Last night I was watching The Screen Savers and they were talking about if Linux is ready for the desktop market (a re-hash everyone does, but at least Leo and Pat weren't talking about overclocking, or MP3 players AGAIN AND AGAIN). Here is a link to their show notes.

Read on for my theory, and challenge to anyone who will fund this...

Anyways, this got me thinking. We all hear this every so often, "Is Linux ready for the desktop?". Basically, can moms and dads use it, or is it mainly for geeks. Noone has been able to answer this question, but I have an idea on how to get a good gague.

Take, say, 20 people (or some higher, even number of people), split them into 2 groups. These people should be the "I don't even know how to turn a computer on" type of folks with little or no experience with computers. Basically, the type of people who pay others to teach them the basics, and read Dummy books.

Put both halves into two classes, one teaching basics on Winblows, and one teaching basics on Linux. The class (which would be a few days) would cover what many basics classes do: connecting to the internet, getting/sending email, browsing the web, creating a document, printing, changing wallpaper, etc... And maybe a few intermediate things like changing your IP address, or DNS servers.

On the Wintendo box, have standard productivity tools like Outlook and Office. On Linux, use StarOffice 6.0 (5.2 is a swap hog) and Kmail. I think beginners would be better off with KDE than something like Ximian Gnome (which I use), or Enlightenment.

Both classes, teaching the same things. At the end of the class, each group of students would get a test... the same test. Answering some basic true/false type questions, and exercises like changing from DHCP to a static IP. Associating a file type with an app. Creating and printing a document. Etc... Then, see if either of the groups were any more productive than the other. Did 8 out of 10 Winblows people have no problems creating a printer, while 7 out of 10 Linux users had no troubles? If the final test is good, some of these things could be measurable.

My theory is that if someone is a computer dummy to begin with, then they are tabula rasa, so it shouldn't matter which OS they learn on. I think that the basics of what most computer people do (non-Geeks) can be done on either OS: email, web browsing, photo editing, documents, IM, etc... so it should be fairly easy for people to pick up using Linux.

Of course, some things like installing programs may be a little tougher to teach on Linux. Having gandma typing 'make; make test; make install;' isn't a good option. I hope someone writes a toolkit (if it exists, I don't know about it) to allow software developers to create something similar on Linux to the 'install' process on Windows. Or, even better, make it drag-and-drop like on OS X.

So, who wants to step up to the plate to fund the testing of my theory? OSDN (DiBona, paging Mr. DiBona)? TechTV (c'mon Leo! You could get this funded!)? O'Reilly?

What do I use? Well, I use OS X on my TiBook, Mandrake for my spare desktop at work, a desktop with FreeBSD at home. I have one Wintendo box at home, which Suzy uses (and one Kyla uses for kids games) and an older Vaio with FreeBSD on it. Basically, I haven't used Windows for some time now, which is very liberating.

Do people think this is a good idea? Could we get something like this to happen? May be some interesting results.