Re: Experience the New Windows

[Suresh Ramasubramanian <mallet@xxxxxxx>]

Atul Chitnis rearranged electrons thusly:

> Ummm, a strength is what you make of it. There is nothing wrong with Linux
> as such - it is the presentation that sux. We all know that it is possible
> even today to use Linux in a very productive manner. But if the trend of
> presenting Linux as a hackers/programmer's OS continues, the much-needed
> change in presentation isn't going to get the attention it needs.
 
Agreed.  We both agree that some distros (caldera / mandrake / corel) focus on
being a user-friendly OS rather than a "strictly geeks only" thing.

> While I consider the concept of Linux as appropriate technology for India,
> I am wary of the concept of an "Indian Linux".
> 
> Before you aim your bazookas as me, consider this - after much hoo-haa
> about Indianised Windows, how many people are actually using it?
 
well, if I knew to write my mother tongue Tamil (sadly, I don't) I _would_ keep
at least a tamil compatible text editor / word processor around, so that I
could write letters to my grandmother, who can't read a word of English (I type
far better than I write <g>).  Similarly, I have a couple of relatives who,
though fluent in English, prefer tamil so much so that their mails are actually
transliterated from tamil (nee eppadi irrukkai written in english script
instead of "how are you")

If you take a look at places like Germany (you'd definitely know of course <g>)
several people even post to usenet / mailing lists in German.  Localization is
an essential thing there.  Same case with most of Europe.

> I am sure that there are people who would benefit from an "Indian Linux",
> but we are not talking about those kind of people in this discussion. The

It's not an "all or nothing" thing Atul, I prefer an English interface myself -
but I'd love to have a few apps around which _do_ support this.  Mandrake
supports quite a few languages (including hindi / devanagri) in its extensive
i18n (internationalization) libraries.  An "Indian distro" would get rid of the
swedish / finnish / german / chinese stuff and add support for a few more
indian languages.

> Neither am I - I am just trying to point out that the average Indian user
> of a machine is not in any way different from the average user in the USA
> or Europe.
 
Precisely.  The average user in Europe is bilingual (or even multi-lingual, if
you consider a country like switzerland).  There's also extensive vernacular
content on the 'net (and several local-language newsgroups, lists etc).

> There really isn't anything like "an Indian need" - usability issues are
> universal. And if you refer to "Indian needs" as in "SIS cards, Yamaha
> cards, etc." you are again slipping back to installation issues which I am
> *not* trying to address in this thread.
 
I'm not talking about a repackaged redhat / mandrake / whatever with a few i810
/ SiS card customizations that calls itself "made in india" :) Also, this
(support for locally available hardware) is a very small (and not all that
significant) part of the whole "usablity" issue.  

Internationalization is an ongoing effort in most linuxen, and an Indian distro
is one which has been customized to support more indian languages instead of
chinese / german / russian (and which has copies of various docs translated
into local languages).

This will make it more welcome with us (who are primarily english speakers, but
would definitely find it nice to have vernacular language support handy).  It'd
be even more useful to people from smaller Indian cities / towns, not many of
whom are very conversant with English, but who are extremely keen to learn
linux.

Or take the case of various state governments / the govt of India, which decree
that hindi / tamil / telugu / kannada _must_ be the language used in government
correspondence / forms etc.  These departments already run some kind of ancient
unix or the other (sco, solaris etc).  Convincing them to switch to linux,
which has vastly expanded support for the same thing, will be a welcome move.

> discussion, let's concentrate on the "out-of-box-experience" (OOBE) of a
> pre-installed Linux box that meets its owner/user for the first time.
 
Excellent idea.  May I suggest moving this to lih (both for the wider audience
it'll get, and because the discussion is pretty likely to turn technical, and
thus more on-topic to LIH)?

	-s

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian  <-->  mallet <at> efn <dot> org
EMail Sturmbannfuhrer, Lower Middle Class Unix Sysadmin
"What separates normal people from kooks is how they react when people disagree
with them or tell them "NO"  <-- Ron Ritzman on news.admin.net-abuse.email