lists.

Linux is hard. It takes commitment or an IT guy.

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orib
It takes buying compatible hardware, and things will Just Work. With Windows,
the manufacturers design their hardware to work with it. With MacOS, you can't
run it on most hardware anyways. With Linux, you have to spend some care
chosing hardware -- mainly wireless networking these days; Graphics are far
better than they were about a year ago, since ATI released documentation.

It doesn't take any effort to get Linux working on hardware that it claims to
support. In fact, I find it far _easier_ to get Linux working on supported
hardware than Windows; the install is far smoother, there are no drivers to
hunt down after the install, and the software that I care about is 90%
preinstalled. the last 10% is just a click in a nice GUI away, and I don't
have to search around the internet for a reliable source to download from.

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Prrometheus
The problem is that it will take you at least a few hours' commitment to find
compatible hardware. If you'd also like to buy a box at a good value, the
problem becomes exponentially harder.

Hardware compatibility is getting better, for sure. The biggest glaring hole
is Linux support for USB wireless peripherals (something a majority of home
desktop computers use nowadays). Also, software support for the 64-bit
architecture lags behind support for 32-bit architecture despite the fact that
every new box is going to have more than 4 gigs of RAM in a year or two.

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orib
For 64 bit architecture, the only big hole I found was the flash player --
it's simply broken, even with the npviewer plugin.

As far as wired networks/desktop hardware goes, I find that things Just
Work(tm). Laptops, yeah. You do need to google, or buy with Linux
preinstalled. thankfully, there are more and more places that sell Linux
laptops these days.

~~~
Prrometheus
Amazon's MP3 downloader and the most recent student version of Matlab also do
not support 64 bit architecture.

Most of the stuff in the repositories is good on 64 bit, much of everything
else is not.

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orib
Hm. Never used the MP3 downloader myself, and Octave has been sufficiently
compatible (ie, every bit of code I've encountered/written worked on both) for
me to do all the Matlab courses and assignments that I've worked on. I suppose
that I should have qualified my original statement -- all the software I cared
about as an engineering-physics/computer science student that ran on Linux in
the first place runs just fine on Linux 64 bit. (I miss CAD and a good GUI
circuit designer, but those were also missing from 32 bit Linux)

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pavelludiq
There are probably many women in computing, just not that much famous ones, i
guess.

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grahamg
this is useless.

