On Monday 02 October 2006 11:03, RtX wrote:
A good 75% of my calls deal with virus / adware / spyware issues that are slowing the machine down to a crawl. Most machines that I work on are P-4 Dell's.
Sometimes I think the biggest hurdle Linux has is convincing people that good (great) software CAN BE FREE or low cost. They have this stigma that if it's free, it's probably junk and would rather pay a fantastic amount of money for MS Office because it makes them feel better.
I'm sure there are other angles here. Just my 2-cents.
I think that the spyware and virus angle is a good one but it's not the whole enchilada. I can think of three "WOW" factors that would really impress:
1) Both the GNOME and KDE desktops now automatically mount removable drives and show them on the desktop. It would be nice to have a USB pen drive that can be attached to a system, detached and then inserted in to a Windows system to demonstrate that NTFS and FAT32 support is stable and interoperable.
2) Both network-manager-gnome and knetworkmanager are stable enough to be used in production. It would be neat to show people browsing wireless networks with a tray applet and then connecting to one with WPA encryption.
3) Compiz and XOrg 7.1 just entered Debian. They are also available on Ubuntu Edgy. It would be incredibly awesome to demonstrate this functionality in advance of Vista coming out. This is the long-term "eye candy" solution. The following video cards are supported, currently:
* All Intel cards 900 and higher with open source drivers * All NVidia cards GeForce and higher with the 9xxx beta drivers. * All Radeons except the 200M with open source drivers (must use XAA)