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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/06/2013 02:38 PM, Derek Carter
(aka goozbach) wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:527A9AB1.4040506@friocorte.com" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">I've been toying with creating an intro-to-linux course and would like
to know what topics you would think would be best.
It would be a 15-20hour course. Taught over a couple of days.
What would you want to learn if you had <b class="moz-txt-star"><span class="moz-txt-tag">*</span>ZERO<span class="moz-txt-tag">*</span></b> Linux experience?</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Oh, that's hard. Even harder if you don't know <i>why</i> they're
interested. An intro to Linux for an end-user is going to be very
different from that for a developer or a system administrator. Give
an end-user an overview intended for a system administrator and
they'll run away screaming. My sister didn't use "Linux" until this
year, despite having been introduced to it in 1996. She saw me
using my computer, heard what it was, and never ever wanted to ever
use it. :-)<br>
<br>
I'm not sure that what we need is an "Intro-to-Linux" course (unless
you're a developer or system administrator), because the real
problem is that on the desktop, it should just be a computer.<br>
<br>
Something I've been thinking about the past couple of days is "what
would be the <i>ideal</i> distribution"?<br>
<br>
People generally seem to be able to use Windows and Mac
interchangably these days, even those who aren't Technically
Qualified™.<br>
<br>
I think that there is a laundry-list of issues that we could solve
on "Linux" that would enable users to feel comfortable with the
system. One of them would be to achieve what I call "perfect
integration" between the components of a distribution and enable a
single configuration interface to the operating system. This has
yet to happen, though there have been many attempts to cover subsets
in the past and even in the present (for example, sysconfig and
YaST, among others).<br>
<br>
I think that, however, in order for it to happen, we must rethink a
lot of things in our stacks. Some of this is already happening: see
systemd, see Wayland. However, we need to rethink more.<br>
<br>
The "operating system" must present a single, unified, documented
interface to the system administrator so that the system
administrator can easily control everything from the kernel's
firewall rules to the configuration of the interoperability of file
sharing systems with Microsoft Windows clients. It must provide a
unified interface to the programmer so that the programmer can
easily find all the information necessary to work on the system
without e.g., going to find upstream documentation that may be
incomplete or nonexistent.<br>
<br>
Anyway, in order to not hijack the thread, I'll discontinue there.
I'd be more than happy to start new threads on the ideas I do have,
though, if there are people in the group who'd be interested in what
amounts to essentially research and development in the area of Linux
distributions.<br>
<br>
— Mike<br>
<br>
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