

Dvorak Likes Linux - Zoasterboy
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2342703,00.asp
Long time Microsoft supporting, Mac Hating columnist says: "The critical mass has been reached. Go download Ubuntu 8.10 and see for yourself what the fuss is about. You won't regret it."
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ZeroGravitas
Well that was a surprisingly sensible article. Looks like we could be heading
for a tipping point. Or the apocalypse. One of the two anyway.

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ahpeeyem
A couple of people I know currently have computers that are basically unusable
because of problems with malware on Windows. I'm thinking of suggesting using
Ubuntu to them, but I'm pretty sure they will hate the idea.

Of the people I have introduced to to Firefox and OpenOffice.org, some adjust
and like using the free software, but some people revert back to IE or go and
buy MS Office almost immediately. They seem to just really hate change of any
kind.

Another example is the number of people complaining every time Facebook
changes their UI -- the last two big changes I've been impressed at how well
thought-out the changes were, but there was still those groups of people
complaining and wanting things to go back to how they used to be.

Why do some people persist with what they're used to in spite of annoyances
like malware? They've had to change to what they're using now at some stage,
so what is it that makes them change? Is it only when something different
allows them to do something they couldn't do at all before, like say a Firefox
extension? Are these people more "feature driven"?

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loumf
I tried to get my wife on OSX or Linux. Big problem for Linux was no Quicken
(she's very particular about how she manages finances). GNUCash wasn't there
yet for her -- she probably could have lived with the feature set, but the UI
was making her want to break things.

The other problem is that she takes online classes and they tend to use
packages that have very fussy browser support. I wouldn't trust that it would
work on Linux without a thorough test -- don't want to find out you have a
problem during a timed test.

Mac was rejected on cost (she went with a sub $600 laptop).

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ahpeeyem
Yeah, I can appreciate why people don't switch when there's something they
need to be able to do (eg. Quicken or online classes) that they couldn't with
the new software.

But it seems to me that some people are just resistant to change and won't go
to something new unless there's a compelling positive reason, ie. to do
something new, and a negative reason (avoiding malware) won't suffice.

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derekj
This is exactly it. I am certainly technical enough to run Linux (and have in
the past) but there's no real good compelling reason for me to use it. I don't
get malware on Windows and, believe it or not, things hardly ever crash. And
you know what? I actually like using Windows. I can run basically whatever I
want and use basically any hardware I want. I'd rather get work or play done
on my machine instead of tinkering with every little config file and stupid
little problems that always occur in Linux. Win7's UI is fantastic as well.

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rbanffy
It now seems Dvorak wants to test the Windows fanboy crowd for how many
pageviews they are able to generate on a pro-Linux article.

