[ale] What would you like to see in an "Intro to Linux" Course.

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 11/06/2013 02:38 PM, Derek Carter (aka goozbach) wrote:
> I've been toying with creating an intro-to-linux course and would like
> to know what topics you would think would be best.
>
> It would be a 15-20hour course. Taught over a couple of days.
>
> What would you want to learn if you had*ZERO*  Linux experience?

Oh, that's hard.  Even harder if you don't know /why/ they're 
interested.  An intro to Linux for an end-user is going to be very 
different from that for a developer or a system administrator.  Give an 
end-user an overview intended for a system administrator and they'll run 
away screaming.  My sister didn't use "Linux" until this year, despite 
having been introduced to it in 1996.  She saw me using my computer, 
heard what it was, and never ever wanted to ever use it.  :-)

I'm not sure that what we need is an "Intro-to-Linux" course (unless 
you're a developer or system administrator), because the real problem is 
that on the desktop, it should just be a computer.

Something I've been thinking about the past couple of days is "what 
would be the /ideal/ distribution"?

People generally seem to be able to use Windows and Mac interchangably 
these days, even those who aren't Technically Qualified^(TM).

I think that there is a laundry-list of issues that we could solve on 
"Linux" that would enable users to feel comfortable with the system.  
One of them would be to achieve what I call "perfect integration" 
between the components of a distribution and enable a single 
configuration interface to the operating system.  This has yet to 
happen, though there have been many attempts to cover subsets in the 
past and even in the present (for example, sysconfig and YaST, among 
others).

I think that, however, in order for it to happen, we must rethink a lot 
of things in our stacks.  Some of this is already happening: see 
systemd, see Wayland.  However, we need to rethink more.

The "operating system" must present a single, unified, documented 
interface to the system administrator so that the system administrator 
can easily control everything from the kernel's firewall rules to the 
configuration of the interoperability of file sharing systems with 
Microsoft Windows clients.  It must provide a unified interface to the 
programmer so that the programmer can easily find all the information 
necessary to work on the system without e.g., going to find upstream 
documentation that may be incomplete or nonexistent.

Anyway, in order to not hijack the thread, I'll discontinue there. I'd 
be more than happy to start new threads on the ideas I do have, though, 
if there are people in the group who'd be interested in what amounts to 
essentially research and development in the area of Linux distributions.

     --- Mike

-- 
Naunet Corporation Logo 	Michael B. Trausch

President, *Naunet Corporation*
? (678) 287-0693 x130 or (855) NAUNET-1 x130
FAX: (678) 783-7843

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