Posted by
Roblimo
on from the we-need-more-stories-like-this dept.
GauteL writes "Sigurd Rinde, a typical desktop user, talks about how Linux can replace Windows for everyday use.
He talks about word processing, presentations, Web editing,
accounting, calendars, etc.
Read more
here."
I love Outlook Express, but I'm not going to talk about that. Instead, I'd like to say a few words about mh (or nmh, actually) because somebody mentioned "The UNIX way(tm)".
nm is a suite of programs, each of which does one thing well. There's comp to compose mail. It calls your favorite editor and then hands the message off to send, which sends it. When you receive mail, you call inc to move the messages from the spool file to mh's mail directory, where each message is one file. Inc will show you a list of new messages. You can get a list of all your messages with scan. Use show to read a message, repl to reply to one, forw to forward. These can take a message number as an argument. All these are normal shell commands that you can type interactively or put in a script. Since each message is a file, you can also use normal file handling commands like mv and cp to organise your mail and you can script those operations as well. Configuration is distributed. If you don't like how mh sends your mail, you configure send; nothing else. For someone who prefers the UNIX way, mh is heaven.
I still prefer a really good integrated client to mh, though. It's just that there aren't any really good ones for Linux. (Yes, I'm actually saying that Outlook Express is better than any mail client available for Linux. Sue me. (Yes, I've used mutt) --
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Actually, computers are suppose to be tools. For some tasks and for some people, an appliance is what is necessary. For other people and for other applications, a highly configurable and option rich environment is needed.
All my grandmother's friends have email. She however freaks out when her flashlight runs out of batteries and still uses an electric typewriter. She will never be comfortable using even a Windows OS. She needs an internet appliance so she can communicate via email with her family and friends all over the world, with as seamless an interface as a telephone or toaster.
I develop software and do scientific research. UN*X systems have the development environment tightly coupled to the whole concept of the UN*X operating system. It makes software development easy and fast. I find it much easier to write my code in Emacs and invoke gcc & gdb from bash or a Makefile than I did coding in Visual C++ (for you this might not be true). To analyze the large amount of scientific data that I have to, nothing is easier than sort, cut, tr, perl, etc.
I'm sort of rambling here, but my point is that there is no one interface that is suited to all people and all situations. I find the Mac easy to get started on, but for me it doesn't scale up as well as UN*X - once I get to the intermediate/expert level of use I am more efficient on UNIX.
What I would like to see in UNIX apps is a complete decoupling of interface and implementation, with GUIs built using something like XUL. Then you could create a 'novice' UI that exposed many of the common tools and made liberal use of the mouse. This could be used to transition users into a more advanced UI that emphasized shortcut keys and scripting. This would require all developers to expose the functionality of their program in a standard way. Maybe this could automatically be integrated into one of the standard GUI toolkits so that there doesn't have to be any extra work done by developers?
He ain't no suit, for whatever that means. Though I suppose the definition and connotations of the word "suit" can vary somewhat, it certainly involves more than just having the computing IQ of an Ape (which this guy certainly doesn't have). Beyond his relative adeptness with computers, there are some other non-suit like qualities to him. For example, he dropped Powerpoint for HTML and a browser? Think about what this says about this guy. He is willing to diverge from the rest of the herd (powerpoint) -- definetly not a "suit" like quality. In addition, he has the time (real or percieved) to not only learn HTML sufficiently, but also to use it instead of Powerpoint. While I hardly think Powerpoint is a particularly good product, it is certainly faster for your quicky presentation. Again, if you're going to generalize, "suits" value time; a "suit" would not waste time in HTML. More time/value points: He uses vi (while it's a great text editor for those who have the time to learn it, it ain't a suit tool). He doesn't seem to mind, or atleast makes no mention of, having to track down and download all of these various programs (e.g., vmware, IglooFTP, Klynx, etc.), nor the compilitation/installation processes. He is obviously familiar with slashdot, enough to refer to it as "/.". I could go on, but you get the point...
While my intent is not to deride him or the person who posted, lets be real here. There is little value to his article. He doesn't speak for the financial community in general or "suits". Nor does he attest to Joe Schmoe's view of Linux. What he might have been able to do, he did not do. He did not provide slashdot with a window into how his comrades, the "suits", would or have (not?) approached Linux. Instead, we got a not particularly well written commentary of an individual with a professional job outside of computing (perhaps not your typical slashdotter), yet he has time to burn, and nothing to lose. The mere fact that he finds Linux acceptable doesn't mean most will. We (you) can't pat ourselves on the back for doing a great job. Being both a student of finance (not a suit) and working in and around IT and technology, I can tell you that Linux/Open Source has miles and miles to go.
