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Bart and Lisa could keep the family running Linux

Gerald Willmann <[email protected]> écrivait/wrote:

>On Tue, 25 May 1999, Gilles Pelletier wrote:
>
>> I certainly realize this. No later than yesterday, I was 
>>telling a friend that if you exclude Linux users who boot 
>>Windows by default, there might be no more than 100,000 linux 
>>users left.
>
>and I'm one of them - how nice. 

Indeed! And I'm glad to take your word for it: now I can say I 
know one of those rare birds. Still 99,999 to find. That's a lot.

>You didn't try to convert him/her to linux
>with this argument, did you? 

I figure I was talking to a convert. I'm just trying to keep the 
hype down: Microsoft is much closer to offering a decent server 
than Linux is to appealing to the everyday user. Comes Windows 
2000, Linux might end up being little more than a forlorn geeks' 
dream. 

Do you really figure the average user will be amused having a 
conversation about mount - umount - mtab - fstab - /mnt - /dev - 
etc. just to read a CD, or that a graphical interface will solve 
all the problems interfacing with Linux? 

However zilch my contribution might be, did you take a few minutes 
to read the interview with Eric Raymond, the "evangelist" of 
Cathedral and Bizarre fame, who, just as M$ is facing the DoJ, 
contends that the Linux community will be 750 million strong in 
five years and encourages anarchic development to reach this 
goal? (Linux, as we know it now, results mainly from efforts 
centered around Torvalds, Stallman and the X Consortium. 
The outcome of Bob Young's feats remains to be seen.)

So, how come you don't go after this moron instead? Isn't he 
much more influencial than me? If I raised to say "Fear not! 
Forget your concerns! In three days, even Chineses in the 
remotest confines of Mongolia will use Linux." would you laud 
me as an even greater prophet... well, at least for three days? 
Where's the rationale, Mr "stanford.edu"?

>It seems as baseless a speculation to me as the subject promised.

Maybe you'd prefer to comment on your guru's figures? Where's 
your Truth, your sound speculation? How do you figure Linux is 
doing? What's the future of an OS with next to no users base? 
Oh! Your Boys Scout association is throwing big installfests once 
or twice a year with close to 100 participants! How many are still 
booting Linux after a month? How does this feat compare with 
thousands of cheap internet computers being sold everyday with 
only Windows installed, and every member of  the family striving 
to get its hands at it?

Hype might keep the morale up for a while and make people like 
me look like doomsday prophets, but in the end, only the bare 
figures count. For now, let's face it, Linux is loosing ground.

What is needed is good documentation and Linux's is definitively 
rotten. Having to figure how to read a CD combining information 
from man pages and HOWTOs is not the way to go. As I tried to 
explained in "AutoInstall is for experts, not beginners!!!"  
(which finally turned into a thread on Debian), an interactive 
course is: instructions in a top Emacs window, the prompt in 
the bottom one, and there you go mounting and unmounting your CD, 
adding users, changing permissions, etc.

No doubt, this project wouldn't turn Homer Simpson into a hacker, 
but maybe Bart or Lisa could keep the family running Linux.

GP