When I can tell my mother

The long anticipated year of the Linux desktop will come the day I can recommend it to my mother. The Linux desktop is not ready until I can look my own mother in the eye and tell her you can do it! As of today, I cannot. I know that if she installed Linux today; she would not understand too much of it, and I would be called in as her support advisor.

Linux needs to be more friendly to all the mothers around the world.

Specific changes that would make Linux more mother friendly:

The command line has to go. Or at least get a sidebar with easy to understand instructions for regular users!
Uncluttered applications menu. The menu system needs to be more task oriented.
Acronym-free. Gnjuu-slash-Linix, what!? I think I will rather go stare out the window.
Out-of-the-box-everything. Every possible piece of hardware must be supported out of the box.

There are probably a lot more that needs to change as well.

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3 comments

Suggest a Mac. It has everything you just listed

Comment by Magnus Damli at 2007-07-13 @487.

"Out-of-the-box-everything. Every possible piece of hardware must be supported out of the box."

You have got to be kidding. No platform, not even the Mac which has an easier time of it, can claim this.

Also, the CLI is not shown by default, at least on recent K/X/Ubuntu installs. I am sure most modern Desktop oriented Distros are similar in this regard. Just like Windows and Mac OS X, the CLI is always ready to do real work, when needed. Mom rarely needed to run cmd under windows, just as she rarely needs to run konsole (or see the CLI shell).

"Acronym-free" will likely never happen. Fortunately this does not matter. My mother could care less about GNU Linux or just Linux. It is just a computer to her. She needs email, a web browser, and sometimes an Office suite (Open Office will do nicely).

I can agree that the Apps menus can become cluttered, but only after you install a lot of apps. At least there are somewhat sane catagories. Still there is work to be done here (actually there is a lot of work going on here, at least from the KDE camp).

Comment by Gustin (Subscribed) at 2007-07-15 @457.

Hear hear!

Comment by Christian Knappskog at 2007-07-22 @507.

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