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Ben Goodger wrote:
> 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.
Reminds me of what I was like when I was your age. Okay, I don't think
I had the high IQ, but I found most of the people in my class were
fairly immature and wanted to mess around. I was just happy spending my
time in the computer rooms learning more about programming & PCs.
> 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.
I know what you mean. I provided a copy of OpenOffice (1.1.4 I think)
to my ex childminder. Her daughter who is 13 moaned that it is too
different to MS Office!
I promptly told her daughter that if she wanted Office, her mum would
have to fork out £100 or so for a student licence.
>
> 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.
>
I've had that not just with Linux, but when working on PCs for friends.
I fix the computer and as soon as something goes wrong (usually user
error - or even worse, relatives of my friends who don't have a clue
about computers but think they know everything go and screw it up) I get
the blame.
> 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.
>
Thats good. I was going to say, the school could charge say 50p to the
students to cover the distribution costs :-) although from what I
remember of school kids, they don't like paying for anything unless they
really need it.
Rob
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