ubuntu-advertising team mailing list archive

[Barry Drake <b.drake@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2010-12-25 at 19:02 +0000, danteashton@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Whereas Banshee, which Ubuntu is shipping out of the box with in
> 11.04, can do it by default, me thinks.

Arrgh!  This makes the problem worse!  Technically it's wonderful
but ....

This is the scenario: You have seen the advertising, or maybe you are
being told by a friend that Ubuntu is the best thing since sliced bread.
Naturally you are VERY suspicious.  You know Windows, and you know that
it is the only reliable system (Oh, there's the Mac, but that's a bit of
a niche market isn't it?).  

But you do go on the website and take a look around Ubuntu.  You do a
site-search for iTunes and what you see is daunting!  Right at the top
is an article about Virtual Box ....  maybe you've been put off already.
A bit further down is something about Rhythmbox, but it only describes a
music player and says nothing about whether or not you can use your iPod
- which is what you really want to know.  Right at the bottom of the
searches you do see that Rhythmbox can work with iPods.  Did you get
that far?

If you do a search for iPod you do get some far more helpful results,
but I think something on the front page taking you straight to something
like
https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/switching/C/applications-equivalents.html
would solve a lot of problems.  That page maybe needs a bit of an
update, but it's really helpful and needs to be very prominent.

This scenario gets far far worse if you use your favourite search engine
to try something like 'iTunes Ubuntu' on the web.  You end up looking at
masses of bewildering mostly out-of-date stuff including a lot of
commandline instructions.  You won't ever look at Ubuntu again.  Just
what you'd always thought - Linux is strictly for Geeks!!!

Let me give a further illustration.  My sister is very new to Ubuntu.
Her ..... (this is complicated) Alex is my sister's partner's daughter,
so I'll just call her Alex.  Alex is highly computer literate - on
Windows.  She and her partner bought my sister a webcam for Christmas.
She wouldn't buy a Microsoft one that was offered because she assumed it
needed Windows.  She got a Connexant one because Google told her it
would be compatible.  She phoned me - I wasn't at my computer at the
time - how could she test it?  I said use the Software Centre to get
Cheese - that will test it.  If I'd looked at the 'Software
Centre' (which I've never used) I wouldn't have told her that.  She
ended up looking for drivers for the Connexant using Google and found a
bewildering array of stuff about Linux commandline instructions.  She
has never used the commandline in Windows so this was a foreign language
to her.  She left a message on my answering machine, and when I phoned
back she had gone home, and I got my sister, who knew nothing about what
Alex had tried.

I made things worse by not being at my keyboard again.  I quickly talked
my sister through firing up the terminal and doing 'sudo apt-get install
cheese' and then 'cheese'.  As you would expect, the webcam worked out
of the box.  But of course when Alex came back and my sister told her
what she had done Alex said 'I'd never have been able to do that!'

The thing is, Cheese fails to come up as an installable in the Software
Centre (on 10.04) when you search for cheese (why?).  We need to do
something about that and maybe lots of other things!  I know this seems
trivial - to Alex and my sister it was not!  Maybe some kind of webcam
app needs to be pre-installed on Ubuntu by default ...  Searching the
Ubuntu website for 'webcam' gives all the instructions ...  the very
first page tells you to test using Cheese.  It tells you the obvious way
to get Cheese ....  commandline!!!  Now how good is that for the newbie
coming from Windows?

Another time, I had to get my sister's Canon camera working.  F-Spot is
fine - but you need to install gphoto2 ....  How would a newbie get that
far?  I don't know the answer to questions like that.

I hope you've had the patience to work this through to the end, but I
think all of us need to be getting into the shoes of the average Windows
user.  Danté, you accused me of being geeky the other day - and you were
right!  I'm trying hard to leave my geekiness behind and I'm fast
finding that much of the online documentation is very geeky.

Regards,		Barry
-- 
What do you see when you use your Computer? Same old thing?
...There IS a Better Way!  Ubuntu!