[OT] End-user uses for x86-64 (was: Why are still not at 64 bits)

[Jon 'maddog' Hall]

> 
>   Ok, now sit her down in front of a formatted hard drive,  :-D

O.K., but let's talk oranges and oranges (I almost said "apples and
Apples(R)", but that would have been confusing).

It has been a long time since I installed a Microsoft product from a
bootable OEM disk, but it was not pleasant.  I had the "chicken and egg"
problem of getting the needed device drivers and code of the boot path
onto the formatted hard drive, and MS did not make that easy.  Perhaps
that has changed, but I think that MS depends a lot on the fact that
most of their end-user customers never install MS, only sys-admins,
VARs, OEMs, etc. who are more savvy.  The most an end-user does is
restore a back-up disk or image, which may or may not wipe all of their
data.

Ubuntu was pretty freaking easy for me to install, and I think for a lot
of people they would have the same thing.  Other than typing in some
simple things like my login name and password, I could have taken a lot
of "defauts" and ended up with a working system.

After we do the "MythTV thing", we might think about doing a few videos
of a newbie installing Linux on a bare disk drive with a clock in the
background (so we can to editing and fast forward) to see what they come
up with when they are finished.

md