Download Squad

Me standing naked in front of a window is illegal. They weren't selling anything. Just, showing it off at a mall.

you put gnome in front of someone who doesnt know linux usually they assume its mac because of the default top bar. kde 4 has a very windows like look with its bottom taskbar. and dont get into the whole "well you can make it look like windows blah blah blah" its a default kde4.2 desktop so althings need to be equal

First, I'm writing this as someone that prefers GNOME, lighter window/desktop managers, and loved KDE 3.59. I'm not a fan of KDE 4 simply because I'm not into how it looks, and I don't relish the idea of having to customize it simply so it works my way when other DM/WMs already do. :)

When it comes to attracting Windows/Mac-using newbies, eye-candy is huge leverage. They're happy with what they have, they've invested time & money into it, and frankly, the one thing Linux does offer is more eye-candy at lower resource thresholds. FLOSS doesn't matter much to them: they can't read or modify the code anyway, and what controls their sharing habits isn't the law as much as how hard it is to crack the app.

What matters is getting the person to use Linux, however it's done... *Then* is the time to show them how to improve performance, how they can help with FLOSS simply by giving feedback or using superior writing skills to edit documents, how much their local/state government would save in taxes if it switched to free software, and all that. Telling them "here, use this old-looking thing, it's faster than that cool looking one your friends envy" or "you should use this, then you can read all of this geek stuff that makes no sense to you" won't work.

In fact gnome runs very well on my old MSI 840Mhz P3 with 512mB memory ;-D

$?

Microsoft is a company that makes profits. So do a bunch of other tech companies, but you don't see the point in putting currency symbols in their names, do you? If you have a problem with capitalism, move somewhere else.

This obsession on hating Microsoft will always be ridiculous.

WINE is NOT an emulator! The programs do run natively. It's as much as a go-between as one that allows you to run 32-bit programs to run in 64-bit Windows/Linux (dynamic recompiler + libraries).

Linux itself is a testament to why you don't need major software makers to have good software. Besides, if there were major software makers on Linux, there wouldn't be an incentive for programmers to write alternatives (that are FREE and can be ported to other OSes).

@JC

Don't be ridiculous. If there were major software makers on Linux, there would be much much more software available for the platform, including more freeware. You make it sound as though there is little freeware available for Windows because there are major software makers on it- that's just not true.

And yes, we all get that Wine Is Not an Emulator, but whatever, its compatibility and reliability is significantly inferior to software that can be compiled and run properly, it is not a true long-term replacement, merely a go-between as Richard puts it. If you want proof, go to the WineHQ website. You'll find that of the set of programs in the database (by no means every program you might want), less than 30% have a platinum rating. So it is more likely than not that running a program with WINE will have issues- this is NOT a proper replacement

I think that Win7 needs more getting used to than Vista did. But once you get used to it, its great.

I'm sure somebody probably figured that out. However that wouldn't prove KDE's point, so its easier to remove them and make it look like everyone thinks its 7.