Re: [Usability]LinuxWorld Presentation comments

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

On Fri, 2003-01-24 at 10:09, John Palmieri wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Didn't know where to post this so I thought usability would be best.  I
> personaly did not attened the presentation on Gnome 2.2 so take this
> with a grain of salt.  
> 
> I was in the Birds of a Feather meeting dealing with Linux in K-12
> education.  One of the IT directors at a school which is considering
> moving over to Linux didn't get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the Gnome
> presentation.  Reportedly the speaker had to kill some processes and
> some things didn't work during the presentation.  The IT person felt
> nervious that she might be making a Linux switch proposal that would end
> up giving them an unstable platform.  I was tempted to say that it is
> still more stable than the Win 98 boxes she was using but knowing that
> would be counter productive instead mentioned that the presentation was
> about the 2.2 beta and that 2.0 is currently the stable branch.  Others
> in the know did so as well and she seemed to be satisfied.
> 
> Again I was not at the Gnome 2.2 presentation and am not trying to
> criticize for the sheer joy of it.  In fact I thank the presenter for
> giving up his time to prepare the talk.  I just wanted to share the
> perspective of this profesional who is trying hard to push Linux in her
> school but who is not an "insider" to Linux or Gnome development.
> 
> Keep up the good work on Gnome.

It's too bad that the presentation did not go as well as hoped. I guess
my main comment is that when doing such presentations its probably
better to show off a distro that uses gnome rather than a self installed
version of gnome on top of a distro. In particular, self installed
software tends to have little problems as you metioned above, most of
which are taken care of by distros during packaging.

dave