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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?"
I'd say yes. When I first started out, there was a lot of hand waving and "this is too complicated for you." Then I looked at it linuxdoc.org and said, "this is easy."
It'd be a risk, though...because I don't know if the average person is ready for Linux.
But people are going to be scared until they see Linux boxes for sale at CompUSA and Sears.
It might not be too smart as much as too arrogant...
I just installed red hat 7.2 and i'm having difficulty learning linux. I have read lots of stuff but maybe I'm not reading the right things. My samba says "unknown error... hmm..." when i try to access my windows machines, and I have no idea how to install programs.... I think the HOWTO's that i read are too complicated. They always mention things that I have no idea how to do. I barely know DOS so I don't know many commands for the shell. LINUX is difficult.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." -Groucho Marx
My theory is that a lot of the people teaching Linux classes learned the OS before it had a good GUI. Now they think they need to pass all their knowledge on to the students, regardless of how much the students will use it.
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?
I hardly think it's because they know too much. It's more that they want to show themselves as sauve and intelligent infront of those they're instructing. I think you'll find all the people who deserve the right to brag are generally much more humble because they honestly have nothing to prove.
The biggest obstable to widespread Linux adoption is not its actual difficulty to use, but perception that it's for geeks only. An idiot proof installer would be good, but evangelests and PR that speaks to average users is perhaps the single most important thing standing in the way of more pervasive acceptance.
I understand how the general attitude that "you've got to know how to use a computer to use a computer" gets bred. I used to work 1-800-support. But that won't cut it on the public image tip.
GNU/Linux needs salespeople. Jeez, I can't believe I just wrote that, but it's true. The barriers are 90% cultural at this point....
Howard Dean for president
Don't forget that for people who don't understand how computing tools work, Unix kinda doesn't make much sense regardless of how it's taught. Pipes and filters really only make sense when you're filtering down large lists of information... and this kind of information pretty much only happens in system administrative contexts.
His eyes get generally glazed over when I do something like:
$> rpm -e `rpm -qa | grep -i ^xf`
...which actually came up today in reinstalling X. And I've done quite a few nastier things.
I think that it would do Linux users--especially Linux evangelists--well to learn our own GUI tools so that when our non-geek friends ask us for help we can give them something that's meaningful to them.
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.
I can only agree with it.
Part of the problem is that most "guru's" know how to use a commandline, but not how to use a GUI.
When I install software, I use the commandline, not Kpackage, Gnorpm or Rpmdrake.
So when someone asks me how to use such a program, he mostly knows more about it then I do, I just know more about the underlying architecture.
Though I do think the users are coming along.
Recently I heard about people who were using Linux, because they liked Tux, and were collecting pictures of him. Sure.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Biggest problem with Linux usability is a lack of applications to use with it.
WAAAAIT! Hold off on that flame-thrower!
I'm talking serious productivity applications.
There is no Linux equivalent to MSWord. Yes, yes, yes: I *know* there is StarOffice and others. But they aren't MSWord.
There is no Linux equivalent to AccPac. Yes, yes, yes: I *know* there are other accounting packages. But AccPac is the defacto standard.
There is no Linux equivalent to Photoshop. Yes, yes, yes: I *know* there's Gimp. But it's not Photoshop.
WAIT! Hold off on that flame-thrower!
I know it's unreasonable to expect Linux apps to be identical in functionality -- and misfunctionality! -- and appearance to the big-time, deeply-entrenched "standards."
But that's not the point. The point is: the problem with Linux usability is that its lacks applications that are direct clones of the standards.
That's unreasonable, illogical, stupid, and every other abusive word you can toss at the idea...
...but it's the truth. The PHBs see it that way, and countless users who've spent years learning the ins and outs of the standard apps see it that way.
It takes years of invested time and experience to become at all proficient at any comprehensive productivity application. No one wants to throw that investment away, just to move to Linux.
And that is, I think, at the very core of it all, a usability problem. If it isn't exactly like the original, it is less usable for many folk.
And now you can flame. Ouch.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
You know, there was a kid who sat at my lunchtable and babbled incessantly about Linux and his "Linux box". I think he sat home all day and hacked it, which, in laymans terms, means he tried to break into his own system and failed. Sounds poor, if you ask me.
No, but really. Anyone who's tried to teach me the larger part of linux commands has taught me in "code form". In other words, they've tried to teach me how to do everything through the console, and what's worse, they try to add their own, new "terms" for them. A "Flood Ping" is suddenly a "Hurricane River Overflowing of Packets", and you casually ask them what EITHER of them are, and the kid tells you that he's talking about sending large amounts of binary data through his umbilical cord into an unsuspecting system. Right.
I think that schools should consider hiring IT professionals who can teach as well as do IT. It might open up a whole new market of jobs. Open Source software would be a great class, if anyone ever got around to TEACHING it.
Newbie - "How do I use my dial up modem in linux, using redhat 7.2?"
... you know, if you used Debian, this wouldn't be a problem...."
....
Expert - "First of all, you need to make sure ppp is compiled into your kernel, then recompile, RTFM."
Newbie - "Is there an easier way?"
Expert - "Yes, but first, lets's get you all the kernel patches, since you're using 2.4.9, which has some known VM problems under high loads, then, we'll need to gut your X server, then, you might as well recompile/build KDE, since the one in Red Hat sucks, which comes with GNOME, but I think it sucks, so I'll make sure that you think it sucks too
Newbie - "What's a Debian?"
... and so on and so forth
The main reason Windows seems so "usable" is because people already spent years learning it. And, pictures and graphics engage people (just like television), whether they actually help or not. Of course, people coming from Windows expect the same interface on Linux, just like UNIX users have tools like Cygwin on Windows. But there is little that's intrinsically intuitive about the way Windows handles files, applications, and all that.
