thelinuxlink.net

I enjoyed listening to the debate, so here my thoughts on the issue
Comparing a car to software does not really go, a less your comparing real time software such as anti-lock brakes on a car , car engine control system ,medical systems such as radiation therapy machines ,Mars Exploration Rover etc..

A lot of the software above , software developers pay a lot more attention to accuracy, because it could be life threating. On a home computer , filesystems that are stable, so files can be saved, retrieved, modified without getting lost most of the time are considered priority number 1. The user desktop applications get 2nd best , as long as they work well 7/10 times its good enough, sadly the 3/10 comes up more often than not.
Things are definitely improving on that day by day, but on top of that new features are added, to complicate and sometimes push back stability. Most real time software can only do one thing and they do it perfect almost each time, when it does not it can be very dangerous. Desktop software is not so much or a danger, as long as you back up personally files, all should be good.

You may ask what i just typed has got to do with usability, well quite a lot, software developers and experienced users want features, stability etc.. They get that at the expense of usability most of the time. Software is a complex task, especially to suit the average user.

Internet appliance is good step forward for users who just want something to work and do whatever job they want, i believe a lot of software problems can be resolved for those users going towards that path.

Unix in all its flavors and clones , was not meant to be a operating system for the average user, what has happened in the last decade is a revolution, many hurdles have been jumped over to turn unix's into something it was never meant to be.

Defining the average user is also a really hard point to mark, There are computer users who can tweak quite a bit as long as its a gui, then there are users who can use the command line without any problems whatsoever. There are also computer users who think the computer is like any other electronic device, like a tv, hifi, phone and just expect it to be a few buttons and it just works without fail.

What has happened in the unix world is that we are catering for all those users except the last group i mentioned, i personally think computers are too complicated to make them too easy. And if any operating system did do that, a large majority would possibly not want to use it and think its a toy.

I personally think its easier to make a car than perfect software because a car is practically hardware based, computer hardware failure is less often than software bugs ,
Also to a non-geek a car is more important , they rely on it to get around, a computer is just that thing in there house to surf the net, write a letter or whatever. If it brakes down, its not the end of the world, they can get it fixed, surf the web some place else.
On the other hand if a wii broke, they would be more annoyed than the pc, but not as annoyed as the car. The wii is hardware and does one thing only, play games, less chance of things going wrong.

The big organizations have set in place all kinds of redundancy mechanism if there network lost power, crashed, hacked etc, which is way out of the price range for a lot of average computer users and also something they cannot be bothered to look at.

Computers are not a toy a less there made as independent appliances.

For the record, Red Hat based distros only alias the rm command to rm -i for root. There is no such thing for an ordinary user. You can add it if you want in /etc/skel/. You can also remove the alias if you want. I personally leave it because when I'm root I don't mind the extra security.

It's been this way as long as I can remember.

Gomer_X wrote:For the record, Red Hat based distros only alias the rm command to rm -i for root. There is no such thing for an ordinary user. You can add it if you want in /etc/skel/. You can also remove the alias if you want. I personally leave it because when I'm root I don't mind the extra security.

It's been this way as long as I can remember.

I stand corrected. but I blame linc.

Since people grow up using Windows, they forget how much time it took them to learn how to use it. What does it matter to them if it took them 2–3 years to learn Windows? Taking even a month to learn something like the Gnome or OS X interface takes more time than just sticking with what they know.

I need to read the book anyway, but linux and even OS X have an uphill battle to fight. Being better is only a part of the battle, familiarity is much more important to Joe “Apathetic” User than to us desktop environment-switching, command-line using geeks.

Most of the non-geeks that I know who just use a computer for certain tasks, are overwhelmed with all the choices we have in Linux. My wife, for example just wants things to work for the five or six things she uses a computer for. She really doesn't care if it's Gnome, KDE, Xfce or whatever. When we offer people numerous options, they don't know which to use and they don't want to have to finagle with the settings to make it work right.

I enjoy all the choices, but many non-geeks don't seem to appreciate them. If a Linux distro is adopted for the masses, it would probably be most successful if it was dumbed down and just contained some solid, easily usable applications in the distro. Isn't that really the reason why Ubuntu is doing so well? I personally prefer KDE because it has more stuff, but I am a geek.

Vogateer wrote:Since people grow up using Windows, they forget how much time it took them to learn how to use it. What does it matter to them if it took them 2–3 years to learn Windows? Taking even a month to learn something like the Gnome or OS X interface takes more time than just sticking with what they know.

I need to read the book anyway, but linux and even OS X have an uphill battle to fight. Being better is only a part of the battle, familiarity is much more important to Joe “Apathetic” User than to us desktop environment-switching, command-line using geeks.

