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A comment on My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work done. Parent comment

Re:My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work... by qb45 on Sunday October 27, 2013 @04:35AM (#6621284)
Because ten years ago you had to partition your HDD with fdisk and configure WiFi network by editing /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.

I'm pretty sure none of the nontechnical users mentioned here would be willing to do that.

Ubuntu moved lots of configuration to the GUI, making it easily discoverable and usable for people who don't already know where to look for things. Ubuntu may be sucky, buggy and inflexible, but it's much easier to use than old-style GNU/Linux.

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Re:My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work... by PeterisP on Sunday October 27, 2013 @07:56AM (#6621660)
The change wasn't moving configuration to the GUI - the main thing was making most of the configuration unneccessary.

End users don't want easy HDD partitioning and easy WiFi configuration - they want to avoid them altogether, and have everything work out of the box.

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Re:My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work... by nitrogen on Sunday October 27, 2013 @05:23PM (#6623630)
Not really. There were several consumer-friendly Linux distributions at that time that automated dual-boot and provided GUIs for configuration, including Mandrake/Mandriva, Lindows/Linspire, etc., and WPA didn't really exist.
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