Site of the week: Stay at home mom learns Ubuntu

This weekend while surfing the Net, I came across a blog about an average Mom who started to learn Ubuntu. She was trying to rate how appropriate tagline “Linux for human beings” really is and it got me curious. I started to read her series of posts entitled “The Ubuntu Chronicles: The Saga of Amber and Ubuntu“

What’s very interesting about Amber’s series of posts is that it gives some very good points on how well Ubuntu (Linux) has moved forward in terms of usability on the desktop. And some very good points which may very well help the community identify some improvement areas in terms of usability. Although I wouldn’t rate her as the average typical Mom, she has pretty much written things that provides some insight to how an average user might react to Ubuntu.

One of the things that struck me is that, most Ubuntu/Linux users have gotten used to command line methods to get things done even in a GUI environment simply because it’s faster and we know how to do it. But the typical user (who is probably 90% of the total user base) aren’t used to “sudo”.

An idea that I think would really help a lot of users came up on my mind. People who have been using Ubuntu for a while may already be familiar with the Synaptic Package Manager and one of it’s features “Mark Packages by Task”. I think that it would really help a lot in terms of usability to put something similar on the Applications menu together with the “Add / Remove …” feature. Something like “Add/Remove/Install by Task“. What do you think?

As I was reading the series, I suddenly realized that she is now getting aggregated into ubuntuweblogs.org so I would assume that you guys are also reading her posts by now.

Hi Amber, welcome to Ubuntu!