Ubuntu: So Easy a 10 Year-Old Can Do It

      by Wyatt Walter

Okay, this “Linux is hard” FUD is driving me insane. I can’t take seeing articles like this anymore. The author claims to want to give Linux a try but clearly wants the experiment to fail. The author tries to pick a distro for the experiment by searching for “linux os that doesn’t suck” suggesting that there would only be a handful to choose from. Other comments such as “So that’s one point for Ubuntu; good job on making use of basic http protocol” after downloading and “I hurriedly look for a copy of the OS and blissfully ignore anything that looks like a guide or set of instructions” indicate that the author doesn’t really want to succeed. Using that logic, I’m going to stop checking the fluid levels in my car since I bought what was supposed to be a “good” car. See how far that gets you with a mechanic..

All right, rant aside, I’ve some embarrassing news for those who argue that Linux is much harder to use: I installed it for my sisters (at the time one was 10 and the other was 16, both with very little “tech” experience) and had to answer very few questions for them to use it.

A couple of years ago around Christmas I acquired an old Dell Inspiron for free, so I wrapped it up. It was a slower Pentium III with 256MB of RAM with a broken USB port and a battery that barely held a charge. I picked it up to give to my sisters so that when one of them was using my parents’ XP desktop for school, the other could do some browsing on another machine. It fit the bill perfectly. I installed Ubuntu 6.10 (the newest at the time) and let them play with it. They actually used it much more than I ever anticipated. They both did a lot of browsing as well as some arcade games and chatting. The older of the two surprised me one day and called me wanting to install Real Player. I was very impressed. She had gotten the .deb files that she needed, she just needed the command to install it (sudo dpkg –install <package>, btw). They both used the machine for using Firefox (they even used it to play Flash games), OpenOffice.org, Pidgin, and the arcade games. One of them even got into using GIMP just a little bit for cropping pictures. They had even been keeping up with updates and had installed a few extra pieces of software. Given that story, all the people claiming that simple tasks are difficult absolutely amaze me. What makes me laugh even more is that now the older one has a MacBook and I seem to field more phone calls with questions about OS X than Ubuntu (Please, any Apple fans, don’t flame me. I’m an Apple fan as well, it’s just an observation I’ve made).

Just to preempt any Microsoft fanboys from commenting on this.. I would like to point out one key difference between the article linked to earlier and my story: the author of the linked article was trying to install Linux from the perspective of an “Average Joe” whereas my story did not involve the installation of any OS or drivers (actually I just popped in the CD and took all the defaults). Unfortunately, thinking that the installation is part of the “average user”’s experience is very flawed logic. I’ve done my time in the IT support world. There’s not a single “average user” who will even think of reinstalling his or her OS (Windows, Linux, or Mac). In fact, a lot of users have a hard time connecting to file shares on their Windows server from their Windows desktop. They simply call the IT support department to have them just do it for them. Heck, most users don’t even read error messages, let alone try to install an OS.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 4th, 2009

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