Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

you put gnome in front of someone who doesnt know linux usually they assume its mac because of the default top bar. kde 4 has a very windows like look with its bottom taskbar. and dont get into the whole "well you can make it look like windows blah blah blah" its a default kde4.2 desktop so althings need to be equal

First, I'm writing this as someone that prefers GNOME, lighter window/desktop managers, and loved KDE 3.59. I'm not a fan of KDE 4 simply because I'm not into how it looks, and I don't relish the idea of having to customize it simply so it works my way when other DM/WMs already do. :)

When it comes to attracting Windows/Mac-using newbies, eye-candy is huge leverage. They're happy with what they have, they've invested time & money into it, and frankly, the one thing Linux does offer is more eye-candy at lower resource thresholds. FLOSS doesn't matter much to them: they can't read or modify the code anyway, and what controls their sharing habits isn't the law as much as how hard it is to crack the app.

What matters is getting the person to use Linux, however it's done... *Then* is the time to show them how to improve performance, how they can help with FLOSS simply by giving feedback or using superior writing skills to edit documents, how much their local/state government would save in taxes if it switched to free software, and all that. Telling them "here, use this old-looking thing, it's faster than that cool looking one your friends envy" or "you should use this, then you can read all of this geek stuff that makes no sense to you" won't work.