Free software evangelism
I use free software every day at home and at work, but I’ve never been really big on converting non-technical people to use it. For my purposes it’s clearly superior, but I’m not sure that’s true for my family and friends. Possibly the only exception is Firefox. I do a bit of Windows tech support for friends, and without fail I install the latest Firefox release and issue stern instructions that for security reasons, it’s the only browser they should be using.
This has had mixed results- my little brother is still a dedicated IE user. However it looks like I might get him to start using Lyx, the world’s only What You See Is What You Mean document processor. This year he is doing a thesis for his B.E. in Civil Engineering, and I suggested that he use Lyx rather the ubiquitous Microsoft Word. Once I showed him a printed version of my B.E. thesis he was really keen, as it looks very shmick- more like a journal article than an undergraduate essay.
I find that for a given level of graphic design ability (i.e. none), Latex documents look much better.
The other big selling point of Lyx (and Latex) is stability. In my experience, Word is great for relatively short, simple documents. A 100 page document with many images, footnotes, sections and other features can go pear-shaped. This has happened to my brother, so a solution that doesn’t suffer from this was appealing to him. And, of course, Lyx runs on Windows. I don’t think he’s interested in a Ubuntu install any time soon.
I’m interested to see what his experience will be like, how easy Lyx is to use, and how well it met his needs. Stay tuned for updates on this riveting usability study.
