[Hampshire] OS comparisons, was:pcworld southampton & linux

Hi John,

Your mail just prompted an interesting conversation with my wife Clare.

She's in a somewhat interesting position of being utterly
non-technical, and having experience of the following environments
roughly chronologically since I met her:-

* Windows 98 using MS Office, MS Works and IE
* Windows XP running proprietary only applications such as IE, MS
Office and Outlook
* Debian testing (around 5 years ago) running Thunderbird and Firefox
and openoffice
* Ubuntu (all 10 releases) running Thunderbird/Evolution, Firefox and Openoffice
* Xandros (EeePC pre-install) running similar apps
* OSX running Firefox, Openoffice, iPhoto and iTunes

All under my wavering stewardship..

2009/8/10 john lewis <johnlewis@???>:
> I just googled for some images of OSX desktops (since I have never
> seen one in real life) and good looking it may be but it has a thingy
> at top and bottom of screen and icons all over
>

That's only a small part of the experience really. A relatively
unified look and feel to the majority of apps, a slick boot and logon
process and tight integration with tools such as the parental controls
make it a bit of a step ahead of Linux distros.

Yes, Apple are 'evil', yes their software is predominantly proprietary
and very very closed, but it looks gorgeous (for the most part) (to
most users) and works in an expected way for the majority of the time.

I'm sat here using a free software browser on a linux distro. Wifey is
in the kitchen using a Mac.

I just called her in to quiz her about her experience and asked her to
be as honest as possible.

I asked her about her experience with the above platforms, what was
her favorite, the one she found easiest to use and so on.

"My original Dell (running XP) was probably the easiest to use"

I suspect this is at least in part because at that time I'd not pushed
Linux on her, so it was somewhat familiar to her given she had used
Windows in a work environment although not as a main part of her job.

"When Windows gives me an error it's not easy to decypher the
technical jargon, I've got no idea what I need to be doing. Sometimes
I do, and you try and do what it says and it buries you deep
somewhere, and then I get confused and close it all and just call
someone technical".

"On the Mac when it comes up with an error I can pretty much
understand what it's wanting me to do. So then I'll go ahead and try
and do what it wants me to do and invariably it just kinda works out
alright, and gets back to where I want to be, and I can do that and
follow the instructions and what they say will happen happens"

"On the EeePC (Xandros) the help is very instant in that it happens
right away, you're not waiting for the 'will it work or wont it'. I'd
say Linux is slap bang in the middle of Windows and Mac, if I was a
bit more technical I would probably get it. It seems a bit more
jargonised. If I personally made more of an effort I could probably
sit through it and work it out, but because I have a Linux expert on
tap I don't bother. With a little time and effort, and maybe I might
have to google a bit, but I could probably work it out".

"But also with Linux, the important thing is it very rarely happens. I
very rarely have any kind of need to ask for help."

"The same goes for the mac. The difference for the mac, is it probably
happens more frequently with the mac, but I can deal with it, when it
happens with Linux, it's less frequently but not so fixable... and
when I say _less_ frequently, I mean _really_ less"

"The one biggest complaint of Linux is that it's difficult to switch
from one to the other, as in from linux to windows. It's become easier
with the newer versions but I still find that things move about, and
when you don't use the system 9-5, and you need to go into something
quickly, if things aren't immediately easy to find then it causes
delays, and causes more thinking time".

"If I had to score the three systems on reliability, Linux is always
reliable, it very very rarely puts up error messages, and very
extremely rarely crashes, except the old EeePC used to crash a bit.
Then the mac, then windows.. Windows is very 'ooh, you're asking too
much of me'. "

"If I had to pick a favourite, it would be _this_ computer" - pointing
at an iMac (running OSX)

Food for thought from a complete non-tech.

Cheers,
Al.