The only thing a reasonable person could draw from this, is in regards to professional (e.g., Doctor, Lawyer, Financial people, etc.) people's possible use of applications--there are some applications out there that they can theoretically use (not true even 2 years ago)--he found them sufficient. Though having tried using most of them extensively, I disagree with much of it.
WinXX is good for someone who wants to use a computer as an appliance, while Linux is great for someone who wants to learn what makes a computer tick, and how to use it effectively.
If that's the case, then I'm afraid that Linux will never be popular - nor should it! Computers are supposed to be appliances; the fact of the matter is that most people want to get stuff done, not to go diving into technical swamps. (There's a word for those who do want to go diving into technical swamps: it's "geek". I'm one of those myself, and there's nothing wrong with being one, but suggesting that everyone should be like that is preposterous.) If you ask me (and I know you didn't), it's precisely the fact that our community insists on sticking with the PC-era mentality of "more power^H^H^H^H^Hwork to the user" - and it shows in everything, from hardware to programming languages to user interfaces - that is hindering the arrival of the age of ubiquitous computing. We should learn from Microsoft's attempts, however failed, to make a computer into a thing you can use like an appliance, not shun them.
-- To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
While I respect the opinions of the author of this article, I have to say that in my experience the apps for Linux just aren't up to the same caliber as those available for Windows yet. I mean, can you show me a mail client as powerful and easy to use as Outlook Express? How about a word processor with the feature set of Word (and I know a lot of/. readers think of a spell checker as "bloatware", but some of us like having a lot of options we can configure).
On the whole, I do agree with your post- but I would like to take an exception to this particular part of it. If the spell checker is all that you care about, hell, even kEdit and gEdit can use the (default in most linux distros) ispell program, and they do. Does notepad or wordpad include a spellchecker? I didn't think so.
But on the whole, as I said above- you are mostly right. We don't need to keep patting ourselves on the back, we need to bring things up to par- and Outlook is a damn good example, as is IE. Mozilla's not there yet. It's getting closer every day (I'm downloading the latest build as we speak) and I think that it's great, but we don't have a great web browser yet. Nor do we have a great mail client. We still lack the one thing that Microsoft can claim over us- unification and easy drop-in replacements of parts. KDE is doing great things in regard to this- KParts is a great stride forward in this field (as also noted in another post) but it's not perfect and it's not even public yet.
Just give us time...
StarOffice isn't a good alternative to Microsoft
by
Animats
·
· Score: 3
I'm underwhelmed with StarOffice. It's still an early version; the basic stuff is there, but it's not a finished product. It's always doing something slightly wrong. Import of Word documents works maybe 75% of the time, and the format never quite matches. The HTML editor is on a par with Netscape Navigator, the drawing tools are lame, and it keeps trying to act like a visual shell with folders. There's also the annoying problem with Sun that they tend to lose interest in their software products after a while. Remember their Java Workstation IDE product? If Sun keeps at it, StarOffice could be a nice product. But will they?
On the other hand, it doesn't have that stupid dancing paper clip.
The thought of using TeX in the year 2000 leaves me completely cold. That's the last gasp of the programmer-oriented word processors. The line that began with Runoff and went through nroff, troff, and ditroff ends with TeX. And it's time for it to end. Macros are just the wrong tool for that job. (Whatever happened to math formatting for HTML, anyway? There was a working group on that, but it seems to have been lost somewhere along the way, probably because everybody's off doing electronic commerce.)
Even if Linux becomes just as easy to use as Win, that's not easy enough. Why? Because the easiest system to use is the one you already know how to use.
What will make Linux dominate? In the short run, nothing. Open Source tends less to innovate, and more to emulate. So when the OS becomes a commodity product with little room for innovation, the Linux price point (0) will then drive people to Linux. This is already starting to happen.
Of course, when the OS is totally commoditized people will care as much about which OS they use as they do now about what kinds of circuits are in their TV sets. Not even geeks will care by then. Commodity products are boring. Hopefully something new and exciting will come along to replace the OS as something for geeks to work on. It will be nice too if that something is difficult to emulate so that the true innovators can have time to make money on it before people copy it.
-- For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe the writer wears suits, but he's hardly a typical non-tech user. As soon as he talks about compiling and vi v. emacs, he's disqualified.
Still a really interesting write-up, though. Just don't point to this as proof that your PHB could survive in a Linux world yet.
Re:Hooboy: the "typical user"
by
Crixus
·
· Score: 4
Wake up people! The typical desktop user doesn't understand the difference between "netscape" and their operating system! If you unplug their keyboards in the night they will call tech support in the morning! They run their monitors in 640x480x256 because they don't realize there are any other settings!
