Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Guy Tetruashvyly]

> In light of the latest economic protests, I hope what I wrote in my last
> paragraph doesn't sound filthy-capitalist. It's not that I think that 1,000
> shekels is peanuts. But it's that 1,000 shekels is much cheaper than what
> typical computers used to cost (5,000 shekels 10 years ago,

You're right about that, with my insisting on using this used P4 , that 
I bought used, for 80$ , and when it's mother-board broke,
a few weeks ago, getting a replacement from E-bay, instead of just 
buying a new PC ! , -  I'm the joke of plenty folks here, and a classic 
case of  " shoemaker walks barefoot " ,
Prior to leaving the holy-land I bought a very nice PC , and I'm trying 
to fly it over here, rather then pay the 500$+ that
it will take me to re-build it here. True, my old system does not 
reflect the what's going on out-there.


On 09/17/2011 02:01 AM, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011, Guy Tetruashvyly wrote about "Re: Linux is ready for the desktop!":
>>       a few years now. reminiscing my first Linux days, 4 years ago, the
>>       most frustrating part was " why isn't it working 5 seconds after I
>>       installed it ? " , so, I do agree about the part of having a
> This is why I was thinking that if Linux was installed at the computer store,
> you *could* get something that is working 5 seconds after you open it.
> I believe that 90% of the Israeli newbie users (not programmers and gamers
> and other people with specialized requirements) share 90% of the needs,
> and if the system supported, out of the box, playing audio and video,
> Hebrew keyboard, connecting to ADSL or cable, and other typical needs of
> typical users, it would indeed work for most people 5 seconds after they
> first turn the machine on.
>
>>       themselves for the first time.  I do agree with Oleg that an FC15
>>       or Ubuntu 11.04 are ready for use 1 hour tops after the first GUI
>>       login, ( with 2.5 Mbps downstream ) .
> I didn't see Oleg's mail (I don't know why), but I definitely do NOT agree
> that a vanilla FC15 is ready for actual use one hour after install - unless
> you've already done this 10 times. It took me almost an hour to figure out
> how work around a NetworkManager bug and get ADSL to get reconnected during
> boot ("service network restart" worked perfectly, but it simply didn't
> work during boot). It took me about an hour to set up all the "not-so-legal"
> yum repositories and figure out which packages to download to enable playing
> of music and video. And so on, and so on, and these hours add up.
>
> But once you know how to do it, doing the same thing for a hundred or a
> thousand people is easy. This is why I think Linux should be installed in
> the computer store. Heck, this is what they do with Windows (who installs
> Windows on their own nowadays??), so why not with Linux?
>
>>     * My trouble with Fedora 15 was its lack of performance on older P4
>>       systems, ( like the one I'm using at this moment), I suspect is
> In my opinion, at a time where a brand new desktop computer costs around 1,000
> shekels, reusing an old P4 system is probably does not represent the typical
> newbie. If you consider that this old P4 system probably had too small a
> disk for modern needs (such as holding tens of thousands of photos of
> the grandkids, or hours of videos), and probably lacked a lot of other modern
> things, buying a new computer might not only be smarter - it might actually
> not be that much more expensive than trying to "upgrade" the old computer.
>
> In light of the latest economic protests, I hope what I wrote in my last
> paragraph doesn't sound filthy-capitalist. It's not that I think that 1,000
> shekels is peanuts. But it's that 1,000 shekels is much cheaper than what
> typical computers used to cost (5,000 shekels 10 years ago, 10,000 shekels
> 20 years ago if I remember correctly), and when you consider other costs,
> the cost of the computer is dwarfed. Just as an example, I looked very hard,
> and the *cheapest* Internet connection I could find in Israel costs 46
> shekels a month (for 1.5 Mbps download). This comes out to 552 shekels a
> year - and over the lifetime of the computer (probably at least 4 years)
> it comes out to much more than the price of the hardware. So trying to save
> on the hardware, of all things, won't save you all that much in the long run.
>
> Nadav.
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20110917/814b5794/attachment-0001.html>