[Tfug] Why not do usability research?

[Ammon Lauritzen]

Joshua Bernstein said:
> Why waste the time?

Erm, for the sake of knowledge? In the 'name of science'? In order to
actually produce some sort of document worth publishing? For the
betterment of the lives of computer neophytes everywhere? In order to beat
down MS FUD?

Does the reason -really- matter? It's a good idea.

> But I mean really... Isn't our time spent better elsewhere? I know there
> are more people on this list then I that have jobs and school...

And, obviously, if a person signed on to do this when they did not have
the time, they have problems with time management. I, for one, have a
decent amount of free time right now, and if the commitment is limited to
three hours a week after initial setup, I'm game for participation.

As regards likely hardware, I think lower end machines are also
appropriate for reasons of the origin of this discussion. We were talking,
after all, about refurbished charity-type machines in the first place, eh?

Also, with respect to distro... well, I'm a very devout fan of Debian, but
you are probably right, an RPM-based distribution would likely be best.
With SuSE and RH out of the way, I think Mandrake makes itself a very
likely candidate. It is one of the few distros you'll see for sale at
normal stores in town. I know I've seen Mandrake boxes in Best Buy and
Borders, and am pretty sure I have seen it in Walmart before.

The custom user goodies were quite good back when I purchased and used it
(8.0), and if I recall, the distro leans more toward KDE than Gnome. I
came away from the experience (running Mandrake for about 9 months) of the
opinion that it was great for desktop use and terrible for server use. In
fact, I think I am still on their user support mailing list... hmm...

-- 
Ammon Lauritzen
ammon at simud.org

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