Look and feel/psychological choices [LWN.net]

Look and feel/psychological choices

Posted Nov 20, 2006 17:39 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: too little... by wtogami
Parent article: IRC meeting about Novell/Microsoft deal

Warren,

The reason most people chose between distro's is psychological bordering on religious. They like something (say the look of an icon) etc at some point and then build an entire rationalization about why this distro or that is inferior to it. There is no logical reason except inside the head of the believer.

There was a psychological study where a group of psychologists took I think a Chevrolet and relabeled it a Ford (and they did the vice versa). They then took a lot of people who liked a certain brand and told them they were going to drive the next years model and compare it with a similar model from the competitor. The people chose the branded car over and over again even when they said "you know its awfully like a Chevy/Ford, but I just don't like Ford/Chevy."

I am pretty sure that you could change a SuSE system out and change the icons to have Red Hat.. and people would call it inferior because it wasnt the brand they identified with.

Branding is very much about tribal totems and getting something to identify who your 'clan' is. It is getting the lower parts of the subconscious to identify who is safe and who is the enemy.

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Look and feel/psychological choices

Posted Nov 20, 2006 19:48 UTC (Mon) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

Last I looked (SuSE 9.2) there was a vast difference between YaST and the Red Hat admin tools. You won't fool many with an icon/images switch. BTW, that particular workstation, a dual PIII 600, dual boots both SuSE 9.2 and Fedora Core 4. But YaST is so sluggish on that hardware that I don't think I've booted SuSE more than twice since the install. And I had intended SuSE to be my primary OS.

Look and feel/psychological choices

Posted Nov 21, 2006 1:34 UTC (Tue) by grouch (guest, #27289) [Link]

Branding is very much about tribal totems and getting something to identify who your 'clan' is. It is getting the lower parts of the subconscious to identify who is safe and who is the enemy.

At the time I settled on Debian, all other major distributions required a re-installation for each new version released. I don't know if they still do that and don't care. What's the "tribal totem" for lazy?

Look and feel/psychological choices

Posted Nov 22, 2006 15:59 UTC (Wed) by alexl (subscriber, #19068) [Link]

Fedora, and Redhat Linux before that has never required a reinstall on upgrade. They do however require you to do the upgrade through the installer, so that some special case things like bootloader and filesystem changes can be handled.

In practice though, many people upgrade between fedora releases live with yum.

Look and feel/psychological choices

Posted Nov 21, 2006 8:24 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

The reason most people chose between distro's is psychological bordering on religious.

I must be an odd person then, or you are mischaracterizing the whole distro thing. When I bought the new 64-bit workstation I wanted things to run and I wanted ease of administration; having a certain experience with GNU/Linux I tried OpenSUSE, Mandriva, Gentoo, Debian 32/64, Ubuntu 32/64. Today I would probably give Fedora a try too, out of curiosity and by its stance on freedom.

I was gladly surprised by OpenSUSE and Gentoo. In the end Gentoo was the most versatile and Ubuntu-32 the easiest to run, so I chose the latter for common usage but keep the others around. It is so easy to install a distro that there is no reason to be led by religious issues at all. True, you need some motivation to try things out, but once you do the differences are quickly spelled out; at least for minimally knowledgeable people.

If you want to find out if the person speaking knows what (s)he is talking about, just ask if (s)he has actually tried the darn thing. Fanatics are easily spotted.