User Feedback :: Thoughts from a MS admin

Now that I have a little more time --

Thanks for the responses. I definitely agree that having to work for my reward is plenty more, uh, rewarding than just having it handed to me. But that's because I love computers and I love making them work. To most people, a computer is just another utilitarian/entertainment tool, like a car or a TV. They just want to turn it on and have it work. The general public has neither the aptitude nor the will to tweak the hell out of any OS installation, OSS or not. That's why they pay people like me (and a lot of you) to do it for them.

Thank god for that, because I would be destitute otherwise. I got kicked out of college after my freshman year (sternly asked not to return), and only had half of the NT4 MCSE tests done when I got picked up by a temp agency to install DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines, not the Linux distribution) in 1999.

Now we're buying our second house, and this one is the one we're probably going to live in until retirement.

Enough about me, for now at least, and back to the subject at hand. DSL (Linux now) is great. I got to thinking today, how long did it take me to build my first Windows machine? Rebuilding the Packard Bell from its recovery CDs probably took four hours. What about trying to install a Windows OS cold onto spare parts hardware? Probably 12.

This DSL install on the Toshiba took about ten hours altogether, I'm guessing. I would say that my utter lack of experience with Linux balances out the fact that I have greater experience now with figuring things out in general, plus the fact that there are more answers out there to be had in the first place now. I'm calling it even - installing Windows 95 cold on scrounged hardware ten years ago was equal in difficulty as installing DSL on an old laptop this week.

In the course of ten years, one might expect OS installation to get easier, but I'm quite willing to cut DSL some slack. Clearly, DSL is not intended for the masses, but rather for a more technical niche market.

I know I keep slipping off the track of DSL-specific user feedback, but I just had a great idea for an experiment. Take a group of people, regular unwashed masses types, and give each of them a computer (all the same) with a blank hard drive, and a random OS CD - some Windows, some Linux. They would also have at their disposal another functional computer of the same OS to browse the web for answers, download drivers, apps, etc. Find out how long it takes each person to install the OS and get a set of prerequisite tasks completed. An actual experiment.

As above, since DSL is not intended for the people who would be participants in such an experiment, it wouldn't be right to force it to "compete." But it would be so cool to see how that all played out, and maybe the results of such a thing would make it past Slashdot and Digg and into more mainstream media.

Now. Above I mentioned that we're moving to a new house. That's happening real soon. I also have a toddler and an infant and a wife. All of us have had moderate to serious colds for two to three weeks. We still have to pack. I now have a self-imposed curfew of 10:30 PM (so I can watch The Daily Show). I'll be back in full force in like a month or two.

All I can say is welcome!

oh and "right click,aps,tools,MAKE myDSL CD Remaster"

I hope you have as much fun with DSL as I'm having. I've found the Frugal Grub install with persistant /home and /opt to be the easiest for me to manage. The community has been great at supporting it with apps that work without any real installation. You can just download most of them to your hard drive and they work automatically. If you corrupt something in your /home or /opt directories, then you just delete them and you are back to a working OS.

original here.