Heheh. Everyone is so damn polite here. I thought the responses to my post would be much more harsh.
OOOPS!!! Actually it was Red Hat I should have been bitching about, not Corel. Corel didn't work though - it crashed whenever I tried to install it. I may be an idiot, but I couldn't get Mandrake to install either, but I didn't pursue it. I did manage to install Red Hat 6, partially because for my Promise there were drivers, but it was a big pain. Also, the interface for Red Hat 6.0's install was definitely not very pretty. The edge of the images was slightly off my screen and it looked like some of the designers had never ever set foot in a design class. It's the kind of stuff I see coming out of computer programmer dungeons - geekified but not very user friendly.
Actually, I have no problem with Linux per se, but I find that the simplification of the Mac OS and Windoze and all that "window" dressing is actually a good thing because morons like me can't figure out anything else. It's also a bit distressing when downloading drivers, that one set of drivers will not work will one company's distribution, or that the drivers are nearly always labelled as beta.
BeOS on the other hand took all of 15 minutes to install, and both the install program and the GUI made intuitive sense while Linux didn't. With Linux I found myself calling up my Unix friends asking for advice in choosing the best setup for partitions, and choosing which directories would need their own partitions, etc., and what size they should be. Or else I'd be trying to figure out which set of utilities I needed to install, because the explanations were not included in the install process. Basically, it seemed to me that most of the Linux distributions assume a basic set of knowledge which I simply did not have, and which I only learned after several hours online and on the phone (and which I have since forgotten). Also, just reading the tutorials was a pain, because many were geared toward setting up servers, etc., not desktop computers, so much of the info was over my head.
So I still stand by that statement. For the average user, Linux basically has NO place in the home/office desktop market. Until these companies can afford to find good design people and such, it will remain that way.
It's sort of when my friend hired a computer programmer to design his company website. It had lots of cool features and applets, but I still thought it sucked. It was geekified but did not flow aesthetically, etc. Then he hired an advertising exec of all people for the next site. Boring simple HTML - but the site was MUCH better at actually getting the information to the customer. Then there's the databases we use at work. Definitely not very user friendly - does the job, but navigation makes no intuitive sense (even though everything is there). I'm now starting to think that every computer programming type degree should include courses in basic GUI and web design.
OK sorry for the rant...
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