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On Sat, 24 Sep 2011, paul sutton wrote:
What's intersting to me, recently, is the effort to move just one person from XP to Linux (my wife). She's fairly clever though and can now use OpenOffice writer and calc as easy as she could use Office before - she's even getting to grips with Scribus too - but one thing that was an issue recently was printing documents - she was exporting to PDF to email to people, but when she printed them locally, some letters were missing! It turns out to be an issue with "Document Viewer", whatever that is - I think it's a Gnome thing... I suggested she print directly from OpenOffice - which worked fine - then installed XPDF for her, and that printed them fine too. I then wasted 10 miutes trying to work out how to make xpdf the default PDF viewer, but found out that it was a viewer thing in the GUI filemanager rather than some system thing - ah well. So it's a learning process for lots of things, all the time... GordonI think this is one of the reasons software centre is taking over as the default package manager so there is one program user interface for people to use, ok its controversial as people here probably prefer synaptic but i think if you look at it from a new user point of vew software centre is a lot more user friendly.
Personally, I use dselect - because it's what I was using unteen years ago when I first moved to Debian, however ...
What I did show my wife was the gnome thing - and it might well have been "software centre". She was somewhat confused until I said something along the lines of "it's just like the application manager in your android phone" - then she got all excited and once she know what it was, she then could work out what it did and how to use it... So it's a terminology issue...
(And I suspect she's now going to use it to install 3 million new packages that I'll be epxected to teach her about!!!)
I've always thought that training was not a "proper" requirement, but it really is - I've seen too many people who're absolutely terrified of computers and when a menu moves a few pixels to the left or right they really are stuck.
Even (what I think are) simple things like "Export to PDF" rather than "Save as PDF" confused her - even I had to work that one out - my explanation is that exporting is one way, saving means you can re-read it again (yes, I know you can read & edit PDFs, but in general...)
Again we have a CHOICE if this was MS or perhaps apple were doing this you have to accept the new changes regardless of if you think that is a step back or a step forward.
We, as private individuals doing our own thing have a choice, yes. People working for companies or local authority, etc. don't always have that luxury, and people providing ICT for these companies don't always want to make the choice for fear of losing their job, embarassment, lack of adequate funds, lack of bribes, etc.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq