Wal-Mart shipping PCs with Lindows preinstalled

[Marvin GodfatherofSoul Bellamy]

I think this is a very dangerous attitude to have towards newbies. 
 Linux elitism breeds contempt for ease-of-use which leads to neglect 
for features which make it easier for the newbs to adopt Linux.   Lack 
of fresh blood leads to death.  We've got to be encouraging everyone we 
can to use Linux, even the friendlier distros.

A stretched analogy for you, I was a big time Netrek player back in the 
heydays.  There's some pretty complicated strategy for such a simple 
program, but after a while the experienced players would get annoyed 
with mistakes and persist in flaming the newbies every time the screwed 
up.  The newbies started getting discouraged and stopped playing.  Now, 
Netrek is a dinosaur of a network game and hasn't gone through any 
considerable upgrade in years as the player population has dwindled. 
 There's only one trafficked server now, as far as I know.  A bit more 
dreary a future that Linux will ever have, but it doesn't take mch to 
get going down that path.

Teach.

atechsol.net wrote:

>Hang out in my chat room, you'll see it daily.  The wonders of mandrake is it seems to attract the 
most clueless newbies. 
>Clueless to linux, clueless to maners, clueless to pretty much everything.  I've seen some give 
up, I've seen some excel.
>I've seen some crash bang hack and reboot their way into a machine more broken than I've ever 
produced in _any_ OS. 
>(They dont call me crash for nothing.)  When a user joins my room and asks 'how do I start 
windows' after a few minutes of teasing them we inform them to call it atleast X windows if not 
XFree86 and kindly tell them to 'startx/Xtart/X' whatever the choice of said person may be.  With 
proper support and not-so-broken releases linux can go a really long way.  
>
>>Of course.  But right now thier friend can't tell them that they got screwed
>>into buying a "non-compatible" operating system.  A retarded monkey can run
>>windows.  Maybe it's just my ego but I like to think that Linux takes some
>>brains.  Think of all those clueless Windows users the first time thier
>>machine boots to runlevel 3 instead of 5.
>>
>>Aaron
>>
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