[BadVista Advocate] Vista owners

[Jacob Maynard]

I'm for it. I would be willing to bet that with all of us chiming in on
wanting to help with the BadVista site, BadVista wouldn't have any
problems helping out.

I see you have already defined your position in this effort. That's
outstanding.

We need to cover some basic areas on this one:
1. Games - Cover the games that are out there and which run natively on
GNU/Linux, and cover which ones run with WinE. But this is going to be the
toughest selling point because there's not a huge push for games on
GNU/Linux with the same reputation as major video games on Windows and the
XBox/PS.
2. Productivity - Obviously OpenOffice.org is on the list. We can include
StarOffice, if anyone thinks it is worth mentioning while we are
presenting it to the users. The biggest thing that we need to focus on is
agreeing on standards. Thunderbird or Evolution for e-mail, even though I
think that most of us use Evolution. GNUCash should be included, too.
3. Multimedia - Our distribution should have support for all of this
already, or an easy place to download a binary codec package. This is
almost as big as the games, if not more so.

More advanced areas we can work on may include the command line. You don't
want to start off with the command line, though. That's where people say,
"Umm, I have something else to do." I know that most of us can't live
without the command prompt, but your average user is intimidated by it.
Sorry, Yasith. You can't just open them up right off of the bat to this.

So I guess that the question should come up; are we intending on creating
a distribution of our own that includes all of this support, or are we
going to decide on a distribution collectively. I've heard gNewSense, and
from the short amount of reading I've done on it, this is creating our own
distro. Can we clarify and take a vote on this? This should come second to
the website, though.

More later.

Jacob

> Don Hensley wrote:
>> So any suggestions would help. That's what I would like to see, a FAQ
>> that is
>> written to show point by point why one not only should, but will benefit
>> from
>> using GNU/Linux and why one should not, and will not benefit from using
>> Vista.
>
> I'm all for it. How do we go about this?
>
> Having written lots of "executive summaries" myself, to make technical
> complexities appear less complex to managers, I think I'd be able to
> contribute to this effort. If it's possible to explain to a project
> manager what an "API" is, it should be quite easy to explain to a Windows
> user what a "GNU/Linux" is.
>
> Here are a few more ideas, that I think would go well with what you
> suggested:
> - It's very likely that those people who are going to visit the site at
> all have heard about GNU/Linux before. What they probably heard was that
> it's only for hackers; that it's hard to install; that in order to install
> applications, you need to compile them; that the console is the only user
> interface. You know, all these horror stories from the 90s. ("I tried SuSE
> 1.0 ten years ago and it crashed. I'm not willing to try GNU/Linux
> again.")
>
> What we need: Get rid of the myths and show the state of affairs in 2007.
>
> - If someone shows the willingness to give GNU/Linux a try, we need to
> show them how to do this. It wouldn't be wise for us to try to maintain
> GNU/Linux installation instructions ourselves, but we can point visitors
> to the information that is already available elsewhere on the web.
>
> What we need: Provide instructions for how to start using GNU/Linux, and
> show that it *is* possible to migrate your data from Windows/Mac to
> GNU/Linux.
>
> - Have plenty of freedom talk, as this is what's unique about the BadVista
> approach. We shouldn't (only) talk about saving money, or about the
> technical merits of the Unix heritage.
>
> What we need: Pointers to free software philosophy on the web.
>
>
> In my opinion, it would be very useful to have a wiki of some sort, which
> we can use to collect ideas and to prepare the drafts. I also think that
> the actual FAQ page shouldn't be the wiki itself, but that it should be a
> polished and edited version of the wiki. This gives us a chance to try out
> ideas freely, while not scaring off readers with unfinished material.
>
> (Sending drafts back and forth through the mailing list would work, but
> it's far from efficient.)
>
>
> How many people do we have here who'd be willing to invest some time and
> effort? Could BadVista host this?
>
> Kind Regards,
> M.F.
>
>
>
>
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