[ale] Chinese government recommendation - Linux

[Lightner, Jeff]

Are you the ONE who is tasked with transitioning people in your organization from iPhone to Droid?   Are you the one that migrated users from Windows 95 to Windows XP or from XP to 7?   If not then being pedantic about “easy” is meaningless.  You seem to think I’m arguing that migrating to Linux is a bad idea which I’m not.  I’m arguing that just because IT types think something is “easy” for themselves does NOT mean it is “easy” for end users.   Arguing about the degree of “easy” is specious at best when I’ve continually said that it is “change” not the “specific change” that is resisted.

However, using your example I know that KDE is NOT as “easy” as you say because I’ve seen many a question by Linux folks specifically about using KDE (or Gnome or Unity or…).   Even if it WERE that “easy” to you or me it does not mean it is to the average end user.

Years ago I learned a valuable lesson when I was taking accounting 101 in an evening class.   Each class the professor would give us things to do (e.g. make a P&L or a balance sheet or just a simple T chart) to be ready for the next class.   Before class several of us got together in the student lounge and would go over the solutions we’d come up with.  Usually when they’d ask me I’d start out by saying “It’s easy I just …”.   Finally one woman said to me “It may be ‘easy’ for a god like you but for us mere mortals it actually takes some effort.”  Up until then it had never occurred to me that everyone didn’t find something as logical as double entry accounting seemed to me to be “easy”.   In fact I later found out most folks took Accounting 2-3 times before finally eking by with a passing grade because to them it is “hard”.

Another lesson I learned was back in the days when electronic cash registers became computerized.   One guy I worked with could NOT get the “cash register” to work because he “didn’t know anything about computers”.   He had this attitude because the new register had a tiny CRT screen on it.  No matter how hard I tried to explain to him that he wasn’t actually dealing with the “computer” aspect of it I couldn’t get through his head that it was just as “easy” as the “cash register” he’d been using before.  (This was before touch screens so it still used the same type of keys the old “cash register” had and still used the hard copy guest checks the previous register did.)

There IS a real world resistance to change and arguing that something is “easy” because YOU think it is does not change the fact that it may NOT be “easy” to the individuals to whom you’re trying to push the change.

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Wolf Halton
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 1:51 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Chinese government recommendation - Linux

If they figured out an iPhone or a Droid phone, they can figure out the Linux desktop.  It is less of a jump from XP to KDE than from XP to Windows 7, and the Ubuntu desktop is very similar to Win 8.  Actually, I think that there is less disruption from Windows 7 to KDE than from Windows 7 to Windows 8 (or even 8.1).

Wolf Halton

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