[Opensource] Each to his own

[Roland Gesthuizen]

Just thinking through a debate on another list about what to recommend for
retiring staff that wish to buy a replacement laptop. My elderly parents and
students are not smaller versions of office secretaries or corporate CEOs.
It is worth carefully thinking through the real needs of each user. Each to
his own.

Other teachers choose the Apple Macintosh for their laptop, hardware support
and configuration isn't an issue with these robust units. Recently we have
had a surge of interest from English teachers about purchasing the eeePC  or
for personal use, weight and bulk is less of an an issue (although colour
was). Apart from the standard issue,some IT teachers in Victoria switched
the base operating system on their department laptops to a linux
distribution such as Ubuntu and run Windows in a partition or dual boot.
Software support isn't an issue, they manage it themselves.

I mention real needs. Most users are not drawn to things that "just work"
but to those that "just work" and also are pleasant to use. Buying an device
with redundant capacity is not only wasteful, it ignores that things have
changed with power applications and features working online using just a
standards compliant and upgradeable web browser.

In some ways, this reminds me of the Australian military purchase of a fleet
of M1A1 Abrams tanks, fully functioned combat brutes that that too heavy to
take anywhere but mainland Australia.
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