Definitely, in england, when you goto school, enter a public library most of the time your see windows, its not easy to convince people linux is better system to use because its easier. As Dan mentioned people are happy to pay for software, telling them you can get 1000000s of applications for free is not working. Dell sell computers without windows
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segt ... l=en&s=dhs
Its a start.

Lets take Amarok for example, my favorite Linux app. It has an enourmous amount of features yet when I gave it to my friend who was just using Linux for the first time he had next to no problems using it. Why? Because of the design.

The main part of the Amarok window always contains the main data that you are using and is seperated so you can tell each piece of data from eachother and each piece of meta information. The side panels will always give you more actions to use with your music and are cleanly organized into related categories. The wording is all using standard terms that almost everyone should be able to recognize. All of this helps make it easy to pick up and use. Now does all that user friendlyness stop me from using it and make it less powerful? Absolutely not.

Everything has a learning curve but IMHO there are only two ways to make it very small: remove functionality (like Apple), or design/tweak the interface to make it easy to navigate and use. I think the Linux desktop has definately been getting better in regards to the second option and will continue to do so. Sure it might get better if we remove some of the functionality but I honestly don't see that happening anytime soon nor do I think it is absolutely necessary.

So to summarize, Linc I don't think you need to worry about not being able to have complete control over everything, the only thing that is happening is newer users will have an easier time learning how to use the power features that you use.

On a side note maybe you guys should get the OpenUsability guys on the show and talk about it with them.

dann wrote:

Gomer_X wrote:For the record, Red Hat based distros only alias the rm command to rm -i for root. There is no such thing for an ordinary user. You can add it if you want in /etc/skel/. You can also remove the alias if you want. I personally leave it because when I'm root I don't mind the extra security.

It's been this way as long as I can remember.

I stand corrected. but I blame linc.

Obviously that is my fault. However, it's been noted and I will ensure that it's corrected in all the future versions of RedHat that I publish

What I keep hearing a lot is me, us, choice, freedom, and all those wonderful words we use to describe the community we are in. That's great, but the point is, that community is very, very, very small compared to the rest of the world. Now I am not advocating we take everything we love about the community and dumb it down and reduce choice and make Linux less technical or maleable to our needs.

But, on the other hand we are concerned about how the rest of the world impacts our community. We are concerned about where media and popular culture is going and whether or not we are going to be able to particpate and share ideas with the rest of the world, not just our community. We can close ourselves off and try to live in our own little bubble, isolate ourselves and carry own with our ways; but I doubt that is what most of us really want.

As geeks we love to find out how things work, solve problems and I would like to think a lot of us like to share this knowledge; if only to showcase our talents. That's great, and I hope people keep doing that. But in a world that is becoming more and more closed, this is going to become more and more difficult.

I want to see more mass adoption by Linux. I want to partake in some of that popular culture and not be shut out. I think it is important for Linx and FOSS to gain more market share so we can secure our foothold in the future. We've come a long way and have a long way to go and we are not going to get there by closing off.

By appealing in some ways to a wider audience we begin to grow our market share. As that grows we will start to see more options available to Linux users. More games, more media, more driver support. Sure, some of this will be closed, but at least we will have the choice as to whether we want to participate or not.

Face it, the average joe cares little for the concerns our community has. I believe this is more out of ignorance than anything. These issue do not impact the general user because the general user is using Windows and knows of no other option available to them. We cannot go to them and say here is this better option but you have to give up 50% of what you do on a regular basis. They are not going to buy it and we are not going to get our market share.

The FOSS community is second to none in technical skill; but we cater too much to our own community. We can do better. We can appeal to a wider audience by listening to what that wider audience wans and make some inroads there.

What is really difficult for me to add to this conversation is what that wider audience wants. I can venture some guesses, but I don't know. I am not hat audience, but I do know that said audience is voting with their dollars and that money is not going to Linux.

Again, I want to stress that I make these comments specifically about Linux and FOSS because I believe the community can do so much better. But I also want to add that in no way do I think that Windows or OS X have reached that level of embracing the general user. They lag behind too. OS X is probably the best at it now; but I do think we can beat them.

It's not all about technical superiority, it's also about usability.

dann wrote:I stand corrected. but I blame linc.

That is a wise and honorable solution.

Gomer_X wrote:

dann wrote:I stand corrected. but I blame linc.

That is a wise and honorable solution.

Works for me

dann wrote:It's not all about technical superiority, it's also about usability.

