Look Grandma! same shit as windows [LWN.net]

Look Grandma! same shit as windows

Posted Jun 5, 2008 19:34 UTC (Thu) by stock (guest, #5849)
Parent article: Mark Shuttleworth on the future of Ubuntu

Shuttleworth :

But we are willing to put in drivers that are not yet open source, because we figure it's more important to give everybody's grandma the opportunity to actually run free software applications on a free software environment, even if they need some proprietary drivers to get their hardware going. That puts us squarely in the pragmatist camp rather than the purist camp.

This way Linux becomes the worst of both worlds. An open source distro which still has the potential weaknesses which come with these proprietary drivers. AND your Grandma still has to learn Linux to get the same out of it as Windows. Makes me wonder what Mark Shuttleworth is actually contributing here.

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Look Grandma! same shit as windows

Posted Jun 6, 2008 1:07 UTC (Fri) by nlucas (subscriber, #33793) [Link]

For your grandma there is no difference even if you lose an hour explaining it.

The only difference for her is if things work or not.

Example of Ubuntu replacing Windows

Posted Jun 6, 2008 17:01 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

As it happens, I switched an 80-year old relative from Windows XP to Ubuntu last weekend. This
was done at short notice because the power supply in her XP PC was failing, and I happened to
have an old laptop spare that was running Xubuntu.

My relative is doing fine with Ubuntu, and there's really very little to learn as the main
applications (Firefox and Thunderbird) are identical - she's not a power user at all, simply
needing a few basic apps.

The differences between Windows and Xubuntu really don't matter to this person, as long as
everything works. I could have done the same thing with KDE or GNOME, I'm sure, but I already
had Xubuntu installed and XFCE works OK in 192 MB RAM. I did spend a bit of time making the
XFCE setup look like Windows, with a Start menu at the bottom, but that's not exactly
difficult.

The huge benefit is that now I can remotely administer the machine using either SSH or VNC
(over SSH, using the excellent x11vnc, ), and quickly fix any problems as they occur. This
was very hard to keep working on Windows for some problem. Also, all the Ubuntu applications
get security-updated automatically (thanks to "aptitude install unattended-upgrades"), rather
than the apps remaining insecure until my next visit.

On the proprietary driver point - as it happens this laptop doesn't need any proprietary
drivers, but if there was a need for this due to WiFi or graphics, it would be a deal-blocker
if only open source drivers were available. I'm a pragmatist like Mark Shuttleworth on this -
if a PC is 'only' 99% open source due to proprietary drivers, it still creates more demand for
Linux-supported hardware, and in the long run the proprietary drivers can more likely be
dumped as a result, compared to leaving the PC on XP where everything is closed sources.