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Making Linux Look Harder Than It Is
drkich writes: "According to an article on The Register (by our very own roblimo).
Many 'gurus' teaching new users about Linux make it look harder than it needs to be, and apparently fail to explain that yes, you can make PowerPoint-style presentations in Linux, you can view Web Pages that use Flash animation and other "glitz" features, and that you can manage all your files though simple "point, click, drag and drop" visual interfaces. Could the biggest problem with Linux usability be that most of the people teaching newbies to use Linux are too smart and know too much?"
In the basic O'Rielly book on Linux, it makes a point that most textbooks on Linux go into detail about such topics as how to use the ed command and other things that most people never use.
There are some conceptual points about Linux that even a newbie needs to know...such as permission and the file tree, but there is a lot of stuff that you really can just open it up and click around on stuff.
I think the problem is that a lot of Unix work in general has been going on in academia, and so that a lot of books are written with a lot of traditional complicated busywork in them. Students now are learning about the vi editor for the same reason that students for a long time had to learn Latin, because it is a tradition.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
As a *nix person who has had to pick up Winders skills, I will be the first to admit that all the Windows training I have taken has had the tone "This isn't really that hard."
/mnt/disk
In contrast, I went to a LUG meeting where a workshop was held for Newbies and I distinctly remember someone saying "Look, mounting a share with NFS is hard." You would never hear this at a Windows workshop.
Take my example:
C:\net use p: \\foo\bar
versus:
hookado@monkeyfudge ~$ mount -t nfs gorilla:/export
Why is one "easier" than the other? Is it just cultural?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Most of the people who know Linux well assume that everyone else can learn Linux just as easily as them. I think that's about all that needs to be said because that is all I have ever seen.
These are some of the major points I've seen guru's forget about "average" computer users.
1. Average computer users are afraid they will break their computer. Example: Many think if they mess up setting up a drive in the BIOS, the drive will physically break.
2. Average computers users need to get their information visualy. Just look at all the Visual MS products. People don't know where to look for information so they need all the info laid out in front of them. They need menus and GUI's that can show them all the options they have to use. They don't have the time or ability to hunt out where the information is they need.
3. Average computer users have a very short time span for learning something on a computer. A computer is just another utiliy they need to use. They don't learn how it works for the same reason they don't learn how their TV, VCR, microwave, refrigerator, cellphone, etc works, they don't have the time. They expect someone else to do all the detailed work for them.
4. It takes logic to understand a computer, and most people just can't grasp the concept of logical thinking. "The computer shouldn't do that when I click there!" "Why?" "Because.. that's a stupid thing to do!"
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Well, I'm not going to say I'm humble, but I will say that I already have everyone I'm teaching linux too impressed enough where I don't need to show off. ;)
Anyway, I actually have found myself having problems helping people with linux because I really can't see the problem from their point of view. It's hard for me to recognize what they will or won't know, and I tend to make assumptions, completely unintentionaly, about their knowledge base such that I end up just confusing them.
It also doesn't help that I have never wanted my Linux box to be "easy to use" (as defined by those who say Linux needs to be more so), and thus have a hard time trying to make it so for others.
All in all, I'm just not that great a teacher, but I do think that the difference in technical knowledge is part of the problem.
Not that roblimo isn't still an ass.
The enemies of Democracy are
You're right, of course.
But I do think that there are apps that are meant to be clones. Like StarOffice. The first time I used it, I felt like I was using office -- all the way to the exact menus and buttons you had to click to turn off auto formatting. I was amazed, until I realized that I hated StarOffice for all the same reasons I hate Office.
But still this doesn't matter. Because no one is going to try out StarOffice to find out that it's exactly like MS Office, simply because it -isn't- MS Office and that's scary.
Damnit.
The enemies of Democracy are
Since MS has a forced (or strongly persuasive) upgrade cycle is also an investment that should not be underrated. As StarOffice gets better and better (and it seems to be) and remains free... the margin narrows.
A person ( or a corporation) has to make the tradeoff between 3 factors while switching: features, familiarity, and cost. Right now, MSoffice blows SOffice5.2 out of the water on features and familiarity, but loses on cost. But if the features are pretty similar, then the only tradeoff is between cost and familiarity. IF the cost of upgrading (or purchasing new machines) with Windows and MSOffice is greater or equal to the retraining costs for Linux and StarOffice, then people will start to switch.
It's happening already as the Linux GUI gets easier to use, and more feature-rich and user friendly.
501 Not Implemented
Another field would be politics, I think. When I started getting involved with it and paying more attention to how politics effected the daily lives of myself and everyone around me, I found that my passion for it would sort of rub off on others. I remember ranting on one small internet forum that I frequently visited, and more often than not my topic was politics. Eventually more and more of the regulars there started caring about the things I cared about. In fact, when the 2000 election came around a good majority of them were set on voting (for Nader) and making sure their friends and family got out to vote as well. In contrast, these days I find that most peoples' eyes just start to glaze over when I'm talking about politics. My guess is that I stopped relating an issue to how it would affect a person's daily routine. I would just start blabbing about Carnivore, or the DMCA, and expect someone to understand how it would impact them.
But anyway, to get on topic, given the impending exinction of Win98 I hope somehow to learn to use Linux. There's two reasons I haven't done it already...
1. I know a lot more about politics than I do about computers.
2. I don't know if Linux is, as yet, fully compatible with my gaming addiction.
But I know for certian that I'd rather learn Linux or buy a Mac than give any of my money to Microsoft.
Absolutely. Mac OS X is an example of this. Nontechnical users get pretty icons to click in the Dock, and geeks get a fully functional Unix under the hood.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
Might be, might not. Perhaps someone is just looking to see what kind of response they would get.
Maybe for some, reading Slashdot then running Linux takes a long time.
Could also be that they got an account early on, forgot about Slash (what a sin!) then decided to post.
Either way I found it interesting that most of the answers were sane.
Blogging because I can...
"In many ways they sort of look at the computer as something that an average person shouldn't really touch unless they know what they are doing"
No kidding... I have a computer science degree, and have been using computers forever. But I can't keep up with everything that is out there. For instance, I mentioned on slashdot that I only had enough time to get basic security on my linux box, and everyone screamed that I should take my box off the net. My box is secure enough to not have been hacked in over a year, but what about these newbies? How are they going to secure an OS, when they barely understand the concept of logging in?
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Using Linux for most tasks is easy now.
/etc directory: the simple stuff is GUIfied now, but the extent of that depends on your distribution, and doing anything complicated requires reading man pages and figuring out config file formats.
Installing most distributions (I consider Debian an exception) is easy now.
Administering a Linux box is still not easy.
As an example, to get the pictures off my digital camera:
The Red Hat upgrade (somewhere around 7.0, I think) installed my USB drivers automatically.
Easy to install, check.
When I have new pictures, "mv camera/* pictures/new" (in my home directory) transfers them to my hard drive.
Easy to use, check.
Setting the "camera" directory up required editing two of my automount config files and making a symlink to the mount point.
Easy to administer? No.
Well, okay, this was easy to do, but way too difficult for someone uninterested in computers to learn to do. Similarly with most tasks that require you to touch the
Ironically, this makes Linux a great choice for office environments where users aren't expected to administer their own systems in the first place, but other considerations (say a little prayer for OpenOffice and KOffice tonight) are the limiting factor there.