Yes! I love it when I see someone get a system shipped to their door with a 19" monitor and the screen settings are exactly that, 640x480x256.
The Start button is roughly the size of a house on a 19" monitor in that resolution. I don't switch them to 800x600 or 1024x768 because it's likely a better resolution for them with that monitor, I switch them because I swear that once the huge start button tried to kill me.
One day, before Netscape.com was a portal, I was asked by a cousin what search engine I used, "Yahoo or Netscape."
It was difficult helping him to understand the difference.
"...and so, as the sun sets on Slashdot World, everything is hunky-dorie and everyone lived happily ever after and without Microsoft."
While I respect the opinions of the author of this article, I have to say that in my experience the apps for Linux just aren't up to the same caliber as those available for Windows yet. I mean, can you show me a mail client as powerful and easy to use as Outlook Express? How about a word processor with the feature set of Word (and I know a lot of/. readers think of a spell checker as "bloatware", but some of us like having a lot of options we can configure).
What's more irritating about articles such as this one is that they don't really serve a productive purpose to us as a community of developers. It glosses over the failings of Linux, and this is a Bad Thing(tm). Remember the "Jihad Tux" icon on Suck back a couple of months ago? It was funny, but it was a bad omen as well.
I suppose this article in particular is just serving as a final straw to me. Lately I've noticed a really disturbing trend towards self-congratulation in the OSS movement, and especially on this particular discussion board. Criticism of Linux is less and less welcome while this sort of wanking is on the upswing.
Look, sitting around patting ourselves on the back while ignoring the deficiancies in our software is the exact same behavior that we love to flame companies like Microsoft for. It feels good to convince ourselves that Linux is finally "there" and that anyone who can't use it is just an idiot. It feels good to think that even a "suit" can use it now. It feels good, but it's not true -- not yet.
When I first installed Slackware (waaay back when), it was nearly impossible to deal with as a newbie with no previous UNIX experience. Linux has come a very long way; I won't dispute that. It's not a replacement for Windows yet, however, and we as a development community aren't doing ourselves any favors by pretending (as an example, not a flame) that the GIMP can hold a candle to Photoshop yet.
I am conviced that the OSS development paradigm will lead to a better product that any closed paradigm. I am also convinced, however, that if the community loses their focus that the OSS paradigm breaks down. Flaming the "non-believers", trolling about "suits", preaching to the choir and pretending that flaws don't exist are all symptoms of this loss of focus.
Now, I'm not trying to discourage discussion. I'm not trying to sell short the efforts of the people developing Linux and various OSS apps. I'm not trying to suggest that the whole community is one way or the other, nor am I forgetting that Linux kicks ass in particular areas. I'm not saying that the people who developed the OSS paradigm or who work on the software don't deserve a vast amount of credit.
What I want to point out is that self-congradulation (which is how I view this article) is inherantly dangerous to the future of the paradigm from a Big Picture point of view. It should be recognized as such, and should be avoided whenever possible.
----
-- Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
About time... what Linux needs to truly take off is support from the average desktop user, not just the techies and power users. I just hope we see more favorable reviews from "average" people and that these reviews encourage other "average" users to run Linux on their PC. It's important to recognize that Linux isn't just a server OS, it can work well as an office platform too.
No, it's not. Whatever you do folks, don't get complacent. Linux is NOT ready for the average user yet.
Roadmap:
1. Forget skins. They're bullshit. Concentrate on UI design - flash can come later.
2. Make your UI consistent across apps. Someone needs to come up with a "Linux UI style guide" - preferably have some kind of library that does standard keybindings and mouse handling - eg. for context menus. These things vary so wildly between apps right now (heck, even cut & paste varies wildly between apps right now) that it makes using the computer a jarring experience.
3. Design GUI apps for the GUI - that is, don't think in terms of command-line apps. Too many GUI apps (heck, look at KDE & the basic bits you get with Corel Linux) look and feel like someone decided to switch to a command-line app at the last moment. Developers - try coding the GUI first, and then work on the internals - not the other way around. The GUI should NOT be tacked on at the end.
4. Do usability tests on your granny. If she can't get it (and if she can, she musn't be related to Ada Lovelace), then you're doing it wrong. Take notes, and go back to the drawing board.
5. Try running Linux without editing a text file for configuration / using the keyboard for anything except data entry. If you can't, it's not ready yet.
6. Provide: a. Duhhhh-level install. That is - you insert the disk, you hit OK, it does it. b. User interviews (find out their needs and provide them a list of options based on them) for the medium level install. c. Techy level install - that is, you let them customize to the nth degree. d. Provide a,b,c in all your apps.
7. Help should be context sensitive, and never more than a STANDARD KEYBOARD SHORTCUT away.
8. If it looks like an idiot could use your app, you've not made it easy enough. You've designed it for a pretty smart idiot.
Simon [... wonders if anyone would be willing to take me on as Linux GUI Czar.. hmmmm... have to look into that]
Hooboy: the "typical user"
by
konstant
·
· Score: 5
You know your market perspective is skewed when...
Roblimo calls a guy with a three computers at home running over a lan he installed himself, and who waxes nostalgic for his old HTML editor a "typical desktop user".
Wake up people! The typical desktop user doesn't understand the difference between "netscape" and their operating system! If you unplug their keyboards in the night they will call tech support in the morning! They run their monitors in 640x480x256 because they don't realize there are any other settings!
If you're planning on marketing Linux to the masses, at least get the character sketch straight. This guy is at least what you could call a "power user". Hell, I'm sure some of the people on this board who call themselves "geeks" couldn't do have of what he's apparently done.
-konstant Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-- -konstant Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
First of all, good for him, it'll no doubt save him money in someway...but I have a few grumbles with what he says anyway...
Have to admit that I was inclined to do my best to end my relationship with MS (costly stuff that, forty percent plus margin kind of makes me uneasy in the have-I-been-taken-for-a-ride department)
Where does he get 40% from? How does he know how much Microsoft spends in R&D?
Word can easily be replaced by Wordperfect, Staroffice or Abiword. Quite satisfactory, and MSWord files are no problem.
Yeah, if all you use words for is just typing up stuff, Word has MANY features, most people only use 5% of the features, but not everyone uses the same 5%. In many areas, Staroffice and Wordperfect fail (good antialiased fonts is a BIG area). Table support, integration (eg. embedd other documents like excel/pdf/ etc are lacking. He probably does use these, but then, if all he needs is 'abiword', then maybe he would be just as happy with a simple editor like notepad or wordpad.
Somebody has a question that you are about to answer in slide 14. I 'click' forward to 14 and then back again. (try that in Powerpoint).
Uh, maybe he should look at PowerPoint again. Linus likes PowerPoint right?:P
This is where I see a glaring gap among the Linux applications. Netscape is useful (but unstable), best solution I guess is having a Palm Pilot in conjunction with Kpilot or Jpilot.
On the dot;).
And the few times I needed a helping hand both Mandrake and Caldera did their best without sending me through the hoops of four levels of interrogation before support - MS style
Oh, I dunno, I've found Microsoft to be the best support company (in my own experience). But then, I deal mostly with developer support where they ship you like service pack cds by courier to your door:). I've heard phone support is pretty crappy, but web based support is good. I've always had personal responses from my emails to Microsoft.
I think a lot of what the guy is saying hovers around the 'correct' mark, but it depends so much on your personal needs. A lot of the reason why everyone uses Office is because there's a huge 3rd party market for plugins and applications based on Office. I mean, you can write a (small) accouting system using Excel and macros alone, and heaps of people use Excel for exactly that. Unix is damn good for shell scripting, but Windows is damn good for business/producvitiy app scripting and integration. Want to reuse IE in your word document to render VML drawings, with vector data coming from an Access database? No problem. COM. Want to play an MPEG video in your power point app using Windows Media Player? No problem. COM. Want to add your power point presentation into a word document, and also display an excel sheet inside your powerpoint presentation? No problem. COM.
etc. KOffice/KDE is making huge strides towards this, but still has a way to go.
If all you need to do is to type up letters, then spending money of Office is stoopid. But just don't think that that's all Office does.
There are two problems with this post. The first problem is that the HREF tag is incorrect--the closing is not formed correctly so the link doesn't work. The second problem is that the bitmap doesn't correctly identify this post as a joke.
This guy is a typical user? You're joking, right?
He indicates that he's presently using three different distributions of Linux, and has recompiled (at least one of them) 3 times. He has a home network, with a full-time Internet connection. He "naturally" chose KDE over Gnome, and prefers vi to emacs.
He's a "typical" user. Right.
I don't like to see "end luser" comments, because those end users are the people who pay us. (If half of my clients had half a clue, I'd be looking for a real job....) But to suggest that this guy is anything like a "typical" end user is too much--way too much.
The "typical" user turns off his computer, but leaves the monitor on--and thinks he's saving energy. Or he turns the monitor off, but leaves the computer on, thinking the whole thing is off. The typical user carefully types his password on his notebook when he boots it up on the airplane--otherwise that heavy-duty security won't let him into his files. The typical user hopes that someday the computer support geeks will stop giggling about the time he demanded immediate onsite response, and the "critical problem" turned out to be that the monitor was unplugged.