I think there's a lot of truth to this, but not just with linux. It seems to be a phenomenon at all increasing levels of sophistication, in many different fields.
In my own example, I taught an advanced database course at Stanford, and how no trouble connecting with upper division CS majors and industry professionals in the course. Two quarters later, I taught "CS01i: Introduction to the Internet." I found myself at a loss sometimes trying to relate to the uninitiated Internet user. I had become detached.
It seems that the same thing is true of linux. We get ingrained in an OS/culture that requires a certain level of sophistication to succeed. Then (for better or for worse) we often become trapped in that paradigm.
I've found that with Linux education (and CS01i), that an old maxim holds true: "If I can tell my mom how to do it, and she can then successfully explain it to my dad, my job is done."
It may sound like an elementary test of fitness, but it works as a good filter for teaching the uninitiated.
(please note, this only works if your mom isn't a kernel contributor...):)
I started geeting into this stuff about 2 years ago, and I'm naturally a technical guy. The documentation currently has a terrible 80/20 problem: 80% of it is...
Most often, documentation is an afterthought to a coding project. This is not a good way to get novice users to get to use the software, because those writing the docs are too intimately involved with the project and usually burnt out to the max.
Howard Dean for president
I'm somewhat ashamed to say that it's often easy to forget that everyone hasn't been using Linux, vi, and command-line tools as I have. I do a lot of work with public school teachers and other "non-computer-literate" people, and while I do try to remember what it was like to start out, sometimes I forget that what I think is obvious, other people have just never had the chance to learn. In fact, I'm often shocked by the fact that many people have "grown up" with Windows or Mac and don't even know that a command prompt exists.
:-)
Still, while some people aren't good at explaining things in terms that a newbie can understand, others are. It's the same way with teachers of anything, though, so let's not lump this in with Linux/Unix/BSD* etc. I had many math teachers who made things sound so horribly complicated and uninteresting I just couldn't get it. Then I had one teach me enough Algebra/Trig to get an A in Calculus and 1st year Physics in about 3 hours. I remember thinking, "That's it? Why the hell didn't they say so???"
Partly, too, there is a prestige aspect to this. Sadly, some people's teaching style is all about showing off how wonderfully smart they are and showing how woefully stupid the student is. No, this isn't everyone, but I do seem to encounter a lot of people who feel that if you can't use vi, then you are just hopelessly dumb.
Maybe the gurus need to think more about what the goal is. Is the goal to make it so that other "ordinary" people can use Linux, or so that we can all be some kind of honored clique who, together, are just so much cooler than everyone else? Once the goal is declared, act accordingly: simple as that.
I, like a lot of others, learned how to use linux from the many many howto's and guides on the internet. I didn't have anyone to teach me, because no one i knew ran Linux. The only real help i got when starting was from a kind soul on IRC, who spent a few hours with me, to teach me the basics, and what packages to download for slackware 3.5.
But i find the bigest problem I have with trying to teach someone else how to use it, is the nice graphical user interfaces. A lot of people think of this as a great teaching tool, to make linux "look" like windows translates into the user being able to "use" linux but not "work" with linux. For example, my ex-girlfriend runs Mandrake 8.0 , and has been since early summer, but ask her something about linux and you can literally see the question marks floating above her head, she has no clue about it, she doesn't even know how to install an RPM (not that it's a bad thing).
I believe the only way that someone can really learn how to use linux, is to do it themselves, and only seek help if they are really stuck, that way, what they learn will stick with them, like anything else. My ex-girlfriend can call me up and say "hey, i want to install napster, how do i do it?" i could easily tell her to go to the gnapster website, download the file, open up the terminal, type "rpm -Uvh filename.rpm" but she will only remember that for 33 seconds it takes for her to type it, after that, it's gone, and she'll be calling me up again in a few more days asking how to install another program.
Note: If you go out with a girl, do not introduce her to Linux, because when you break up, she will still be calling you for months and months.
tourettes
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.
I have been using Linux routinely since like 1995 and so of course I've learned the hard way to do everything. Today, when I'm dealing with friends and colleagues who have a problem with Linux I start spouting off command lines and obscure file paths. The fact of the matter is that I have no idea how to do a lot of these things the easy way. When I tell them I can sense their dread.
As an excercise in trying to be more helpful I've been trying to learn the easy way to do things. I did an out-of-the-box install of Redhat 7.2, and I'm trying very hard not to touch the command line. As it turns out I can do an amazing amount of stuff without touching a command line. The stuff I do have to do is usually obscure power user stuff that normal humans don't have to mess with.
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He looked at me like I was from mars.
Then he said, "Don't you have explorer like in windows?"
I was stunned. Of course I did. I was running KDE for Crissakes. I never use it, so it just didn't occur to me. Then I showed him again, using konqueror for ftp, and file management. (He was impressed that you could use the same program to get files from other computers, and file management.) He did have to do command line cd recording, since I didn't have a gui, but he was ok with moving files to the right directory, and hitting up-arrow, enter.
When he was done, using almost all GUI tools, he came in and said something about Linux not being as tough as everyone said. If he hadn't hit me over the head with the obvious, though, he would have given up in frustration at the command line.
From the article:
.ppt documents to send to his boss, the clients, and to intoxicate us. PowerPoint-style just doesn't cut it.
:)
and apparently fail to explain that yes, you can make PowerPoint-style presentations in Linux,
The keyword here is "style". PowerPoint-style. My boss wants to create
you can view Web Pages that use Flash animation and other "glitz" features,
Ha! You're joking, right? All those sites "enhanced" for "best experience" with IE... maybe if you have Mozilla, Konqueror, Galleon, Opera and Netscape 6.2 and you them one-by-one, on each website!
and that you can manage all your files though simple "point, click, drag and drop" visual interfaces.
