Group talk:Giving Guide Suggestions

Audience

The giving guide is a great idea, but terribly poorly implemented. I believe the primary concern is the fact that we haven't decided on who our audience is. The giving guide is laden with suggestions that are primarily interesting to the kind of audience that is already very libre-minded and doesn't mind the additional technical overhead that comes with less user-friendly solutions.

The result is that if you give out this guide to random people or friends, they take one quick glace and instantly dismiss it.

If our audience is the average customer (we are planning on handing these out and giving them to all our friends and family, right?), then the guide should reflect the shopping interests of the average buyer.

The suggestions in this guide are also terribly technical and unless we can come up with a good list of *actually interesting* gifts, this guide will end up doing nothing but promoting the other side: "if this is the best libre has to offer, we might as well forget about it".

There are other issues; telling people to gift an FSF member card over an iTunes music card comes off as nothing short but unabashed advertisement. Telling people to gift a Linux distro over Windows 8 is pointless: nobody gifts Windows (or Google Drive ... seriously). --Lhunath 10:52, 18 November 2014 (EST)

FSF response: Thanks for your feedback. Some of the things you've identified are areas of the guide we strive to improve. We always do our best to make the guide accessible to people who aren't already involved with free software, but there is, unfortunately, still a limited range of devices that are worth recommending. Companies like those in the guide are changing that year over year, and we actually had a large increase in the number of physical devices in the guide last year thanks to their work. In addition to product suggestions, we always welcome ideas about how to make the guide more friendly to beginners. Zakkai (talk) 17:32, 31 October 2016 (EDT)

The > symbol is ambiguous

The > symbol can be read as an arrow since it is in the reading direction. I would read this:

Android => iPhone

as the next step after Android is iPhone.

To minimize that ambiguity maybe we should flip it around and do < instead. So iPhone < Android.

--Tange 18:21, 16 December 2012 (EST)

Agree with the problem. Flipping it around is better, but doesn't completely solve it either... Ciaran 08:39, 20 December 2012 (EST)

I've fixed this by introducing a table. --Cypherpunks (talk) 14:06, 25 November 2016 (EST)

Suggestion: remove software

How can I give someone software in a way that won't be more inconvenient than if they just got it for them self? Sounds like an awful (thoughtless) gift idea.

If someone gave me the source or a binary of Gimp, I wouldn't install it. I'd use my package manager to get a version of Gimp that has been tested to work with my system.

The recommendations in that section should be moved to a page for how to migrate from proprietary software to free software. Ciaran 08:49, 20 December 2012 (EST)

PSP (w/Free custom firmware)

I noticed on the page at present that under portable gaming there is a question as to what device should be recommended over the Sony Playstation Portable (PSP). Contrary to suggesting another device, I for one would actually encourage the purchasing of a PSP and then recommending how a user can then make it free using the great GPL'd homebrew firmware ProCFW (https://code.google.com/p/procfw/).

As this process is actually quite simple, but on the surface slightly complex, i'd then recommend linking to the excellent guide here published by Wololo.net (http://wololo.net/cfw4dummies/) who are at the forefront of homebrew news. In addition, i'd also perhaps recommend (from the same site) their excellent community-produced game Wagic the Homebrew (http://wololo.net/download/).

Aside from that, using Free custom firmware like ProCFW allows for all sorts of emulators (almost all Free Software - check http://zx81.dcemu.co.uk/ for some) and Free homebrew software such as Links2, PSP IRC, PSPMagic (EtchASketch clone), PSPwrite, Bookr, RenPSP, LuaPlayer, etc.

I really think it'd be useful to point this out as an alternative if nothing else is recommended for portable gaming. -- Frostfog 09:49, 22 December 2012 (PST)

Thanks for the info, Frostfog. I've started a page for this sort of info here:

• Projects to free phones and handheld computers

If you know more about this project, or other projects, it would be great if you could add more info and links to that page. Ciaran 00:58, 22 January 2013 (EST)

Smartphones

Do we really want to have smartphones on the guide? No matter which mobile phone you have, the operator will spy on you if you insert the SIM card.

Indeed smartphones are a big problem. There should be a smartphone section that starts by recommending no smartphone at all. Clearly some are worse than others. So we should still do a comparison to prevent buyers feeding the worst of the worst manufacturers. Progressively patronizing those that are only marginally evil by comparison can at least steer the market in the right direction. The Fairphone is worthy of the shortlist until the market improves. Looks like the smartphone has been removed. That's a shame, because it increases the chance that people will buy Samsung or Sony phones. --Cypherpunks (talk) 15:03, 24 November 2016 (EST)