All joking aside, how typical is this guy? Would any of us pass this article along to "typical" users at an employer's, or at client's? How many typical users that we know would be able to read through the first paragraph and understand what it means? If this is any realistic notion of a "typical" user, ESR (et al)'s dream of "taking over the world" is a joke--because the vast majority of the world simply can't read that first paragraph.
When Windows 95 was being reviewed one of the Microsoft project leaders defined a very simple metric: "can my mother use this?" You can prate all you want about the stability and reliability of *nix or *BSD--but until all of our mothers are chatting on Linux boxen there simply isn't going to be a place in the desktop market for Linux (et al). My (67-year-old) mother is happily using Windows 95. She uses CompuServe for email, and has yet to explore the Web--she thinks it would be more complication than she has time to put up with. Would I expect Mom to recompile Mandrake 6.0 3 times to deal with "Level 5 problems"?
Slashdot Mirror
nm is a suite of programs, each of which does one thing well. There's comp to compose mail. It calls your favorite editor and then hands the message off to send, which sends it. When you receive mail, you call inc to move the messages from the spool file to mh's mail directory, where each message is one file. Inc will show you a list of new messages. You can get a list of all your messages with scan. Use show to read a message, repl to reply to one, forw to forward. These can take a message number as an argument. All these are normal shell commands that you can type interactively or put in a script. Since each message is a file, you can also use normal file handling commands like mv and cp to organise your mail and you can script those operations as well. Configuration is distributed. If you don't like how mh sends your mail, you configure send; nothing else. For someone who prefers the UNIX way, mh is heaven.
I still prefer a really good integrated client to mh, though. It's just that there aren't any really good ones for Linux. (Yes, I'm actually saying that Outlook Express is better than any mail client available for Linux. Sue me. (Yes, I've used mutt)
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Computers are supposed to be appliances
Actually, computers are suppose to be tools. For some tasks and for some people, an appliance is what is necessary. For other people and for other applications, a highly configurable and option rich environment is needed.
All my grandmother's friends have email. She however freaks out when her flashlight runs out of batteries and still uses an electric typewriter. She will never be comfortable using even a Windows OS. She needs an internet appliance so she can communicate via email with her family and friends all over the world, with as seamless an interface as a telephone or toaster.
I develop software and do scientific research. UN*X systems have the development environment tightly coupled to the whole concept of the UN*X operating system. It makes software development easy and fast. I find it much easier to write my code in Emacs and invoke gcc & gdb from bash or a Makefile than I did coding in Visual C++ (for you this might not be true). To analyze the large amount of scientific data that I have to, nothing is easier than sort, cut, tr, perl, etc.
I'm sort of rambling here, but my point is that there is no one interface that is suited to all people and all situations. I find the Mac easy to get started on, but for me it doesn't scale up as well as UN*X - once I get to the intermediate/expert level of use I am more efficient on UNIX.
What I would like to see in UNIX apps is a complete decoupling of interface and implementation, with GUIs built using something like XUL. Then you could create a 'novice' UI that exposed many of the common tools and made liberal use of the mouse. This could be used to transition users into a more advanced UI that emphasized shortcut keys and scripting. This would require all developers to expose the functionality of their program in a standard way. Maybe this could automatically be integrated into one of the standard GUI toolkits so that there doesn't have to be any extra work done by developers?
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
He ain't no suit, for whatever that means. Though I suppose the definition and connotations of the word "suit" can vary somewhat, it certainly involves more than just having the computing IQ of an Ape (which this guy certainly doesn't have). Beyond his relative adeptness with computers, there are some other non-suit like qualities to him. For example, he dropped Powerpoint for HTML and a browser? Think about what this says about this guy. He is willing to diverge from the rest of the herd (powerpoint) -- definetly not a "suit" like quality. In addition, he has the time (real or percieved) to not only learn HTML sufficiently, but also to use it instead of Powerpoint. While I hardly think Powerpoint is a particularly good product, it is certainly faster for your quicky presentation. Again, if you're going to generalize, "suits" value time; a "suit" would not waste time in HTML. More time/value points: He uses vi (while it's a great text editor for those who have the time to learn it, it ain't a suit tool). He doesn't seem to mind, or atleast makes no mention of, having to track down and download all of these various programs (e.g., vmware, IglooFTP, Klynx, etc.), nor the compilitation/installation processes. He is obviously familiar with slashdot, enough to refer to it as "/.". I could go on, but you get the point...