Well, no details about this in the article. Personally, I dislike the "graphical, point, click, drag and drop" interfaces - call me old-fashioned... I would use mc, but nothing more.
So... I use linux both at work and at home for 99% of the time; but it's not ready for my mom (or the other way around... hmmm...
Most casual users don't want all of this complexity - heck, to most the idea that they need to login to their home system seems absurd.
Linux was written by geeks, for geeks, and it shows. Most Linux users (myself included) would not give up the security and reliability of Linux for the sake of using something simpler.
And from a user design standpoint, the system fails - unlike windows, 3 different Linux boxes can have 3 different interfaces - each of which confusing to the new user.
Linux will be ready for the clueless masses when:
- Users can use the machine without logging in. (perhaps under some restrictive user account...)
- Users never have to manually configure hardware - the kernel detects the hardware and compiles and loads the requisite modules automatically
- There is one standard GUI interface across all distrubutions; even though GNOME and KDE are remarkably similar in function, the different appearance of windows will confuse the average user.
- The user can install or upgrade any system with a single click of the mouse.
Granted, this is an OS that not many geeks would like. However, there is a tradeoff involved - one can run a good, but obscure OS, or use a popular, but buggy and restrictive OS. If Linux is changed to suit the average desktop user, most technically astute users wouldn't use it; the old adage holds - make something that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will use it.The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
While linux can be difficult, if you know how to get support it can be a lot easier. Heck if you want some help on this one, e-mail me, I've beat my head against SAMBA a few times. But look at newsgroups, IRC, and websites and you can find gobs of useful info.
Remember Linux was designed for geeks by geeks and slowly it's working its way back to being usable by normal people. There's still the occasional chink in the armor though.
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It's not necessarily that you *can't* surf the web, make PowerPoint presentations, etc... obviously, you can. It's just that in many cases it seems pretty darned hard to get a system to a configuration where you can. Pre-installing stuff would probably help, because if a PowerPoint clone isn't installed, how is the average uninformed user going to figure out how to make a pretty presentation?
On a Windows box, if PowerPoint wasn't already preinstalled, then most people at least know that they need to get PowerPoint somehow... MS has at least done their job in getting mindshare. Love it or hate it, everybody's heard of Office.
But will they know what to use on Linux? Will they know what to download, whether they need KDE or GNOME or whatnot? And where to find it if they do? How to build an app from source, or how to use a package management system to install it? Probably not, and there is a lot to learn there...
On Linux, the software is there for the most part, and some of it finally doesn't suck (not just a Linux issue; most software sucks, although at least on Windows it's a form of suck people are familiar with). It's just a question of familiarity with it, I guess. Things in the Un*x world are sufficiently different from the norm that people just aren't comfortable with it yet. The only way to fix this is lots of exposure, which is tricky to get sometimes.
But to get back on topic, knowing a lot of geeks, my guess isn't that they're too smart to teach "normal" people but just tend to focus on what they deal with, which is the technical details which tend to intimidate everyone else. Geeks are tinkerers, "normal" people like to get things working and leave it that way. So when systems running Linux that have all this stuff, and work fine without any tinkering, become widely available the problem might go away somewhat.
Hi... I'm Larry... the shivering chipmunk... brrrrr!... I'm cold... I need a sweater...
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
I guess all the time I've been spending playing Civ III accounts for the last 1%. I remember when all I did on my computer was write and print letters, oh wait, that was a typewriter.
I see a lot of people intentionally going over the user's head and the vibe I get from the people who do that is "See how leet I am?" Those people need to grow up. Of course, when you get free support you often get what you pay for. If you get that attitude from someone paid to provide end user support, you should ask to speak to their manager immediately and complain.
Some of us can't help but go over the user's heads. I'll do it if I start focussing on the issue at hand but I've learned to pick up on that blank look and pause at that point and say "Ah, you don't care about that!"
Part of the problem too is that some of us are just unfamiliar with the tools. I haven't used StarOffice in ages and get better results with LaTeX. I'm a programmer so I never need to do Powerpoint presentations. I _like_ mucking around behind the scenes to see how things work, and I've become used to working behind the scenes as well.
The best way to approach someone you want to help is to view it as a learning experience for you both. You have to learn to put your personal preferences aside and look at what is best for the user you're working with. You can actually expand your horizons that way.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Now if only Roblimo could try to make the point without overgeneralizing. I know quite a few old time Unix/Linux users who happen to agree with Roblimo. But his writing sure doesn't seem to leave that option open. Lots of flame wars in our community get started in this fashion; too bad Roblimo hasn't learned how to avoid the problem.
Your point is well taken. But have you used StarOffice or the GIMP? These applications are about as close to a feature-for-feature clone of the original as they can legally be. As an experienced user of Office 95, I felt right at home in StarOffice 5.1 the first time I tried it. I can't wait to try v6. It took me a bit to learn to use the GIMP, but again the fit is very good. I didn't feel like I was in a foreign country.
I would go beyond your statement and say that what Linux really needs to be accepted is not clones, but *the real thing*. Which is unlikely to happen any time soon.
But you said we don't have any functional clones of the leading productivity apps. In the cases discussed above, I say we do.
