Don’t forget knoppix. I love the gui. It also works great on computers being used at home for internet only purposes. spyware? viruses? impossible because there’s no need for a harddrive, thus nowhere to store spyware or viruses. I haven’t heard of any viruses being able to infect a computer being executed solely from the ram (knoppix viruses would be possible i guess i’ve just never heard of any, anyone familiar with the subject?).

To the person who said real users don’t NEED windows: not all, but if you enjoy video games you do. I would never play a graphics intensive game on an operating system it wasn’t written for. considering i’m seeing more and more directx only games, i don’t think this will change in a long time. also, it comes down to adobe software as well, as someone else mentioned. that’s software that can be very resource intensive so i would go the same route as with video games. considering all i have to choose from there is a mac and a pc… well, there’s another reason i won’t be dropping windows for a while.

The whole business is nuts.

Microsoft Office dominates (sigh… once again) because Microsoft got there first, and gained trust through propaganda and other marketing strategy.

This means that the best way to get Linux out there is to create a psychological barrier between office computing and home computing in the mind of consumers. Then get vendors to pre-install Linux at the reduction of $price_of_windows from the system. Of course- it has to be an easy to use distro…

Good incentive, huh?

boot in safe mode and do your scans. and hope something hasn’t infected your security suite :D. or completely reinstal windows.

perhaps there should be a few new forms of write protections in windows, and developers that use them. modifiyable only by so and so executeable, and this setting can’t be changed except by that executeable. modifiable only with password thats given(ie it needs to be passed somehow before you can change it). also windows should already have some sort of registry permissions type of thing(UI similare to a firewall but with differnt programs)

the case got dismissed cause the judge was TOOOO annoyed. would be my guess.

^ And, once installed, winDOS installation is inefficient – your hardware config’s hardcoded, any drastic changes and at best you’ll find it *deactivates itself*, and at worst it’ll force a complete reformat. All flavours of Linux don’t seem to mind if I switch hardware…

And don’t get me started on the USB drive letter assignment bug – y’know, the one that insists on automatically mapping external disks to specified locations, and forgetting to check if the drive letter for the location is already assigned. But I guess to WinDOS users, I shouldn’t be assigning network drives any drive letters in the first place, eh.

Zango is smokescreening the issue. The case was dismissed with prejudice because Collins Law _asked that it be_. There was no court decision, or impending decision, that played any role. The Judge did not order this dismissal. It was voluntary.

I’ve posted more on my blog on the matter.

Alex

My company sets up PCs for SMB use regionally. I checked the records and we did 121 Windows installs last quarter. We use 4-5 different HW setups, and additional local modifications. We can do a Windows unattended install in about 2 hours. That’s pretty painless.

As others have pointed out, Linux won’t take hold until the ‘flavors’ become more interchangeable and the GUI gets dumbed-down slightly. Sure, power-users might love it, but the real estate agent down the street or the restaurant owner downtown each have about 100 other things to worry about and don’t want to learn the ins-and-outs of a completely new OS. They know that when they click the big “e” that the internet opens, etc.

That’s probably one of the biggest obstacles to open-source distribution. And it’s apparent in this thread as well as most others on this site. Tech-savvy ‘nerds’ have tunnel-vision and don’t understand that people don’t care about how a computer or it’s OS works…they just want it to do whatever it is they bought it for. There is such a huge anti-enduser mentality among techies, that good implementation will not occur, since they believe all end-users are idiots.

We are currently putting together an implementation plan for an upcoming customer who has agreed to put their business on a ‘mostly’ open-source software platform. If successful, and if we can get the users past the “this doesn’t look like my computer at home” mentality, I think it could be the start. But it will take patience and a thoroughly planned-out training plan. Have any of you sat through a “How to use MS Word” class? Probably not…it’s a little beneath most of the people on this site. But if you do, you will see how easy Joe Sixpack finds it. Alternate OSs might be that easy, but the training for implementation needs to be that easy as well. The local library runs 5 classes each week for people to learn to use various SW packages. How many classes are there for learning Linux? 0.

I think it’s just about maturity. The Windows OS has enjoyed a couple of decades of dominance to work out the GUI issues. If Linux can settle on a specific flavor, to which developers can see some fiscally sensible development returns, then things will change, and then stick with that for 5-10 years, it will start to see the expansion it deserves.

back to work

You know how you are forced to watch advertizing on TV? Well, it’s going to be the same thing with this!!