Submitted by rich_c on February 9, 2009 - 10:06am
Over the Christmas/New Year period, I posted some polls on a couple of forums and on Facebook to try to gauge how competent home computer users feel they are. I don’t think the results I got are of any use from that point of view but they raise a few interesting points none the less.
Although I announced the existence of the poll on Facebook fairly well, I didn’t get anyone voting. This leads me to draw two possible conclusions. Either your average Facebook user (In my circle of friends, anyway…) doesn’t give a monkey’s about IT related posts or they’re all too afraid to venture into my profile for fear of the hacker related shenanigans they may find in there. ;-> The lack of responses to this poll is what makes me feel that the results I did get aren’t valid for getting a feel for the perceived level of expertise/confidence of most computer users. The forums I got responses from are probably quite technically orientated. One is a Linux users’ forum, the other a car owners’ site. Both yielded fairly similar results, with the Linux forum edging ahead in the most confident/competent users category.
From a Linux advocacy point of view, this would lead me to conclude that there is not too much point in posting on Facebook with articles intended to raise interest in Linux/FOSS. Of course, that won’t stop me and I will continue to pounce on anything that looks like one of my friends may be turned to the Penguin! As for the car owners’ forum, I assume that those that rated themselves highly will have experience with various versions of Windows. To me, this means that they may be interested but will be fairly used to battling with Windows issues and perhaps be reluctant to learn a whole new bag of tricks with an unfamiliar OS. I would like to think that if they dug a bit deeper they may find that the learning curve related to switching, although pretty steep, is worth it and depending on your choice of Linux distribution there is plenty of willing help and advice available. Visit the link at the bottom of this entry for a few pointers on the advantages of Linux and indeed some of the other entries here.
As much has been said before, but certainly in my view the users who would feel the least pain in switching are those who don’t feel they have much technical expertise or those who didn’t respond at all. This is assuming they have someone at had who could install a Linux distribution for them and ensure they knew which applications to go to for their day to day needs. For example, Firefox/Iceweasel for the internet & OpenOffice.org for your MS Office documents etc. Migration from Win XP/Office 2003 to a good Linux distro, as has been observed countless times, is probably easier than going to Vista/Office 2007.
The polls can be found here:
http://www.clubtouran.net/forum/showthread.php?t=4137
http://mepislovers.org/forums/showthread.php?t=18923
As mentioned, nothing to see with the Facebook poll but feel free to get in touch through FB if you want.
Richard Clinker
http://www.btinternet.com/~richard.clinker/rich_it.html
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