While my intent is not to deride him or the person who posted, lets be real here. There is little value to his article. He doesn't speak for the financial community in general or "suits". Nor does he attest to Joe Schmoe's view of Linux. What he might have been able to do, he did not do. He did not provide slashdot with a window into how his comrades, the "suits", would or have (not?) approached Linux. Instead, we got a not particularly well written commentary of an individual with a professional job outside of computing (perhaps not your typical slashdotter), yet he has time to burn, and nothing to lose. The mere fact that he finds Linux acceptable doesn't mean most will. We (you) can't pat ourselves on the back for doing a great job. Being both a student of finance (not a suit) and working in and around IT and technology, I can tell you that Linux/Open Source has miles and miles to go.
The only thing a reasonable person could draw from this, is in regards to professional (e.g., Doctor, Lawyer, Financial people, etc.) people's possible use of applications--there are some applications out there that they can theoretically use (not true even 2 years ago)--he found them sufficient. Though having tried using most of them extensively, I disagree with much of it.
WinXX is good for someone who wants to use a computer as an appliance, while Linux is great for someone who wants to learn what makes a computer tick, and how to use it effectively.
If that's the case, then I'm afraid that Linux will never be popular - nor should it! Computers are supposed to be appliances; the fact of the matter is that most people want to get stuff done, not to go diving into technical swamps. (There's a word for those who do want to go diving into technical swamps: it's "geek". I'm one of those myself, and there's nothing wrong with being one, but suggesting that everyone should be like that is preposterous.) If you ask me (and I know you didn't), it's precisely the fact that our community insists on sticking with the PC-era mentality of "more power^H^H^H^H^Hwork to the user" - and it shows in everything, from hardware to programming languages to user interfaces - that is hindering the arrival of the age of ubiquitous computing. We should learn from Microsoft's attempts, however failed, to make a computer into a thing you can use like an appliance, not shun them.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
On the whole, I do agree with your post- but I would like to take an exception to this particular part of it. If the spell checker is all that you care about, hell, even kEdit and gEdit can use the (default in most linux distros) ispell program, and they do. Does notepad or wordpad include a spellchecker? I didn't think so.
But on the whole, as I said above- you are mostly right. We don't need to keep patting ourselves on the back, we need to bring things up to par- and Outlook is a damn good example, as is IE. Mozilla's not there yet. It's getting closer every day (I'm downloading the latest build as we speak) and I think that it's great, but we don't have a great web browser yet. Nor do we have a great mail client. We still lack the one thing that Microsoft can claim over us- unification and easy drop-in replacements of parts. KDE is doing great things in regard to this- KParts is a great stride forward in this field (as also noted in another post) but it's not perfect and it's not even public yet.
Just give us time...
On the other hand, it doesn't have that stupid dancing paper clip.
The thought of using TeX in the year 2000 leaves me completely cold. That's the last gasp of the programmer-oriented word processors. The line that began with Runoff and went through nroff, troff, and ditroff ends with TeX. And it's time for it to end. Macros are just the wrong tool for that job. (Whatever happened to math formatting for HTML, anyway? There was a working group on that, but it seems to have been lost somewhere along the way, probably because everybody's off doing electronic commerce.)
MS dominates because it got their first. Period.
Even if Linux becomes just as easy to use as Win, that's not easy enough. Why? Because the easiest system to use is the one you already know how to use.
What will make Linux dominate? In the short run, nothing. Open Source tends less to innovate, and more to emulate. So when the OS becomes a commodity product with little room for innovation, the Linux price point (0) will then drive people to Linux. This is already starting to happen.
Of course, when the OS is totally commoditized people will care as much about which OS they use as they do now about what kinds of circuits are in their TV sets. Not even geeks will care by then. Commodity products are boring. Hopefully something new and exciting will come along to replace the OS as something for geeks to work on. It will be nice too if that something is difficult to emulate so that the true innovators can have time to make money on it before people copy it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe the writer wears suits, but he's hardly a typical non-tech user. As soon as he talks about compiling and vi v. emacs, he's disqualified.
Still a really interesting write-up, though. Just don't point to this as proof that your PHB could survive in a Linux world yet.
Yes! I love it when I see someone get a system shipped to their door with a 19" monitor and the screen settings are exactly that, 640x480x256.
The Start button is roughly the size of a house on a 19" monitor in that resolution. I don't switch them to 800x600 or 1024x768 because it's likely a better resolution for them with that monitor, I switch them because I swear that once the huge start button tried to kill me.
One day, before Netscape.com was a portal, I was asked by a cousin what search engine I used, "Yahoo or Netscape."
It was difficult helping him to understand the difference.
Ignore Alien Orders
While I respect the opinions of the author of this article, I have to say that in my experience the apps for Linux just aren't up to the same caliber as those available for Windows yet. I mean, can you show me a mail client as powerful and easy to use as Outlook Express? How about a word processor with the feature set of Word (and I know a lot of /. readers think of a spell checker as "bloatware", but some of us like having a lot of options we can configure).
