ubuntu-advertising team mailing list archive

["danteashton@xxxxxxxxx" <danteashton@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 26 December 2010 11:52, Barry Drake <b.drake@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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?).
>

Actually the Mac is growing in popularity. Since the iPhone came out Mac
adverts have been everywhere.

>
> 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?
>
> Again, another problem; Linux (and Ubuntu entire) comes from a very
technical background.


> 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.
>

Agreed.

>
> 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 masses of bewildering mostly out-of-date stuff including a lot of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!!!
>
> Agreed again.


> 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.


  Many will argue that commandline instructions are the simplest way to do
something in Ubuntu; that's true, but it's not really user friendly...


>  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!


It isn't trivial, this is exactly the kind of problem we need to address;
your average programmer/console jocky considers it a minor annoyance at
best, but to the average end-user, the computer might as well blow up.


>  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?
>
> I would suggest tar and feathering whomever wrote that.


> 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.
>

Shotwell should deal with it...

>
> 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!


Naturally; I'm never wrong ;)


>  I'm trying hard to leave my geekiness behind and I'm fast
> finding that much of the online documentation is very geeky.
>

Good! Look at not only documention, but EVERYTHING through the eyes of the
simple Windows user; from the interface to descriptions in the software
centre.


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

-Danté Ashton

Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici


Sent from Ubuntu