Peter Gordon wrote: > Good. The apps are cross-platform and interact well with other apps > and file formats. Now how does Granny User transfer her settings from > Windows Firefox/Thunderbird/OO.org/etc. to Linux? It would depend on who's Granny. > Currently no easy way exists to do this (of which I am aware). By > "easy" here, I want there to be some way to have a dialog which says > "I want to transfer these settings/bookmarks/preferences/et al. from > my Windows applications to my Linux installation" with clickable > options for Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Gaim) and the user > could just click it. Even nice would be things like transferring what > we could of a user's MS Outlook setup to the corresponding Evolution > configuration or transferring a Trillian buddy list to Gaim, etc. It > would be very difficult to ensure everything was transferred > correctly, but I think it would really help people learn to use > GNU/Linux further without the trouble of reconfiguring their client > software for instant messaging, email, web browsing, etc. (Hey, a > geek can dream, right? :o) That's a nice dream. OC, you can't do that now with any platform so if Linux were to accomplish this it would do so before any other OS. But again, that's the realm of dreams. > Not necessarily. Sure, it's easy to use for beginner computer users, > but even my own grandmother was rather proficient with > Windows-specific stuff. There's that Grandma again. Maybe you might like to read this and see that the Grandmother argument no longer applies. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6562 > Admittedly, things like what you have > mentioned, as well as central and trusted software repositories > (rather than downloading from "cool-applications-example.com" or > similar) are a major plus for GNU/Linux and the Free desktop in > general, many computer users would need to relearn how to use GNOME > or KDE (or another WM/DE) and how to use which apps to achieve > specific goals, etc. Currently this is a 10 minute exercise for most regular users. The people that actually have more problems moving over are the MS-Windows power users. They are the ones who are so locked into the way they do things now it's hard for them to change. > Unfortunately, one of the biggest defeats for the Free desktop > currently is lack of proper video driver support from major > manufacturers, such as NVidia/ATi. Thankfully, ATi's older stuff > works well with the in-tree radeon drivers and Intel has published > specs and source code for the drivers for their integrated Graphics > Media Accelerator stuff; (Thanks, Intel!) and the Open Video project > looks very promising as well. This is 100% the fault of the HW vendors. Nothing can be done until they start playing fair, unfortunately.