It is too hard. Okay, maybe not too hard, but definitely a bit harder than Windows or Mac. After the wu-ftpd warning I decided to update all my RedHat 6.2 servers to the latest version. What do you know, the RPM doesn't work. Why? Because it wants RPM version 4. So I go to install RPM 4, it wants glibc. Surprise surprise, glibc wants RPM 4. And when I got my RedHat user friend of many years, he managed to get glibc installed using force or nodeps, but RPM version 4 and wu-ftpd also wanted xinetd, and for some reason we couldn't get it installed. So we had to resort to getting the latest 7.2 CDs and taking the server down for a while for an upgrade. Windows on the other hand, will tell you when updates are there. It installs them automagically and one reboot is all that's needed. I hear people claim that Windows Update can make it unbootable, I've never seen it happen.
Now, installing something like flash under Mozilla/Linux. I managed to install it fairly easily. But at our crowded computer lab at school, where the only box left was a linux one (we usually use mac), a student couldn't quite figure it out. He downloaded the file, and that was the end of his knowledge. He doesn't know how to use tar. And I'm sure he didn't know what root was or where mozilla was installed. I even had to start X for him. In Windows/IE it's auto install. You click "Yes" on a prompt and it's installed.
When I was first running Debian I wanted to get my sound card running to play some music. I went into modconf and I just couldn't get it installed, even though a pnpdump seemed to find it. So a friend suggested ALSA, which I tried to install. What do ya know, I need to do a kernel upgrade. It still doesn't work. In Windows its found, you put in the driver CD or floppy, don't have to worry about mounting, and a reboot. Maybe it's just my crappy hardware, or I'm just stupid, but with 6 billion people on this planet, I'm sure more than one person has the same problem as I do. The worst part is I got smart people with their degrees to try and help me out, who have been using linux for years. Like the sysadmin for our school district, someone else who just got their CS degree and is a debian package maintainer, someone who is in college learning the kernel. They couldn't get it installed as fast I could, someone who has taken zero (0) college courses in Windows.
I know many people who are very smart, yet I cringe when I hear them try to explain things to non-experts in the field. It is not that they aren't trying, just that they lack the ability to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn't have their level of knowledge.
The real problem is the users themselves who are migrating from another operating system (typically an MS OS, although I'm sure this would apply to any other). While taking a Human Computer Interaction course not very long ago (early this year), the project we chose was to create a simple interface for the Linux lab, for new users.
Now, most users are familiar with buttons, right? Everyone who has used a modern GUI has seen and used and is familiar with buttons. So, we made a little app in QT 2.x that would have a screen with a few rows of labelled buttons. There would be categories (office apps, math and science apps, development apps, etc.), and the user could select a category and click the button of the app they wanted. You don't really get any easier than this.
The results were disturbing. Our team (made of mostly windows users) had little problem, since they had seen it in development. But almost no one else could use it! We tested on a decent number of people in the NT lab (since this was our target audience), gave them a few simple tasks (like "start a word processor"), and only a very small percentage could complete these tasks. They just couldn't handle something different.
This is the problem I see with making it "OK to be ignorant (about computers)". People can't really use a computer at all, they can only repeat a set of rote tasks to do what they want.
Using a computer isn't difficult. Understanding what is happening isn't difficult. Which OS you use, whether you have a GUI or a command line, is irrelevant. Most of the problem people have with "Linux is Difficult" stems from the fact that they only know a series of rote tasks on one platform, and these rote tasks don't work on Linux. (Even if they do, there is mental confusion simply because it isn't the platform they're used to... we tried this with GNOME and KDE as well, which are quite similar to what people here do, which is use the Start menu.) I have set up a Linux computer for my mom and sister, both of whom had no previous computer experience, and they had absolutely zero trouble using it. My dad, however, who had a deal of Windows experience, just couldn't handle it. (In fact, I had my sister edit a LaTeX document one time, just for kicks, and she picked up on the formatting codes without any explanation. She didn't get them all right, but she came very close.)
People don't like to change. They don't like to learn and adapt. But they should, even though they will make a fuss. We know they should. We are experienced, and we do know better than they. This is not an elitist attitude: we want them to learn too. (An elitist attitude would be that they are inferior and cannot, or should not, learn.) Making it OK to be ignorant is merely harmful for them and ourselves, as well.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
If this is so, then the secret to Microsoft's success with usable operating systems must be that Microsoft people aren't very smart or knowledgable. That implies that Apple people must be totally ignorant morons. A description of Amiga poeple would be unprintable on this public forum.
I am a Linux newb and every time I go to #linux on Dalnet or similar IRC hangouts, I am confronted with "You aren't good enough to use Linux" elitists. They do nothing but hinder the spread of free OS's and apps.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
Example: "How do I use a USB hard drive under Linux?" Answer: "modprobe usb-mass storage, and use the mount command (man mount)"
And no one sees why there is a problem with such a statement.
Did he not believe you when you said, "Linux doesn't have any anti-virus software because Linux is not popular enough yet to be the target of viruses"? Or was it because you told him that Linux is intrinsically safe from viruses. That's not true, and here's why:
Right now, most people running Linux know better than to do everything as root. As such, there is a logical separation between what the user can do, and what can damage the system (in that, little of what the user can do can damage the system). Also, right now, there aren't any e-mail apps that are as featureful (bugful, if you must) as Outlook, in that they won't automatically handle whatever attachments you get (you have to download the attachment and then load it up with whatever tool you use to view it). This is a bane when it comes to executable code (already been fixed in Outlook for some time -- people just don't patch), but it's a boon for everything else. It exemplifies a fundamental design difference between the Windows experience and most Linux GUI experiences -- being that Windows is very much "Document-centric". You don't open Word and then open a document. You don't open Excel and then open a spreadsheet. You just double-click on the document or spreadsheet, and Word (or WordPerfect, or Star Office, even, if that's how you have things set up) fires up and loads that document for you. Now, to get off of that tangent and back on to the original point -- as Linux grows in the desktop market (if Linux grows in the desktop market), more and more and more people will be running as root 24/7/365. What that means is that suddenly, viruses are very much dangerous. Or, users start clamoring for an e-mail app that has the same power as Outlook, at which point we get mail virii spread through Linux. Oh, sure, it won't affect you, but what about that guy at work?
