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[LUG] Teenagers, bewilderable middle-aged women; distributing Ubuntu

 

people on this list who have installed Linux for older friends
and they have no problem using it,   (can anyone give feedback on this)

As a fifteen-year-old with an apparent IQ of 150-odd, I consider myself more intelligent and mature than most of my peers (who are nearly all older than me), large proportions of whom are extraordinarily chav-like. Their behaviour is closely documentable by me and so I can make the following observations:

- As a sixteen-year-old cannot annoy people with nudges, shared backgrounds, weemees, webcams, audio, file transfer, integrated crappy games and such, they will not consider using gaim, despite its advantages.
- A fifteen-year-old does not see the point in switching to Firefox, because "tabbed browsing is useless". Then again, perhaps this point is redundant.. they think that bein ard will protect their computers against IE.
- A fifteen-year-old says that Linux is "crap", after booting up a raw livecd of Ubuntu for ten minutes. He refused to elaborate much on this, but I think that his largest complaint was that it didn't look enough like Windows.

This leads me to believe that the average teenager (like the boy previously mentioned) are incredibly superficial creatures.

A lady friend of mine, who runs a language tuition business, was advised that she should remove AVG from her computer and, when she next had £50 or so to spare, buy a copy of Norton Internet Security. I offered to install Linux instead and save her the fifty pounds. Four days later, I recieved a telephone call saying that her computer was behaving strangely, with time issues. She seemed to have got it into her head that Linux had caused the problem. As it turned out, it was a CMOS battery (she's one of these eco-slaves who turns their PC off at the wall, without realising that it needs juice to keep the time running) problem; I replaced the battery and it works now, but she will not touch Linux.

Oh, and I have convinced my school's librarian to allow us to distribute Ubuntu CDs from her desk. She hasn't quite got the principle ("ooh, free enterprise! yes, carry on..") but we're getting there.

--
Ben Goodger

http://www.getfirefox.com/
http://www.ubuntulinux.com/
http://www.openoffice.org/