Some of you may recall that I posted a couple of months ago about a little "project" of mine, to install FC4 (no dual-boot) on the computer a friend was planning on buying. The friend in question has very little computer experience and I thought I'd see how FC4 would work for him if I handled the "tricky" stuff (installing, configuring, maintenance). It took a while to get the project started, but eventually he bought (I was there to help him out lest he be duped by cynical computer store clerks) a used 1 GhZ PIII, 512 MB RAM, 20 GB HD. I installed FC4, set KDE as default, and briefly showed him the menus. No detailed explanations, I want to see how intuitive the interface is. After that I left him with his new machine, with the intention of returning once he got his internet connection hooked up to take care of the final configuration and updating.
Interestingly enough, he figured out how to use FC4 for several things on his own. I had forgotten to add a floppy disk launcher on the desktop and he was unable to reach me when he needed assistance but was able to solve the problem on his own. Quite surprising, according to me, even though he didn't fully know what he had done. But the main thing is that he was able to solve the problem. Next thing, he was also able to use the GIMP on his own and figure out how it worked enough to do some basic image processing. In addition, he could hook his digital camera up in the USB port and transfer images without further assistance, using Konqueror.
I think this clearly shows that FC4 and KDE can be quite useful for plain, everyday tasks, even for people with no Linux experience whatsoever and limited Windows experience to boot.
Next week his internet connection should be up and running and I'll see how things work out when we move on to the next step.
Linear Mode
