I enjoy reading the weekly newsletter by my old IOL colleague Philip Devine, the editor of Business Report online. Today’s was entitled Computing the cost of doing business (the full text is available at getopenlab.com, not sure about the legalities of them posting the whole thing online, but that’s another story).
Phil has some nice things to say about the editorial staff’s move from Windows to Linux workstations that I initiated while I was still IT manager there.
However, he issues a challenge, saying that open-source gurus need a wake-up call of their own, because of the elitist attitude many display. The challenge is for a non-technical person to find and install a copy of an open-source operating system by themselves.
I have no comment on the elitist attitudes he mentions – it’s an all-too familiar complaint, and quite justified in many cases. However, the challenge is an unfair one. Why should non-technical people need to install an Open Source operating system any more than they need to install Windows? The difference of course is that most PC’s come with Windows pre-installed, and somebody wanting to move away has to arrange the replacement installation themselves. It’s this fact that I believe has made most Linux distros easier to install than Windows. But, to be fair, give someone a clean PC without any installed OS, or an unwanted OS (DOS 🙂 ?) and see how they fare. Many non-technical people will struggle regardless, and these days I think they’ll struggle more with Windows. Installation is a task that ideally should be done once by someone technical, and the machine handed over thereafter. Too much focus has been given to the ease of installation rather than the ease of use.