The point? Linux is not intrinisically safe from viruses. It's "safe enough" right now, through a combination of obscurity (it's not worth the time to write a virus for it, as it'll see little spread) and security (though a virus could still trash a user's $HOME just fine, even if it's not running as root). Expect to see that change if Linux does penetrate further into the desktop market (this will take some time -- the Macintosh is fairly free from virii mainly due to the obscurity argument, so Linux would have to substantially overtake Apple's marketshare to make itself a target).
Actually, Linux is not at all easy, it's documentation is atrocious when available, and most importantly, from the point of view of 99% of all people who use computers casually or in the office, it sucks compared to the competition. I realize this is slashdot, but you silly people need to realize once and for all that there is no, no, no compelling reason for anyone to install Linux unless they are an interested geek.
Yes, it really is that simple. Yes, that is why Linux will always be a niche OS.
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?"
I disagree. See there are three types of people that use computers. Those that thoroughly understand them. Those that use them for a little while and then "get it". And those that need to be taught.
I think the secret for a piece of software's popularity is to capture the second group. If linux was really as easy as it needs to be, it wouldn't need to be taught. Just like most people don't need someone to teach them how to use windows and most of its apps. It's the second group that make most users and eventually they drag along the third group.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I've seen people ask how to fix that. I'm sure there's an answer, too. But the fact is that it's fucking RIDICULOUS to have fonts that look like that in the year 2001.
If you give them some complicated instructions for fixing it, 95% of new users will just say "screw that" and either: 1) abandon Linux, thinking it sucks, or 2) keep using Linux with crummy fonts, and think it sucks, or 3) keep using Linux and waste a bunch of time fiddling until the fonts are right.
All three of these situations are horrible, yet it doesn't seem to bother any of the developers that RedHat still ships this way.
This type of situation is common and it infuriates me that not only are you assumed to be stupid if you can't make it work, but everyone is amazed that you'd complain about it in the first place, because fixing it is supposed some sign of your computing prowess.
All right, I just started using Linux last month, so I ought to be able to comment on this.
First thing I did was visit my University's CS Club, where they were offering to give a full version on CD (Which happened to be convienient at the time). They ask me what version I want. I only know of Red Hat and Mandrake (from friends). He says that I should get Mandrake, while I nod my head, not really caring at that point.
So I start the installation process, and begin to enter information. I choose advanced installation (naive me), and was amazed at all the options that I could choose to install of the CD. A reasonable selection, so I picked anything that looked interesting.
About an hour later after all the files had finally copied onto the hardrive (and the partitioning, etc.), I booted up. Created my account, and was immediately greeted with a happy first-time wizard. Except the text-boxes wouldn't work. Needless to say, after a few minutes of frustrations, I just skipped it. I have no idea how to get it back, but it would sure be useful, as I still haven't got my Internet working under Linux. Plus, the fact that there are so many control pannels (3 or so, I think), I never know where to find anything. In fact, once I have KDE running, I can barely tell the difference from Windows, and besides the fixed memory leak, I can hardly tell the difference.
So what's the benefit of switching right now? The only positives to using Linux are: it's not Microsoft, and the lack of a memory leak. Quite frankly, rebooting my computer every two days is worth the price for being able to use all my old stuff.
Personaly, I believe the best interface would be one that is so intuitive it would require no training at all, you would just 'know' what to do. And frankly, I think we said goodbye to such an interface when MAC OS X came along.
That said aside, I happen to use Linux a lot as a UNIX substitute, the terminals I work with get garbled all the time, and have broken mice. I think Linux is a wonderful replacement for UNIX!
There are at least 2 problems with calling these instructors 'smart.'
First, it is stupid to think that a user wants to understand the inner workings of the system. The user wants to unlock functionality. They want a simple, easy way to accomplish a task. They want to have to learn as little as possible in order to accomplish that end.
The second is related, and that is in implying that those who are users and see computers as tools used to accomplish a goal rather than an object of study in and of themselves are not smart. Frankly, this is the sort of sub-cultural elitism that stops most "geeks" from actually having meaningfull career advancement. Until you can think of mere users as equals you'll always be working for someone else.
most of the people teaching newbies to use Linux are too smart and know too much?"
Yeah, that's it.
Reminds me of those "tricky" job interview questions where you lie your ass off to make your weaknesses sound like or be derived from your sources of strength
Interviewer: What's your biggest weakness?
Me: I'm just too damned focused in everything I do!
I use Linux, so I don't understand why it's so hard for most Linux users to grasp the fact that the reason Linux is unpopular is that it lacks apps and that the user experience is wildly inconsistent and unruly.
Stop looking for answers that make you feel good about yourself, and start looking for solutions that will cure the real problem
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
People who post here are very smart. 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, and if they don't know how to administer their own box then that is their problem.
And for people who devote alot of their time to making the stuff work, I don't find this unreasonable. I mean, after all there is real effort and dedication involved is it too much to ask to read a man page?
What MS gets and the Linux commnity doesn't is that most people just want the damn thing (the computer) to do something useful. They want to turn it on and have it work. They don't give a crap about the technical merits of the OS or the effort behind it and for the mass market that is how it should be.
They don't want to mess with config files.
They don't want to care about what hardware is in their box.
They do want to be able to plug stuff in (USB) and have it just work.
They don't want to compile a program to install it.
They dont want to untar things
They don't want to deal with RPM (they want something called setup.exe).
they want easy access to the internet.
they want a browser that works.
and above all they certainly do not want to have to recompile a kernel to upgrade their OS.
