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Our Blogs Open Sauce Moving to Linux? No fear, help is at hand | Moving to Linux? No fear, help is at hand |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 08 April 2008 | |
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Page 4 of 5 The response has, for the most part, been positive. "A few people refuse saying 'I only use Windows', but on the whole most people are intrigued by the idea of free software. Many people haven't heard of Linux, but use Firefox. This is a good starting point to 'introduce' free software. Last time I was surprised by the number of people who said 'Oh, is that Ubuntu?' and seemed to know what I was talking about. That was great! Although maybe they just remember me pestering them the previous year!" Featured Whitepaper
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However, he feels the site has a fair way to go before it represents what he had in mind. "Many geeks like it, but that's not whom it is supposed to appeal to. Hopefully with upcoming changes I can make it appeal to the correct demographic. The site still doesn't work properly in Internet Explorer - bad when you consider the target market are probably mostly using IE. From the web statistics for the site, around 70 percent of visitors are using Windows; 55 percent use Firefox, while 25 percent use Internet Explorer." When it comes to the site, Smart is his own harshest critic. "Currently the website is also much too boring. I need some great artwork to spruce it up and it also needs to be completely re-written. The current site was based on a mock-up which was done by CLUG member Pascal Klein and some experimental code by Matthew Vermeulen from Albany in WA. "As such, the site was never designed to be the final product. After working on the site onand off for six months, I decided to laucnh it on January 1, 2007. This is in a similar vein to KDE4 - I had to get something out there for people to test and see. My plan is to improve it over time and make corrections that people have discovered (such as 1992 as the start date for Linux, and a passage which can be misread and gives the impression that Richard Stallman started both the concept of 'Free' software and 'Open Source')." Smart says the task of updating has become more complex now as there are nine translations of the site. "I would have fixed these things already but I have been expecting to release an updated version of the content at some stage over the last six months, but as yet have not found the time to finish it off! Also, we currently have nine translations of Make The Move, which makes it more tricky to change little bits here and there. I'd rather do it in a large chunk." He now wants to finish cleaning up the content, rewrite the whole lot and make it much more appealing. I intend to split the site into two versions, one for people who 'just want to know how to use their PC better' and another with content similar to the current site which is aimed at those for whom the idea of free software is exciting. This is because many people do not care about free software and what it is from a philosophical perspective - they just want to get more out of their PC. Currently these people are not really being catered to. |
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