Comment 297 for bug 1

I'm a complete newbie at this and I thought I would share some comments.
I love anything Open and found out about Ubuntu when installing OpenOffice. Have been using Gmail and Firefox for years.

I have never taken any computer courses in my life. However I'm the 'administrator' in the house and I'm in charge of my parents computer (which I switch to Mac because they could not figure out the XP interface). Scary? Very common....

Made the CD image, which was easy.
Tried to boot on the desktop: took me some googling to know how to access the BIOS set up (never had to do that with windows before), then found out the whole thing froze, did not know why, some more googling before I realize I don't have the Fat32 format (no idea how to switch over and definitely not interested in potentially screwing up my files doing so). Gave up on that machine,

Went on an older machine my kids were using (the 9 year old thought it was the coolest thing since it's not MS and he heard something about Linux). Boot it no problem from the CD. Got Firefox going then realize all the sites the kids like require plug-ins to be installed (they were getting impatient at this point), then went on VMK.com and Shockwave is required, then realize it's not going to work with Linux. The kids walked out of the room....

So I love the idea of open software, but for some reason I don't think Ubuntu is promoted right (OpenOffice either). You see Firefox everywhere, gets promoted everywhere and its virtues are well known to the general (non geek) public like myself.

The installation and running needs to be a lot more intuitive ( I don't have any computer taught to me, it's always been intuitively pushing button to see what happens....). I definitely have no idea how to write a script. Sure I could have the option of buying a computer with Linux preinstalled but I'm not a computer geek per se and if I'm scared I'll be going back to either Mac or Windows and want something to work right out of the box.

Hope that helps.