MS has money and time to spend on these and other usability issues. Linux does not. Linux is not easy to use unless you are steeped in Unix. There is no way around it.
I think Linux should stop wasting cycles on a mass market that will never happen.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
While programs such as gnorpm, kpackage, and the Ximian setup tools are available, these tools are mostly either not easy enough to use, not widespread enough, or not stable enough for most users.
Secondly, the menu layout in both KDE and Gnome is incredibly confusing. Gnome puts the main menu on the screen in two different places by default! KDE has at least two address books. And how is anybody supposed to remember that Konqueror is a web browser or that GIMP is an image manipulation program? The naming of Linux programs is very hard to understand, and while these names might work in the Windows world as "brand names", new users facing hundreds of unfamiliar programs deserve something more helpful. Also, there isn't a standard menu system for GNOME and KDE (even regular GNOME and Ximian GNOME use two different menu systems!), so users installing programs may find that it never shows up in their menu at all!
I hope the GNOME and KDE usability projects result in some feedback for those two desktops, because, up until now, these projects seem to have been focused on building a development environment first and a usable desktop second. These priorities really need to be changed.
One thing that astonished me recently was when I installed a game, and realized that all I had to do was put the CD in, select an item from my 'K' menu, and it worked. That's the sort of usability Linux needs.
However there was a difficulty. To install the game, I still had to become root, futz with XFree86 to get the graphical install program to work, and to top it off it didn't even use my normal KDE widgets.
There's a lot of good stuff that Linux does, but even more that it doesn't, and to be viable for all those common folks who jobs don't involve writing perl all day, it has to.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Linux GUI interfaces are not useful to novices unless they are ubiquitous. For instance, the article describes modem config available in Mandrake 8.0, or Star Office. Unless these GUIs are installed, available, and identical on (practically) every system, like the MSWin Dialup Networking GUI or MS Word are, they aren't a very compelling alternative to Windows GUIs. I say this as a hacker with no love for MS, who has been using UNIX for 20+ years.
1) FWIW, I personally agree with those that feel Linux is difficult for the inexperienced user. There are many things that can't be done by happily pointing and clicking which is how the average consumer copes with computer issues.
2) Why do we want Linux mainstreamed. There appears to be a trade off between ease of use and power in OS design. Power users really can't be power users while running MacOS 9.x (no flamebait intended). Win 9x/ME leaves you reasonably lame. Win NT/2k gives you some tools and power (if you are Admin). Linux let's it all hang out (for Root anyway). The more power you have, the more damage you can do to your system if you don't know what the hell you are doing. A very reasonable, natural progression.
Therefore, I don't think any incarnation of Linux that the Slashdot community will embrace and use will be truly friendly to the mainstream.
Up until this point I've admin'ed servers and I am completely at a loss how to explain things to newbies. For example, one user asked how to access a floppy and I said "type 'mount /mnt/floppy.'" The response was a blank stare. Then I said "start a shell." No stare this time. They said "What's a shell?" After showing them how to start a shell, and type the command, etc., their eyes had glazed over and there was no way they could remember how to do it. For me, it was second nature.
My problem is that I don't know too much. Rather, I only know how to do things via the command line. I'm sure that KDE on RedHat 7.1 has some file-manager-like tool for accessing the floppy but I was at a loss to find it. Kfm wasn't it. Konqueror wasn't it.
At this point I realize I need to learn how to do things through a GUI. The problem is we have a variety of versions of RedHat, some running KDE and some running GNOME. Rather than devote a huge amount of time learning all the GUIs I think standardizing and simplfying is the way to go.
I have no point here besides the fact that I hate GUIs and may have the wrong job. I especially hate sysadmin GUIs. For example I have used the guis under Redhat, SuSE, Solaris, HP-UX, Digital Unix, and IRIX to add a user. They are all different and lame. I long for the days when adding a user with vipw, mkdir, and cp was the only way to go.
The truth is that UNIX users are users, too. Just like the Windows users we all flame and bitch about, UNIX users are still using their old tools because they resist change. Once they've learned a set of tools and procedures, they don't want to learn the new generation every year when the old way still works. No one does. All the same, new tools DO come out from time to time, and the time saved by learning them is frequently made up by the time you save using them.
USB (and PCI) plug-and-play *does* work. "setup.exe" is no easier or harder than double-clicking on an RPM (and quite a bit harder than apt-get) but anyhow, must of the software I've gotten for Linux on a CD comes with a "setup.sh" anyhow. I don't know whether you've tried Galeon lately, but it kicks the ass of every other browser I've ever used around the block. Everyone I've shown it to (plenty of non-Linux folks in that group) thinks so too. Kernel recompiles most certainly aren't necessary -- install the newer Debian kernel package and everything else is done for you automatically; I'm sure the other distributions have something like it.
Linux is ready for the mass market -- only thing is, the mass market isn't ready for Linux.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. I held off for 5 years on learning vi/vim, because it scared the shit out of me, but I bit the bullet recently and bought Steve Oualline's excellent Vi IMproved - Vim book on the subject.
The first seven chapters alone have speeded up my coding already - that's less than 20% of the way through!
Yes, it takes a huge leap to learn it but, unlike latin, I have yet to find a *nix machine that doesn't speak it's language :)
One day I aim to do all my coding in Vim. that may sound weird, but the time savings I will be able to make will be huge.
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
I see two reasons that Linux gurus don't point to the GUI tools: most of us haven't needed a tool for the given task since before the GUI tools were written. Once you configure something on your system, it tends to stay configured. If you ask someone for help getting your sound card working, and their sound card has worked since before there were tools, they probably won't know about the tools.
