A resounding success
That was what my daughter's presentation on Linux was. She'd taken six copies of Knoppix, but could've given away twenty to her classmates (there are twenty-three kids in her form), and one to each of her three teachers. Because not just the kids, but also the teachers were mightily impressed by Linux.
While she was careful to stress the freedom message, and touched lightly on the gratis aspect, what people impressed most turned out to be:
- Not like Windows at all.
- No malware
And in that order. This is interesting because it was not just the kids who apparently like something just for being different, but also the teachers.
The no-money aspect wasn't as interesting apparently -- reinforcing my impression that for Windows users software and money don't seem to be connected at all, but the it's-legal-to-copy-and-share aspect (which is a subset of the freedom aspect, but not apparent to them, I think) was a big hit. These kids like to share, to copy cool stuff and give it a try.
Oh, and everyone was enchanted by Tux, the Gnu, the SuSE gecko and the other geek stuff...
All in all, a well-done piece of advocacy and richly rewarded by the Dutch equivalent of an A. Naomi was elated with her success. Now I hope that none of the kids has a really weird computer Knoppix doesn't work with, or all is undone!
(For statistical purposes: more than half of Naomi's is not native Dutch. Most non-Dutch kids are Turkish and there is a handful of other nationalities. The mainland Chinese boy was particularly interested.
In another news... I'm not Gill, whoever he is when he isn't designing typefaces, I'm Boudewijn :-). And I have this inkling that it cannot be too hard to recognize iso images for what they are and have k3b act accordingly... And actually my first reaction was even more user-like than I wrote down. I thought that, well, maybe the image itself was a dud so I downloaded a new one, from a different website. Only then programmer mind kicked in and constructed a mental model of what went wrong. This mental model constructing thing is something I've noticed is what's absolutely absent by people who have never programmed, and it's something you cannot take for granted.
What would help, and what I would like to have as a programmer is the kind of movies Bart made of Krita where you can see exactly what people do and how they try to accomplish it. Those two movies were really helpful, and as a result, the palettes can now slide away into the window border when not needed. Krita's slowly getting complete cms integration with littlecms, too, but the going is hard, and complicated by me not being very fit and not knowing anything about the topic.
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