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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tony Viola who wrote (32600)	11/7/1999 10:39:00 AM
From: Bruce Brown	Respond to of 74651

I guess you havent heard of Linux. It's free ( and it doesnt crash every 2 hours!!) The learning curve is too far out of the realm for the average user at this point. Viability will improve once the experience is conformed to the average. In the meantime, the world has work to do. BB

To: Tony Viola who wrote (32600)	11/7/1999 12:34:00 PM
From: Bob Drzyzgula	Respond to of 74651

Linux is user-friendly enough, it is just less familiar to people. One of the primary differences is that with Windows, most of the times something goes wrong the user has no ability to understand or fix the problem, so they just reboot or reinstall. With Linux, it almost always is possible to understand and fix the problem. This scares many people who believe that this means that they have to understand it to use it. Most of the distribution companies such as Caldera, RedHat and SuSE are doing everything they can to build layers that will create greater obscurity for the errors that occur, and soon people will be able to install a Linux system every bit as opaque as Windows. At that point, I suppose, Linux will have achieved the same level of "user friendliness" as Windows. --Bob

To: Tony Viola who wrote (32600)	11/7/1999 7:59:00 PM
From: Gerald Walls	Respond to of 74651

How user friendly is Linux, and I mean to the average world-wide user, not a Unix experienced person? RedHat has made great strides toward ease of installation with 6.1. However you still need to be more hardware savvy than when installing windows (as long as Windows supports the hardware with its own drivers or you have the manufacturer's driver disk). As far as ease of use, you can set the machine up as a Gnome workstation or a KDE workstation and get a good graphical interface. What you do after that is another thing altogether. Doing anything else requires more than what the average or lower Windows user (like my mother) would ever be able to manage. To sum up, Linux, while making great strides, ain't nowhere near there yet.