| Lord Flashheart said: @Alba I wasn't implying that gaming didn't help windows just that it's not as big as some people think. Unless current linux enable you to do everything using the gui and not command lines the person you described would struggle with it probably to the point where it's unusable for them should they need to do more than open ie. Thats where windows really shone and how they really won over the market. Ease of use. DOS was a breeze to use and I still remember most of the commands as they were simple and made sense. The commands in linux aren't like that. |
Yes, I was suggesting a situation between little and big help, at some moments it was more important than now, but, I agree, not the biggest. It's still big, though, but quite difficult to quantify, with tens million hardcores, tens million casuals, tens million retrogamers, an indefinite number of pirates of all these kinds and probably hundreds million utterly casuals, playing the games provided with Windows, flash games and little else, often pirated. Windows, anyhow, benefits from all the regular players and even from those pirates that mostly play pirated 3rd party games.
Linux currently is manageable using the GUI with the few exceptions, for example, of some partially supported peripherals (for my scanner, for example, SANE required to copy its firmware from the Windows drivers CD, but I could even find the exact command line to do it, so even for a newbie it was matter of copying from the browser and pasting into a terminal window. It could have been done even using only graphical interfaces, but it's faster using a command line and in Ubuntu, that disables root account, also easier. This done, XSane is easier, more comfortable and more powerful than the Windows driver). But regarding printers, Ubuntu, like other easy distros, is easier than Windows: if the printer is supported, and most are, in most cases you just plug it in, without even the need to download the drivers or install them from CD. SW updates are managed in a centralized and homogeneous way, with a single program that can update the entire system, OS, drivers, programs, while on Windows you have MS Update for MS SW and various setup programs for drivers and 3rd party SW. On Linux only a few and rare updates require to restart the system, and it's always been so for years.
Things have changed a lot in the last two years, on my portable, installing a Kubuntu 7.10 required a lot of googling, man pages, trying and command line, but later, installing Kubuntu 9.04 required less effort than installing Win XP on my desktop, and only little more effort than installing the same distro on it.
DOS was command line, with a lot of commands similar to Unix ones, nevertheless people managed to use it. Configuring it when programs needed as much free conventional RAM as possible wasn't by any means easy.