What's more irritating about articles such as this one is that they don't really serve a productive purpose to us as a community of developers. It glosses over the failings of Linux, and this is a Bad Thing(tm). Remember the "Jihad Tux" icon on Suck back a couple of months ago? It was funny, but it was a bad omen as well.
I suppose this article in particular is just serving as a final straw to me. Lately I've noticed a really disturbing trend towards self-congratulation in the OSS movement, and especially on this particular discussion board. Criticism of Linux is less and less welcome while this sort of wanking is on the upswing.
Look, sitting around patting ourselves on the back while ignoring the deficiancies in our software is the exact same behavior that we love to flame companies like Microsoft for. It feels good to convince ourselves that Linux is finally "there" and that anyone who can't use it is just an idiot. It feels good to think that even a "suit" can use it now. It feels good, but it's not true -- not yet.
When I first installed Slackware (waaay back when), it was nearly impossible to deal with as a newbie with no previous UNIX experience. Linux has come a very long way; I won't dispute that. It's not a replacement for Windows yet, however, and we as a development community aren't doing ourselves any favors by pretending (as an example, not a flame) that the GIMP can hold a candle to Photoshop yet.
I am conviced that the OSS development paradigm will lead to a better product that any closed paradigm. I am also convinced, however, that if the community loses their focus that the OSS paradigm breaks down. Flaming the "non-believers", trolling about "suits", preaching to the choir and pretending that flaws don't exist are all symptoms of this loss of focus.
Now, I'm not trying to discourage discussion. I'm not trying to sell short the efforts of the people developing Linux and various OSS apps. I'm not trying to suggest that the whole community is one way or the other, nor am I forgetting that Linux kicks ass in particular areas. I'm not saying that the people who developed the OSS paradigm or who work on the software don't deserve a vast amount of credit.
What I want to point out is that self-congradulation (which is how I view this article) is inherantly dangerous to the future of the paradigm from a Big Picture point of view. It should be recognized as such, and should be avoided whenever possible.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
About time... what Linux needs to truly take off is support from the average desktop user, not just the techies and power users. I just hope we see more favorable reviews from "average" people and that these reviews encourage other "average" users to run Linux on their PC. It's important to recognize that Linux isn't just a server OS, it can work well as an office platform too.
No, it's not. Whatever you do folks, don't get complacent. Linux is NOT ready for the average user yet.
Roadmap:
1. Forget skins. They're bullshit. Concentrate on UI design - flash can come later.
2. Make your UI consistent across apps. Someone needs to come up with a "Linux UI style guide" - preferably have some kind of library that does standard keybindings and mouse handling - eg. for context menus. These things vary so wildly between apps right now (heck, even cut & paste varies wildly between apps right now) that it makes using the computer a jarring experience.
3. Design GUI apps for the GUI - that is, don't think in terms of command-line apps. Too many GUI apps (heck, look at KDE & the basic bits you get with Corel Linux) look and feel like someone decided to switch to a command-line app at the last moment. Developers - try coding the GUI first, and then work on the internals - not the other way around. The GUI should NOT be tacked on at the end.
4. Do usability tests on your granny. If she can't get it (and if she can, she musn't be related to Ada Lovelace), then you're doing it wrong. Take notes, and go back to the drawing board.
5. Try running Linux without editing a text file for configuration / using the keyboard for anything except data entry. If you can't, it's not ready yet.
6. Provide:
a. Duhhhh-level install. That is - you insert the disk, you hit OK, it does it.
b. User interviews (find out their needs and provide them a list of options based on them) for the medium level install.
c. Techy level install - that is, you let them customize to the nth degree.
d. Provide a,b,c in all your apps.
7. Help should be context sensitive, and never more than a STANDARD KEYBOARD SHORTCUT away.
8. If it looks like an idiot could use your app, you've not made it easy enough. You've designed it for a pretty smart idiot.
Simon
[... wonders if anyone would be willing to take me on as Linux GUI Czar.. hmmmm... have to look into that]
Coming soon - pyrogyra
You know your market perspective is skewed when...
Roblimo calls a guy with a three computers at home running over a lan he installed himself, and who waxes nostalgic for his old HTML editor a "typical desktop user".
Wake up people! The typical desktop user doesn't understand the difference between "netscape" and their operating system! If you unplug their keyboards in the night they will call tech support in the morning! They run their monitors in 640x480x256 because they don't realize there are any other settings!
