Strangely, Apple doesn’t receive such criticism, even though its operating system, like Ubuntu, deviates in many ways from Windows. If Ubuntu fails to behave like Windows, they count that as a strike against mainstream users. Most of the thoughts below are not very original-they’ve been made by plenty of people before-but I think they’re worth repeating as Windows apologists assault Ubuntu’s usability with renewed vigor in the wake of the Linux netbook surge (see comment #17 here for an example of these attacks).įirst, when Ubuntu’s detractors speak of the ‘average user’, what they really mean is the ‘average Windows user’-that is, a user who’s spent the last fifteen years being taught to use computers in a certain way. Even so, I think that a logical analysis of the anti-Linux arguments above exposes crucial flaws. Until grandmothers can get an Ubuntu system up and running without having to hack a wireless driver or an nf file, we’re told, the Linux user base will remain limited.Īdmittedly, I’m a bit of an Ubuntu ‘fanboy’, so I can’t pretend that I don’t have an agenda. Critics have responded that, sure, Linux has come a long way since 1991, but it’s still not for ‘average users’. For years, free-software advocates have asserted that Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop.
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