If it’s easy to learn and easy to use, how come people are still installing Windows on the EEE PC?
I was chatting with a friend who just installed Windows on the EEE PC. His family would prefer to use Windows over the customized Linux installed on it by default.
Ah well.
But it still doesn’t mean that Linux sucks, right? It’s more like Linux still hasn’t really gotten enough mindshare yet so people don’t know that they could use it without much trouble if they only give it time. Then again, people would want to be able to use something immediately so if they’d want to be more productive with it, they’d want something more familiar. It’s human nature, I suppose? Maybe the “Windows XP-ness” (some people say that its color scheme and style of the icons look so Windows XP-like) of Linux on the EEE PC aren’t enough to get people to really use it.
It probably now boils down to how desktop environments will improve, maybe.
GNOME and KDE have gone a long way already and yet they don’t seem to meet the wants and needs of the crowd. What will probably make Linux more acceptable as an OS is the availability of a desktop environment or window manager that would sweep the crowd off their feet. Just like how some people have been swept off their feet because of the sleek look and feel of Mac OSX. Some people say that maybe Linux desktop environments are trying too hard to imitate Mac and Windows. I don’t know. It’s not really that, I think. Somehow I think that there’s still that perception that Linux is for geeks. For me, it depends on what Linux distro you’re talking about. Some of them might be quite like that but not all. PCLinuxOS, Xandros, Suse and Ubuntu seem to be some of the newbie faves.
What about you? What do you think?
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