If you're planning on marketing Linux to the masses, at least get the character sketch straight. This guy is at least what you could call a "power user". Hell, I'm sure some of the people on this board who call themselves "geeks" couldn't do have of what he's apparently done.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
First of all, good for him, it'll no doubt save him money in someway...but I have a few grumbles with what he says anyway...
:P
;).
:). I've heard phone support is pretty crappy, but web based support is good. I've always had personal responses from my emails to Microsoft.
Have to admit that I was inclined to do my best to end my relationship with MS (costly stuff that, forty percent plus margin kind of makes me uneasy in the have-I-been-taken-for-a-ride department)
Where does he get 40% from? How does he know how much Microsoft spends in R&D?
Word can easily be replaced by Wordperfect, Staroffice or Abiword. Quite satisfactory, and MSWord files are no problem.
Yeah, if all you use words for is just typing up stuff, Word has MANY features, most people only use 5% of the features, but not everyone uses the same 5%. In many areas, Staroffice and Wordperfect fail (good antialiased fonts is a BIG area). Table support, integration (eg. embedd other documents like excel/pdf/ etc are lacking. He probably does use these, but then, if all he needs is 'abiword', then maybe he would be just as happy with a simple editor like notepad or wordpad.
Somebody has a question that you are about to answer in slide 14. I 'click' forward to 14 and then back again. (try that in Powerpoint).
Uh, maybe he should look at PowerPoint again. Linus likes PowerPoint right?
This is where I see a glaring gap among the Linux applications. Netscape is useful (but unstable), best solution I guess is having a Palm Pilot in conjunction with Kpilot or Jpilot.
On the dot
And the few times I needed a helping hand both Mandrake and Caldera did their best without sending me through the hoops of four levels of interrogation before support - MS style
Oh, I dunno, I've found Microsoft to be the best support company (in my own experience). But then, I deal mostly with developer support where they ship you like service pack cds by courier to your door
I think a lot of what the guy is saying hovers around the 'correct' mark, but it depends so much on your personal needs. A lot of the reason why everyone uses Office is because there's a huge 3rd party market for plugins and applications based on Office. I mean, you can write a (small) accouting system using Excel and macros alone, and heaps of people use Excel for exactly that. Unix is damn good for shell scripting, but Windows is damn good for business/producvitiy app scripting and integration. Want to reuse IE in your word document to render VML drawings, with vector data coming from an Access database? No problem. COM. Want to play an MPEG video in your power point app using Windows Media Player? No problem. COM. Want to add your power point presentation into a word document, and also display an excel sheet inside your powerpoint presentation? No problem. COM.
etc. KOffice/KDE is making huge strides towards this, but still has a way to go.
If all you need to do is to type up letters, then spending money of Office is stoopid. But just don't think that that's all Office does.
There are two problems with this post. The first problem is that the HREF tag is incorrect--the closing is not formed correctly so the link doesn't work. The second problem is that the bitmap doesn't correctly identify this post as a joke.
This guy is a typical user? You're joking, right?
He indicates that he's presently using three different distributions of Linux, and has recompiled (at least one of them) 3 times. He has a home network, with a full-time Internet connection. He "naturally" chose KDE over Gnome, and prefers vi to emacs.
He's a "typical" user. Right.
I don't like to see "end luser" comments, because those end users are the people who pay us. (If half of my clients had half a clue, I'd be looking for a real job....) But to suggest that this guy is anything like a "typical" end user is too much--way too much.
The "typical" user turns off his computer, but leaves the monitor on--and thinks he's saving energy. Or he turns the monitor off, but leaves the computer on, thinking the whole thing is off. The typical user carefully types his password on his notebook when he boots it up on the airplane--otherwise that heavy-duty security won't let him into his files. The typical user hopes that someday the computer support geeks will stop giggling about the time he demanded immediate onsite response, and the "critical problem" turned out to be that the monitor was unplugged.
All joking aside, how typical is this guy? Would any of us pass this article along to "typical" users at an employer's, or at client's? How many typical users that we know would be able to read through the first paragraph and understand what it means? If this is any realistic notion of a "typical" user, ESR (et al)'s dream of "taking over the world" is a joke--because the vast majority of the world simply can't read that first paragraph.
When Windows 95 was being reviewed one of the Microsoft project leaders defined a very simple metric: "can my mother use this?" You can prate all you want about the stability and reliability of *nix or *BSD--but until all of our mothers are chatting on Linux boxen there simply isn't going to be a place in the desktop market for Linux (et al). My (67-year-old) mother is happily using Windows 95. She uses CompuServe for email, and has yet to explore the Web--she thinks it would be more complication than she has time to put up with. Would I expect Mom to recompile Mandrake 6.0 3 times to deal with "Level 5 problems"?
You must be kidding....