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posted by takyon on Monday August 03 2015, @10:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the let-them-have-tablets dept.

The number of people in the United States who use the Internet increased steadily from 2000 until 2012, when the percentage of offline adults fell to 15 percent. Since then, despite efforts by the government and social service organizations to encourage Americans to get online, that number hasn't budged, according to Pew.

Why are some Americans so reluctant to sign on? A third of those surveyed who aren't online (34 percent) said they don't think the Internet is relevant to their lives, or that they're simply not interested in what the Web has to offer. Another 32 percent of people who don't use the Internet said the technology required to access the Internet is just too tough to get the hang of, and 8 percent said they were "too old to learn."

But some people said they don't use the Internet because they cannot afford to do so, according to Pew. The survey data showed that 19 percent of those not online cited the expense of Internet service or owning a computer as their reason for staying offline.

Facebook and Google have been in the news recently because they want to get everyone online. What if those people don't want to?


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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday August 04 2015, @04:09AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @04:09AM (#217754) Journal

    I don't think it's the least user friendly UI by a long shot. There are things I like better than OSX, though Yosemite makes it easy to like something else. For about two years ending 1.5 years ago, I had to use Windows for a while -- Win 7 to be exact and after more than a decade away, it was a total pain till I got the hang of it again. Compared to what's out there, the Linux UI compares quite favorably.

    More of an issue though, is the way things get installed and what people can install. I think most people who use a computer could learn to navigate a linux desktop, at least the Gnome or KDE varieties without much difficulty. But people like to just download and install crap, and their experience falls down there a lot when using linux (and yeah, life would be better if they didn't download and install crap, but they want to do it). Synapitc or Yum would seem like such an ideal alternative but the concept is sort of foreign. Of course, if they want to watch Netflix or play most games, things get even more difficult than they're used to. Then there are the occasional unresolvable (without heroics) dependency issues. Honestly, HD space is so copious currently, I wish programs would just come with their own dependency libraries.

    Anyway, not sure where I'm going with this and I've sort of lost my thread. I like Linux and find it generally easier to use than the other big 2 OSs, but that is basically just experience. If Apple's App Store becomes a more widely understood standard way to get software, I think people will be more accepting of the Linux method of using repositories from relatively trusted sources as the main method to install software, and _then_ people will find Linux easier to use.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04 2015, @07:36AM (#217809)

    It's not the user interface that's a problem - that's pretty much like any other. It's the fact that if anything goes wrong, it is very difficult for the average person to fix. Any help online starts with "open a terminal and type...", which is a kind of archaic, DOS-like approach to solving problems. Few useful GUI tools exist to solve most problems and, if they do, they are not referred to by the online experts.

    Other issues exist. If you want to change the mouse cursor size, for example, you need to do it in two places - one for windows and one for the desktop. That's not intuitive by any stretch. Many people would get frustrated quickly by these things. If you like things out of the box, that's fine, but any customization (like for visual impairments) are a PITA. Try changing the vertical bar text cursor size in editors, for example (not the mouse cursor) - it's next to impossible in most distributions.

    BTW that earlier post is not a troll, except to *nix nerds that can't take criticism of a flawed OS. Linux kernel is fine, but the varied assortment of inconsistent UIs out there are nothing but a mess.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:23PM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday August 04 2015, @08:23PM (#218084) Journal

      If it says "open a terminal and type …" then you can usually replace that by "open a terminal and copy/paste this to it". I cannot simply copy/paste a description of how to do it with a GUI.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:14AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:14AM (#218337)

        I remember my days in Windoze forums. RegEdit [google.com]
        Clearly, that OS is too difficult for Joe Average.

        -- gewg_