A Linux guide for Windows users

[llbbl]

This might help some people.

A comparison of Linux and Windows
This document can serve as an introduction to Linux for Windows users

Flavors: (revised Jan.2004) )Both Windows and Linux come in many flavors. All the flavors of Windows come from Microsoft, the various distributions of Linux come from different companies (i.e. Lindows, Lycoris, Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Knoppix, Slackware). Windows has two main lines: "Win9x", which consists of Windows 95, 98, 98SE and Me, and "NT class" which consists of Windows NT, 2000 and XP. Windows actually started, in the old days, with version 3.x which pre-dated Windows 95 by a few years.

The flavors of Linux are referred to as distributions (often shortened to "distros"). All the Linux distributions released around the same time frame will use the same kernel (the guts of the Operating System). They differ in the add-on software provided, GUI, install process, price, documentation and technical support. Both Linux and Windows come in desktop and server editions.

http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.html

[llbbl]

This tutorial will cover the basics of the GNOME desktop environment and application framework. GNOME uses the GTK+ and GNOME API to provide the software developer interfaces.

http://www.yo-linux.com/TUTORIALS/GNOME.html

[ECA]

More More...

[spankers]

A Linux guide for Windows users
This might help some people.

<--- SNIP --->

http://www.michaelhorowitz.com/Linux.vs.Windows.html
Most Windows users don't care about file system hierarchy (err... he forgot to mention /proc in the article) and all the other technical gee-whiz stuff. They just want their computer to work as advertised with a minimum of fuss.

Linspire and Xandros are making some good improvements abstracting the nasty technical details from the end user but I still don't think the average user is going to enjoy the "Linux experience" just yet.

There's not a whole lot of glamour to it, but someone needs to write system configuration utilities akin to Windows' Control Panel. The major desktop environments, Xfce4 included, have a Control Panel analog that allows you to change the desktop evironment , but typically does not touch the hardware or OS configs.

What is really sad is that Red Hat wrote a system level control panel back in 1998. With it you could configure kernel parameters and hardware. Sadly that effort dropped off the face of the earth.

We'll see... hopefully some nice things will come from the Novell camp.... I haven't seen a whole lot of activity on Novell Forge though.

[dang]

actually, what they REALLY REALLY need is an easy way to install software too.

Let's pretend I'm joe schmoe, and I have no clue how to run/configure linux. All i know is that I want to try out linux, and i want to install XYZ software cause I like it alot on my windows box and they support linux too.

I have yet to see a good installer on linux. Normally you have to go to the shell and run an install script (which will ask you a bunch of crap typically of where x/y/z pre-req libraries or application is) or you have to compile it yourself and try to interpret cryptic error messages.

There also needs to be an uninstaller (even if you can uninstall manually just by deleting the folder). A normal user may not know that OR may feel really uncomfortable deleting stuff manually. Also, some packages place crap in many different areas (/etc, /var, etc)

Another thing: easy to install drivers!

[spankers]

actually, what they REALLY REALLY need is an easy way to install software too.

That's coming around rather rapidly. Have you seen the Synaptic package manager for Debian? It is a hell of a lot more user friendly than anything else I've seen, considering the sheer number of packages available in the APT sources.
http://www.nongnu.org/synaptic/

Here's a shot from my desktop: