Date: Fri, 2 Nov 2001 00:40:25 +0100 (CET) From: Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org> To: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG>, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: NatWest? no thanks Message-ID: <20011102000921.J54141-100000@jodie.ncptiddische.net> In-Reply-To: <3BE1CC99.D3C8733C@acuson.com>
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On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, David Johnson wrote: > > The masses can surely come to FreeBSD, but we really shouldn't trade > > flexibility and power to make our system attractive to them. > > I couldn't have said it better myself. But it's odd that you said it in > the middle of your post arguing that FreeBSD should not have mass > acceptance. You err when you equate "mass acceptance" with > "point-and-click-only". It *should* have mass acceptance! If what I said previously sounded different, then it was definately not what I wanted to say. Sorry, it's very late here already ;-) I basically only wanted to say that we do not need to copy Microsoft or anyone else, but instead *get the word out* wbout what we have to offer. > The main problem with the installer and admin tools is that the "mass" > public perceives them as difficult. But they are not difficult. Other > than the initial kernel config screen, the installer is very straight > forward, well documented, and streamlined. It could use some polishing > on spots, but by and large it is much more usable than the Mandrake or > SuSE installers. It would be very hard to make it any easier without > taking away the flexibility. I recently tested the FreeBSD installer on my brother. I let him sit in front of a computer, handed him a FreeBSD CD and told him to try to set it up. He had no previous FreeBSD / Unix experience, but he had s rather good overall understanding of computers. As I observed, he managed to install FreeBSD just fine. It did of course take longer than if someone who had used FreeBSD for years had done it, but it worked in the end. In the end, my brother said that he didn't find the FreeBSD installer much harder to use than the Windows 98 setup, and he specifically said he liked the flexibility of the installer and the complete control over the setup he had. I guess there are people for whom the FreeBSD install process is too hard, but for these people installing Windows would be too hard as well (yes, I have seen such people...) However, I would like to claim that a user who can install Windows can install FreeBSD as well. > Instead of trying to put sugar in the medicine, perhaps we should be > educating the patient that medicine tastes bad but is good for you. > Administering a system is not easy, and no matter how much GUI fluff you > throw on top of it, it will never be easy. But it is not difficult, > especially for single-user desktop systems. We should be forthright and > admit that administering FreeBSD is not easy. We don't have to win over > every single user in order to have "mass acceptance". Frankly, we don't > need those users who won't bother expending enough effort to lift their > fingers off the mouse. They may be the Microsoft target audience, and > they may represent the editorial staffs of ZDNet and C|NET, but they > aren't the majority. I really agree once again! That's exactly what I have been trying to say, but seemingly didn't manage to do too well. In order to accept mass acceptance, we need to educate the masses. It works: At my school, I taught fellow students about *nix computer systems, taking FreeBSD as an example because it's what I use. In the beginning, the students (most of which used their computers only to play games) seemed a little confused. But it didn't take me long to convince them that they are about to aquire freedom! In the end, most of them started to like FreeBSD's flexibility, so that they wanted to me to give them a copy for their home computer. As someone who is known to "be into" computers in my area, I have often helped people and even companies with their problems, and wherever possible, I advocated FreeBSD, often successfully. *THAT* is probably what we FreeBSD users have to do, and that's the only way how we can gain mass acceptance. There will always be people who do not want to use FreeBSD, but if it weren't that way, something would be wrong. > That is not to say that we should shun the GUI. I think a sysinstall > module for KDE would be awesome! But we don't have to be an > all-or-nothing OS. We don't have to be a GUI-only system like what many > Linux distros are trying to be. But neither do we have to be the CLI > only system that everyone thinks we are. I guess the point can be summed up as this. Let's say (which is even probably true) there are three ways of doing things: commands (shell), text-based menu systems (sysinstall) and GUIs (X11/KDE). Microsoft seems to think that a GUI is the only thing their users can handle, and so the only thing they give their users *is* a GUI. Linux distros seem - at least to a certain extend - start to think the same way. For FreeBSD, I think the way to go is extremely simple: Offer support for *all* the possible ways! That means: Things should as far as possible be performable by *shell* and *GUI*. That's just what I mean with flexibility. I want a system that I can fully operate only by entering commands in text-mode, and I want a system that can be operated using a GUI. Ideally, I would like this system to be freely available. All of this added together *is* basically what FreeBSD stands for today: I tend to work at the console in text mode most of the time (using pine right now), but I could use the *SAME* operating system to set up our family computer with a nice graphical desktop (KDE) so that the rest of the family can use it. That's just what I call flexibility, and that's what makes FreeBSD as good as it is today. It's this flexibility, the right (and possibility) to choose that is IMHO the best thing we have to gain mass acceptance. We cannot take over the TV stations and broadcast our ads, just as Microsoft has done for the WinXP release. We can, however, advocate the use of FreeBSD. We cannot run advertising on TV, but personally recommending an operating system to local people or people on the Internet and personally helping these peoples with their questions and possibly problems is something that we can do. And by doing that, our system will definately become more and more known among the public. Greetings Nils Nils Holland Ti Systems - FreeBSD in Tiddische, Germany http://www.tisys.org * nils@tisys.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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