The link to the article has a trailing " that isnât useful.
Some tasks I canât do as well with Linux, such as complex screencasting â recording what the screen is doing, adding a voice-over track and perhaps a video inset, and zooming in to highlight specific items. Iâd gladly pay for something like this in Linux, but itâs simply not available, as far as I can find
If Gillmor is reading this: You can screen capture with audio in X11 using ffmpeg:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop
Iâve used it to record lectures on my tablet. I imagine that the more complex part of zooming in, etc could be done with post processing, but I donât have any experience there.
As great as I think this is, I donât see it as practical for the lionâs share of people who are time poor. You are going to be hard pressed to convince the average working poor that they need to build and maintain an active relationship studying/adopting a new technology paradigm. This strikes me as noble, but a hobby for those with the luxury of time.
You also have to consider the time of the people you work with. If this Gillmorâs a journalist, presumably he has an editor. What is the editor going to do when (inevitably) one of Gillmorâs articles written in LibreOffice or whatever opens up with screwed up formatting in Word?
The journalist generally isnât responsible for the typesetting, so thatâs probably not a heavy concern of his editor unless Gillmor decides to veer into e. e. cummings territory.
Calcâs the one that will really screw you over, especially if you need to work with complex excel spreadsheets.
Every year since '98 Iâve thought this will be the year of Linux on the Desktop. Still waitingâŚ
You mean like RTF (rich text format)?
âŚas opposed to regular Word documents which come pre-screwed up?
I say huzzah! Iâve been using Linux for the last 8 years or so myself for exactly the reason he mentions. There are very few things that the average semi-techie person canât do with Linux nowadays, and with distros such as the various Ubuntu flavors, one doesnât need to invest unseemly amounts of time into setting a system up.
Seriously, fuck MS Office; the only program that could consistently screw up a file from the same computer, from the same login session, from the same hour.
@thirdworldtaxi, I dunno, your average person has taken a real shine to tablets, and most of those are running a type of linux. And speaking of MSO, the most office screw ups Iâve know of is when the changed the UI design over to that stupid âribbonâ theme (never really caught on) and now they changed it again. Given enough Windows 8 REDO EVERYTHING FOR NO REASON debacles I think people would be more open to switching over.
Yes, but your average featherless biped has problems negotiating traffic lights. With this restraint how does one go about creating an environment that fosters openness and accessibility while not serving as a âchoke pointâ?
If they cannot use a closed system, they wonât be able to use the open system, to the same degree. Nothing lost.
If they have to learn the functionality on a new system, they will face the same problems with open systems as with closed ones. Again, nothing lost by going open.
And the capabilities of their relatives who are doomed to do the maintenance will go vastly up.
Installing and using Ubuntu is SO EASY! Iâm no techy, I thought it would be hard, but it wasnât.
The title of this thread interested me, because my personal technology consists of a leatherman PST-2 and a swiss army pocketwatch, and I wanted to know what that said about my politics, at least in Coryâs eyes.
Are computers and word processors really âpersonal technologyâ for most people? People other than journalists? I use linux because itâs easier and quicker for me to get things done there and because itâs freely given to me; but I donât think of it as âpersonalâ tech. I guess Iâm deconstructing this too much, thoughâŚ
Seeing as how I live in southern California, where many of us have yet to
master the advanced technology of this thing called the âturn signal
leverâ, Iâll concede your point. However, I still maintain that the current
Linux distros are as easy to set up and use as Windoze, allowing those of
us who are at least semisentient to use a computer without the many
inconveniences of MS software.
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