.environment, and you won't have that problem any more). But the stuff a guru can tell you will only make sense once you've run into a problem and have the shared context of wanting the system to do something better.
Also, many Linux gurus have entirely abandoned Windows. They don't know that a Linux feature is like a Windows feature that the user understands, because that feature wasn't in the last version of Windows they used much. Furthermore, they probably ignored the Windows-like features, because they were unintuitive and unfamiliar. I, for instance, don't expect a directory window to switch directories if it has icons in it, because 3.1 and Mac popped up new windows for different directories; the other model I expect is a shell, where programs I run from a directory generally stay in that window. A setup where I don't get a new window for a new directory, but I do get a new window if I run a program, is quite unexpected to me, and I'd be unlikely to tell a user to use a setup I had a hard time remembering how to use...
The essential correct idea of the article is this: the people who know how to explain Linux to new people are the people who learned it themselves recently. They have a similar background and expectations, they find similar interfaces sensible, and they've needed tools since the latest tools because available.
If and when the recent converts are unable to do something, an old guru may be helpful. A guru may also have good advice for customizing a system once the user has some experience (e.g., "Put 'update -Pd co -P' in ~/.cvsrc, 'alias cvs=cvs -q' in your
The page seems to be gone, or at least the content removed.
One problem with that approach.
Users. Don't. Read. Documentation.
Go around your office, and ask your non-technical (marketing, accounting, etc.) Windows users questions like:
I'll be amazed if more than 5% of your user community answers "yes" to any of those questions.
IMHO, the problem with 'gurus' teaching 'users' has nothing to do with their relative intelligence. Rather, it's an issue of the semantics of teaching, or more specifically, teaching the use of computers. To a 'guru', teaching the use of computers means getting their student to the point where they can figure out what's going on when confronted with a new program, task, or problem on their own, by connecting it to what they already know. This is called understanding, but that's not what 'users' are used to in the context of computers. What's worse, it is continually suggested to them that it's not what they want.
To quote from the linked article:
This is the basic problem. Telling someone "To A, push B" is not teaching, it's more like programming the student. The student will not understand what they are doing. They'll end up with an unconnected heap of little task descriptions in their head; actually, a lot of people end up with a heap of Post-its glued to their screens and keyboards. They are unprepared to cope with B not causing A (at best they'll reboot, typically they'll call tech support), and if they're given new software where B happens to look a lot more like C and is 5 inches off to the left, they'll need retraining.
That sort of thing doesn't happen with, say, cars. But contrary to popular opinion, that's not because cars are easy, it's because Driving School actually teaches you something, while 'Computer User School' does not.
One can only speculate as to the reasons behind that; after all, driving schools surely wouldn't complain if their students had to return at regular intervals to be told that "in this new and improved model, the windshield wiper switch is now located on the second stick right of the wheel". But in the computer user world, this is exactly how it works. The end result is the perpetual myth that computers are complicated and hard to use, plus excellent job opportunities for 'teachers'.
Feh, that came out rather rambling... Thanks for reading it anyway. ;)
The instructors don't come off as "smart" at all. Look at a similar example. When you take driver's ed, do you want an instructor to teach you how to drive; or an instructor that teaches you how to build a car, the theory of the internal combustion engine, and Newtonian Mechanics to describe the motion of the car, then (and only then) teaches you how to drive.
In any skill, there are stages of mastery, from novice to expert.
Novices know nothing.
Apprentices know some things by rote.
Competent people have mastered all the rules...
... and so on, until you hit experts, who no longer follow any easily described rules at all - they understand everything as it is, with no simplification.
In general, the best people to teach novices are the competent, whose knowledge is still at the "rule" stage, but whose abilities are broad ranging and well learnt. The worst people to teach novices are experts, who understand so much that they no longer think in the same way as the novice.
Hence the derision experts often express for teachers ("those who can't, teach"). The good teacher knows something the expert doesn't - what to leave out, how to convey broad principles memorably, what explanations to leave until later. Cranky experts knock Dummies books, which for all their cutesiness and condescension are models of clear technical writing.
The first wave of Linux documentation was written by experts for experts. I have no doubt that the simpler stuff will come along (there's a Linux for Dummies, perhaps it's coming already).
The point: don't assume that you can teach well because you are a subject expert. Conversely, don't think that you have nothing to teach because you're not.
I find the main obstacle with Linux documentation to be that in the real world we have all of the Linux variants, varying hardware support, varying system configurations etc. On the other hand, in even a good book, when explaining how to do any task, it always explains it in a step by step fashion, from start to finish. Great, except at step 4 I get an error. So I read the chapter from the start. I repeat everything. I get the same error. As somebody who is not a Linux admin (though a comfortable Linux user - it is my job) I have no idea what to do next. Now I know that this is an inherent problem with having many distributions etc, but take my specific case:
I bought a Red Hat 7 book. I downloaded Red Hat 7.1 Is it really that unreasonable to expect the various config tools to be called the same name? This is a minor update, and yet many sections of the book failed at easy-to-follow section 1 - where the command name is wrong.
Another example: I installed this on a computer with 128MB ram. I knew this for 2 reasons, firstly that I could see the stick in there myself, and secondly, Windows had happily used 128MB. When I installed Linux, it used 64MB. My only option of course was to go to the book. After much scouring I found an obscure (I guess not obscure for those in the know) option to tell the kernel to use a certain amount of ram. So I did this, and guess what? Kernel panic.