Fair enough, then let's make GNOME the default desktop on all the distros, trash Qt and KDE, because obviously they are the only ones paying attention to usability. /somewhat sarcasm.

I'm getting tired of this whole discussion of "usability", it's not a matter of improving GNOME or KDE that much anymore in my opinion, what we need is a Microsoft Office clone in OpenOffice. If people have to spend 5 mins. on learning OpenOffice then they rather wanna pay those 100 dollars for Microsoft Office and then another 80 for Windows. Unless you're talking to students who really can't afford that crap, then you can't tell people that they need to take 5 mins. to an hour to learn how to use crap.

I have not run into any to date who couldn't use KDE or GNOME, both have been wonderful for all the people I have tried to get to use Linux, the problem is OpenOffice, it needs to be a lot more like Microsoft Office so that it litterally is a drop-in replacement.

dann wrote:I want to see more mass adoption by Linux. I want to partake in some of that popular culture and not be shut out. I think it is important for Linx and FOSS to gain more market share so we can secure our foothold in the future. We've come a long way and have a long way to go and we are not going to get there by closing off.

By appealing in some ways to a wider audience we begin to grow our market share. As that grows we will start to see more options available to Linux users. More games, more media, more driver support. Sure, some of this will be closed, but at least we will have the choice as to whether we want to participate or not.

I guess I still don't understand why Linux has to conquer the world. It's still the best OS for me. That's enough. I wouldn't mind better open source graphics drivers, but I can get that if I choose the correct hardware.

I don't have a problem with better usability or things that make life easier (like package managers and dependency resolvers), but I don't see wide adoption of Linux as the only goal.

Things SHOULD be easier. It's already possible to configure a Linux distribution that is newbie friendly and not confusing. I just don't think Linux as a whole should have to change to be acceptable to the lowest common denominator.

Let Linspire and Xandros make Linux for my Mom. Give me something that is usable to ME. Taking away choice and options and hiding the complicated parts (ala Windows and Mac OS) doesn't improve usability to me, and I'm just as important to Linux as my Mom (my Mom is dead, but you get the idea).

A lot of what Dann said is probably why Ubuntu has taken off so well. They really go out of their way to not only make things easy to use, but they also hide the dangerous parts from you to a degree. Even if Ubuntu isn't really *the* easiest to use, the perception is there that it is by many filks. The other piece of it is that they give away, free for the asking, pressed CDs. And they make it mind-bogglingly easy to do the asking. Most other distros don't go that extra step, really.

Shuttleworth's monster-sized media blitz style doesn't hurt either.

Gomer_X wrote:I guess I still don't understand why Linux has to conquer the world. It's still the best OS for me. That's enough.

Yeah, when people talk about Linux getting more market share, they always seem to assume that we're gonna get like 80 percent of the market. Which, if you ask me, is a pipe dream, period. There's so many internal proprietary apps at businesses that will never work in Firefox that we're never gonna reach 80 percent within even the next 8 freaking years.
I think that just a 20, 15 or even 10 percent market would be great for Linux, look at Apple, they only have about 4 or 5 percent, and yet that's enough for Blizzard to port World of Warcrack to Mac OS X and for EA to port The Sims 2 there.

Gomer_X wrote:I wouldn't mind better open source graphics drivers, but I can get that if I choose the correct hardware.

I heard some rumors recently that Intel is actually gonna start making actual graphics cards instead of just onboard graphics integrated into motherboards in desktops and laptops. This would be really nice, since I could pick up one of those cards and stick into an AMD system and have fully free driver support.

Gomer_X wrote:I don't have a problem with better usability or things that make life easier (like package managers and dependency resolvers), but I don't see wide adoption of Linux as the only goal.

Linspire doing CNR for openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian I think is a good idea for the newbie user, however I'm gonna stick to my YUM repos and BSD ports systems.

Gomer_X wrote:Things SHOULD be easier. It's already possible to configure a Linux distribution that is newbie friendly and not confusing.

Yeah, one thing I'd like to see improved is actually configuring X, stuff like TV-out or similar I'd like to changeable on the fly instead of having to restart X itself.

Gomer_X wrote:I just don't think Linux as a whole should have to change to be acceptable to the lowest common denominator.

Exactly, I don't want any sort of DRM shit in my OS's core, the kernel.

Gomer_X wrote:Let Linspire and Xandros make Linux for my Mom. Give me something that is usable to ME. Taking away choice and options and hiding the complicated parts (ala Windows and Mac OS) doesn't improve usability to me, and I'm just as important to Linux as my Mom (my Mom is dead, but you get the idea).

I've tested both SUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu on my mom, everyone of them worked fine, and they all work for me.