Firefox used to be the fast browser that would start instantly and have just about no functionality without addons, which was the sole purpose of the browser to begin with. It was supposed to be core functions only and extensible to everyone’s needs through addons. Lately though, the need of addons have been phased out in preferrence of “out-of-the-box” functions and stuff that previous IE-users would like, such as the phising-filter and the built-in RSS-reader (aka Live Bookmarks). To see Konqueror as a much faster browser (and that renders more correctly at that) now is just wrong considering Konqueror was never about having a lightweight browser. The day the average Linux distro fills with bloat in the same way Firefox has been just for the advantage of previous Windows-users is the day I’ll be looking into BSD.

“Climbing percentages in favor of Linux means better business and possibility to make a living from Linux for many companies.”

But then again, Linux is not about business. It’s about making a good, stable, secure OS.

Thanks for pointing out Solveig’s tutorial. I haven’t seen it. It’s a good one.

K

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Scribus does it by the use of plugins. You can find more information on Scribus SVG import/export plugins here: http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=scribus-svg

Climbing percentages in favor of Linux means better business and possibility to make a living from Linux for many companies. This is why keeping an eye on trends and habits is worthing.

I agree with you that copying Windows is not the way. But this is not the point of this article. The point is: integrating feedback from non-Linux users. Price is always shown as a big ‘feature’ of Linux, but it’s not enough in itself. It’s a good policy and has wonderful results. Still you get resistance from people who thrown money out of their pockets for Windows licenses.

Aside from the common FUD saying: “it’s cheap, then don’t expect it to work” which you see all the way, when a Windows user tries Linux he/she likes the desktop but gets buzzed by the small inconsistencies like those pointed out above.

Feedback I got from various new Linux users around me led me to this appeal to Linux developers: try to stick with Human Interface Guidelines (like you pointed out as example for GNOME) or to other standard guidelines and develop applications consistent with one or other usability stream.

It’s like in keeping the environment clean, it’s every single person’s responsibility to keep it clean by throwing the trash in the right place. So is with Linux and it’s success.

Putting familiar applications in distros is just one possible strategy among many others like pointing out the price or creating Linux desktops which copy the looks of Windows. It can ensure a smooth transition. But doing the best desktop is indeed the way, but for this, work out on details and

… do some recicling on the interface routines!

Yes, it will not look and feel identical with Windows, but guess what? OS X does not look and feel exactly as Windows, even Vista does not look and feel exactly as XP or 9x.

I don’t agree either with your 50%+1 figure, OS X seems to do fine with much less. If your goal is total world domination (I don’t think is the Linux goal) then you can’t ignore former Windows users even at 90% of the market, but I personally would be happy with Linux at 10-20%, just enough for myself to not be treated as a second-class citizen of the computing world.

Thanks for your XMMS example, it help making my point: by cloning Winamp it repeats a lot of original mistakes and break the consistency with the rest of the desktop (BTW, what is the “Linux Desktop”? GNOME? KDE?): wrong dialogs, wrong buttons, wrong fonts. And on top of this, Winamp is not the cool program it was 10 years ago, now the “hip” moved over to iTunes (iThunes on Windows) and the likes and you will see the best known Linux music players (Amarok, Muine, Rhythmbox) trying to clone iTunes (personally, I am happy with the simple and straightforward Totem)..

Wrong button labels? Bad text on dialogs? For this are the guidelines, like the GNOME HIG (Human Interface Guidelines), if the developers would follow them then the inconsistency would be gone.

And a final word about offering familiar applications right from the start: so offering MS Office, Adobe Photoshop and so on? Well, those don’t run on Linux, so you have to replace them. Replace with identical clones or with something consistent, trying to do its job as best as it could? At this point, we are back to step one.

How many do use it?
How do they us OOo? What applications for what business cases?
What are the IT challenges, such as support, deployment, upgrade, integration?

K
Busy, providing technical support for OpenOffice.org