Talk:Proposed Freekbox Changes

Argument for Ubuntu
Michael:

I saw your email to the Adoption-teachers list and thought I would immediately jump in here and throw in my thoughts.

Firstly, my recommendation would be to go with Ubuntu, all things considered but I want to go into why I say that in a little more depth.

I've been teaching the adoption class for about a year now (maybe a little longer) and one of the things that I see is we get a wide cross-section of user-students in the program. That said, we also see a lot of folks (particularly older people) who are toward the lower end as far as computer literacy and it is this group of folks (the computer illiterate or barely literate) people I'm thinking about. These are folks who, for the most part, don't want to be geeks. What they want, the reason they came to Freegeek in the first place, is to earn a computer that they can take home and use. They want to plug it in and have things *work*, more or less automagically. Now, most everyone reading this is going to know that it would be very difficult to give the users' that but I believe we can endeavor to make things *easier* for the user.

Debian is a great hacker's distro and that is precisely the weakness of it for our program. The folks who get the freekbox aren't necessarily hacker's and they don't *want* to be hackers. As much as that may be something that seems alien, it is still the truth that folks want to get their freekbox and take it home and then have a Windows-like experience without the Windows. If they pick-up a thumb drive, they want to plug it in and have it work. If they have a digital camera or an iPod they want to plug it in and have the magic happen and it works. They *might* be willing to do a little bit of twiddling and tweaking, I'm not saying that folks are looking for miracles but for your average end-user, the idea of hacking at, for instance, smb.conf does not equal crazy delicious fun. Now, for me, hacking smb.conf is a perfectly fine way to spend an evening but it's not for most of the folks who I have had the pleasure to teach in the last year.

We get them for three hours, folks. That's it. We can change the education model a bit and I'm hoping to work with Liane and Michael on expanding classes but the only class we can reasonably assure that they'll be at is the Adoption class and that means three hours and a bit of change. In that time, we need to give them enough to be able to take this machine home and do *enough* useful with it that they don't just get it home and treat it like a doorstop that can play mp3s.

Of the distros listed, I think that Ubuntu would be the way to go. Although I'm a SuSE bigot, I've installed Ubuntu and Kubuntu and played around with them on my desktop machine (and even had Kubuntu running on my laptop for about a week before I decided to just use SuSE and be done with it) and I'm very impressed from the point of view of looking at it from a teacher's eye. (And also from a hacker's eye but that's a different story.) The folks at Ubuntu seem to 'get it' that if Linux is ever going to move solidly into being an end-user operating system, it needs to be usable. Hardware recognition is a big deal for folks and users shouldn't have to huck their freekbox down to Freegeek when they buy that spiffy CD-RW from the Freegeek Store.

I would suggest staying with the KDE desktop environment. It's powerful and still basically very friendly to use. I also think it's more intelligently designed (again from an end-user perspective) than Gnome although I know that a lot of folks would disagre with me on this.

cheers Aj Davis RfS


 * From this (and Michael's email) I get a few concrete tests we could take away:
 * thumb drive
 * digital camera
 * iPod
 * automatic detection and mounting of mass storage devices


 * We should create a prototype of each of the three options and see how each performs on these tests. Maybe there are more things people want to try out. If so we can add tests. What I read in Michael's email, however, is that while our version of debian (the FreekBox) has some problems and Ubuntu has the advantage over it, it seems that a standard Debian install has also solved some of these problems. It'd be nice to know that we're jumping distros based on quantifiable differences rather than any fuzzy feeling any of us may have.


 * RfS 17:15, 11 Apr 2006 (PDT)

One argument for Debian
Sooner or later we'll grab a FreekBox off the shelf and throw it into place as an infrastructure box. When we do this, we could have a mixed network environment at Free Geek, the standard debian boxen we use on our servers, and an Ubuntu box with its different security model. This is less maintainable. Also not a very big issue, because we could have a standby debian system or two ready to go stashed somewhere awaiting this eventuality. RfS 17:15, 11 Apr 2006 (PDT)