Furthermore,

This is a ridiculous statement. That's like saying people don't drive cars to get around quicker. Everyone uses a computer to increase their productivity. If you send an email, you're increasing your productivity. What else are you going to do? Send a fax? How many people have fax machines? Write a letter? OK, then you have to post it, wait for it to be delivered, then wait for the reply (perhaps a week or more either way for international communication). Telephone someone? Fine for local calls, try calling someone halfway around the world in your lunch hour when it's 3am their time, see if they like that. Email is quicker and more convenient for everyone, thus the purpose of email is to increase your productivity by reducing the overhead (temporal, geographical, or whatever) involved in communicating with other people.

If you shop online, you save yourself the trouble of traipsing around shops, leaving you more time to do something more useful, thus increasing your productivity. Increasing one's productivity simply means (obviously) getting things done more quickly, thus allowing you to do more in a given amount of time, which is the whole purpose of computers, whether you're trying to find a cure for cancer, or just organizing your family photos.

We continue to see the inverted drone-like attitude typical in certain western societies. Instead of actively thinking for yourself and selecting which OS to use based on what you like and need, you passively expect the OS to make a sales pitch and convince you to use it. Well, Linux (fortunately) doesn't come with a monkey-suited bloke with a square jaw and 78 teeth to give you a shiny Powerpoint presentation, so you're simply going to have to make your own judgement, if you can.

Windows is garbage, this is objectively verifiable. You cannot argue with this, it is a fact. That doesn't stop you from using and liking it, of course, you're quite free to use garbage, but don't try to pretend it's anything else. Some people are not prepared to put up with third-rate shit. Just as well, eh, or we'd still be living in caves.

Similarly, Eastenders (a crude, facile, mindless "soap opera" if you don't know) can be objectively verified to be garbage, yet millions of people watch it, perhaps it brightens up their dreary lives and gives them something the're incapable of finding for themselves, whatever that might be. Who cares? Use whatever you like, just stop demanding that everyone else use it too. Why should I watch Eastenders just because other people do? Keep your flabby McOS to yourself. Ta.

The basic premise seems to boil down to:

"Windows works fairly well for me and I'm used to it and lots of other people are used to it, therefore every other operating system should work like Windows."

Which is, of course, a comically retarded thesis deserving of no further attention. (Indeed, it's not even worth the attention it's been given.)

Adieu.

Thanks for this information

This isn't ridiculous. Think about it. People drive cars to move faster. But how many of them can tune up their cars so it'll drive faster? Or how many of them are professional racers? Or how many can do hand-brake turn, drive on two wheels, etc?
I think that given an opportunity to go to a some kind of advanced driving school and spend 2..4 month learning more about cars and driving (which will allow say, driving 2..4x faster in the end) many won't go to that school, because that will be too long and they already know how to drive ineffeciently. This is either because of laziness, or because people would like to spend some time doing other things. Same with computer. user can learn scripting, CLI, etc. or you can use less efficient gui tools. User can learn computer basics or instead keep thinking that program is a picture on desktop. This is user's choice.

Of course it's ridiculous. You fail to observe my point. I'm not talking about using a computer in a simple-minded way versus using a computer "properly", I'm talking about using a computer versus not using a computer. If you use a computer, you do so because you want to do something such that doing it without a computer would be inconvenient or too difficult or impossible. I'm talking about driving a car (however badly) versus not driving a car at all. People learn to drive to increase their efficiency in getting around, i.e. to increase their productivity (what they can accomplish in a given amount of time). They use computers for the same reason. Ergo, to argue that people don't use computers to increase their productivity in some way is absurd.

IMO, you are wrong.
People don't buy computer or cars only to increase productivity. Some do it becasue "this is cool" or "everyone do that".

Try thinking out of the box.

There was a survey conducted a couple of years ago which showed that the computer has not led to efficiency improvements in the office on anything like the scale it has in manufacturing. A lot of computer use is not to do things more conveniently, but to do things you don't need to do in the first place: like sending an email to some-one in the same room instead of speaking to them. I've seen any amount of time wasted in producing documents, presentations, etc that no one needed, no one paid any attention to. For that matter, it's the same with cars. If I used a car to get around London, it would take longer and cost more.

Another survey showed the average office worked spent about 15% of their time trying to solve a problem on their computer, trying to solve a problem on some-one else's computer, or waiting for the system administrator. So much for the ease of Windows, which most of them would be using.

The fact is, most people are stupid. Let them play computer games, watch you-tube (or what ever it's called), and watch East Enders too. Just keep the dummies away from my operating system!

That may be true, but that is more to do with the way a lot of people end up using computers (stupidly, as you say), not the original purpose of using the computer. People buy computers to get more done or do things they couldn't easily do without a computer, but because the're lazy and stupid, they end up using them inefficiently, negating much, or all, of the benefit they could have realised.

Indeed, but again, that has nothing to do with the intrinsic purpose of a car, which is to get from A to B. Driving may be slower for a number of reasons (bad road planning, overpopulation, roads clogged with lard-arsed idiots driving when they don't need to, etc), but that is unrelated to your original purpose of buying a car. Once you are outside city centres, driving will be substantially cheaper and faster than most other forms of transport, especially when you factor in the cost of your own time.

Quite. But presumably the rest of the time, the're using the computer to get work done, thus increasing their productivity versus not using the computer. Of course, the fact that they could increase their productivity even more (perhaps substantially more) if they learned how to use the computer properly (and used a proper operating system) is generally lost on such people.

And mine!

There are manuals?!? Well, that explains some of my problems . . .

I had a support call on Monday from someone who had downloaded the free demo of my software package.

"I installed this, now what do I do with it?"

"What do you mean, 'what do you do with it'?"

"I mean it is sitting here running, and I don't know what to do with it."

"You have it running now?"

"Yes"

"Do you see that drop-down menu item labeled 'Help'?"

"Yes"

"Click on it."

Now, when this package gets installed, at the very end of the installation - just before terminating - the installer opens the help file and leaves it open on the user's screen.

Some people you simply cannot protect from themselves, no matter what you do.