[ale] GA Tech Install Fest

[JK]

Christopher Fowler wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 10:09 -0600, JK wrote:
> 
>>Christopher Fowler wrote:
> 
> 
>>Just out of curiosity, Chris, do you believe that Fedora
>>is a better distro choice for complete newbies than
>>Ubuntu?  Personally, having tried them both, I would be
>>far more likely to recommend Ubuntu to newbies (though
>>personally I use Fedora and Slackware mostly).
>>
> 
> 
> <commence flamewar>
> Ubuntu is great for noobs.  Fedora is good for noobs who will be our
> future in the Computer Science field.  
> 
> When I started out there was not much out there for noobs.  Things were
> difficult and I feel it made me stronger.  There was no module support
> and compiling a kernel was almost always a requirement.  Getting X to
> work sometimes meant to use vim as your X configuration tool.  Gopher
> was your friend.  

Sure, but OTOH, most people don't want to be strong in the
ways of *nix (or *indows, or whatever).  They just want
to get their work done, or pull down their pr0n, or
whatever.

TVs and cars, for example, perform incredibly complicated
tasks, and hide them all behind a user interface that
is essentially invisible.  Until computers get to that
point, they're really not good for all that much, IMO
(except keeping people like me employed, which admittedly
is a huge deal). Arguably Ubuntu is a step in the right
direction compared to Fedora, though only a very very
tiny one. We've got (conservatively) many decades to go.

"Well," you may say, "a general purpose machine necessarily
has a complicated user interface."  As a counterexample,
I offer my daughter, age 9: she can do pretty much anything
I ask her to do (within reason), and responds to requests
in idiomatic spoken English. Sometimes, anyway.

-- Cheers,

-- JK