Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO

[Peter]

This was a very interesting article, theres also alot of comments about it
on slashdot
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/05/2138238&mode=thread&tid=106),
some things that you have to take into consideration with this article:

    - The user is _very_ Microsoft-centric (still running Windows 95,
well..)
    - Apparentley the user doesn't seem to know what she is doing, she
refers to a hardware upgrade as a "CPU Upgrade," and a CD-ROM as a "CD
Player"
    - Some of the demands that are set forth in this article aren't
achievable, because Microsoft isn't willing to do anything about them.

All in all, take this article with a couple of grains of salt, as it is VERY
biased towards Microsoft, and basically puts Linux down in the gutter, she
also tried a bunch of the mainstream distros, but just different versions,
and I really doubt it took her 18 months to complete this study.

FreeBSD will never make the desktop market unless there are some changes
made in the installation project, maybe there should be a DesktopBSD or
something, but everything needs to be seemlessly intergrated, with only one
option, not choosing between a bunch of different window managers and such.
Also, if I want to install a FreeBSD desktop (which I did for my grandma), I
dont want to have to be sitting there for 2 days installing all the
"optional" ports packages making the system pretty, and functional at the
same time.

I hope this helps, but as I said, take this article with a VERY large grain
of salt, maybe its your laughter for the weekend.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gregory A. Gilliss" <ggilliss at netpublishing.com>
To: <advocacy at freebsd.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2003 10:20 AM
Subject: Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO

> I would recommend that *everyone* read this today (Sunday) and ask your-
> selves whether the current FreeBSD distro (4.x or 5.x) meets the goals
> set out by this study?  We've all seen the excreta of these and many other
> frustrations in the list archives.  Can the FreeBSD core team address
> some of these issues and *market* the results to make FreeBSD a more
> worthwhile upgrade path than *any* Linux distro?  I patently hope so!