Eventually I found the problem, after brainstorming with my friends; the onboard graphics card that was sharing main memory was confusing the hell out of Linux. Now to start with, this should not happen. Hell, maybe people don't care enough to fix this. But even if this is not the case, why could I not find this in any book I looked at? And before anybody tells me I'm wrong because it says it in their book, I looked in 2 distinct Red Hat 7 books - 2 books on configuring a desktop system should be overkill. It's all very well explaining everything in a step by step fashion, but after I went through this experience, I paid more attenton to the books, and noticed they virtually *never* explained reasons why things might fail.
In my experience, with the documentation available, if you ever have a problem that takes you offthe beaten track then you will not find your way back on without expert assistance.
BTW, the only time I had a similar problem under Windows was when installing hardware that conflicted. This had nothing to do with Windows, and was fixed by exchanging the hardware.
Bit of a rant, but my experiences left me a little frustrated with the installation (the graphics thing was only one of many examples)
Here's the problem in a nutshell, right there. "clueless masses"... they're only "clueless" because they don't understand the computer as well as you do, though they probably severely outclass you on other knowledge (history, or art, or automobile mechanics, or any one or more of a million other things). Does your lack of knowledge about 16th century French Realist poetry make you "clueless" as well?
This elitist attitude shows up again and again with advanced computer users and programmers--usually from people who should know better, like some of the wizard programmers I know who will try to plug an ISA card in a PCI slot: they may do fantastic software, but they're "idiots" when it comes to hardware. Are these guys "clueless"?
I'm sorry, but this attitude really needs to be adjusted. It's the difference between:
Scenario A:
Scenario B:
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
So what you're saying is that Linux needs to become Mac OS X in terms in the UI. It meets all the criteria in your bullet list.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
That is because in Windows I almost never need to look in a manual
Bravo, bravo, bravo!
I'm not certain if Linux is quite at the 'teaching to normal people' stage yet, but it's nice to see that we're getting there with good people.
In my mind, there are several stages that a new system has to go through, and they increase in importance. First, you need a stable and well built system. Then you have to have a user-friendly system. Then you need good, complete documentation (actually, this may be #2, depending on the situation). Then you need to teach it.
The interesting thing, and possibly the biggest failing of many otherwise wonderful Linux geeks, is that each of these stages requires a different skillset, and probably different people. Kernel programmers are almost definitely going to be ROTTEN instructors. People who debug interfaces aren't going to be the best to write documentation. We need a set of resources who _aren't_ primarily developers to do the promotion, marketing, and education. (And it should be noted that good education is the best marketing of a superior product)
So to someone who actually teaches this stuff as a teacher rather than a geek, my hat is off to you. Kudos!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
That depends upon what you are teaching.
I've taught unix classes for a few years now. If you are teaching from the standpoint that the student isn't going to administrate the machine, then yes, teaching point-and-clic stuff and powerpoint stuff is fine. But if you're teaching someone how to be an actual linux *user*, then you want the course to contain as little point and click as possible. Point and click comes once you get used to how text works. If you teach future admins point and click with no text, then you're wasting your time.
I've been using Linux for maybe seven years now. I remember not even having X for the longest time. I edited all my text files and knew what every app and config file on my system did.
Within the past year or so, I've started discovering GUI config tools and such. I'm learning that Linux has gotten a lot easier to use in recent years.
When newbies ask me how to do stuff, I pretty much refuse to show them. I just explain that I can do it, but the way I know is pretty complex compared to the GUI tools that are floating around these days. I just poke around their desktop looking for a tool that looks like it does the right thing, then say, "that's probably what you want to look at."
I also try to keep a few recent newbie books around for lending purposes.
If you know the intracacies, it's hard to skim over them when you're teaching (at least, it has been for me).
"Whatever can go wrong, will." --Finagle's Law
I get the feeling that a lot of my fellow Linux geeks assume that because Windows users feel more at home in a GUI and are scared of a shell (duh, they've been using a GUI, and not a shell), that they are somehow not intelligent enough, or somehow incapable of reading documentation... of any sort.
On the other hand, I get the feeling that most Windows users believe that us Linux geeks have purposely encrypted current linux documentation in our own esoterica so that we can feel special when nobody else understands; We also explain things extra difficultly so we can feel better about ourselves, like we all have some sort of inferiority complex.
Of course neither is correct. Here are some of the underlying reasons I believe this situation has come about:
Until VERY recently Linux has been pretty much a system administrator's thing, or a serious code hacker's thing. Because nobody outside of the circle probably ever even heard of Linux, why the hell would the documentation have been written for those outside of the circle? It was generally (and correctly) assumed that anyone else reading the documentation was either a sys-admin, hacker, or similar type, who knew Linux/Unix and simply wanted some configuration details or command line arguments. There's no reason our HOWTOs and man pages should have been written any differently, at the time they were written.
Now suddenly Linux got some time under the spotlight and a lot of people are trying Linux for various purposes, Server, Desktop, or for the reason maybe a good portion of us started playing with Linux, just to tinker around. They "grew up" in GUI land for the most part, don't know jack about using a command line, and are now confronted with something that's somewhere between both. They are obviously interested or they wouldn't have bothered, but they are completely frustrated because all of the documentation is really just there for configuration details or usage details. Maybe we don't see it that way, but they probably do. It seems like a lot of energy is being spent in finger pointing when it could be spent writing migration-documentation (I don't know if I just made that up or not). If I did, what I mean is that for the transition from Windows to Linux to be easy we need documentation that not only explains how to do things, why you are doing each step, and what exactly it's going to do, but also what the equivelant would have been in Windows.
Just my $0.02
P.S. Yes this nick is completely unoriginal, but you jerks already stole all of the good nicks! =)
I remember a problem I had in Debian with xterm. I wasing in the IRC #debian channel. In the channel news item which talked about a problem in xterm, and to apply the "usual fix". I didn't know what the "usual fix" was. But I was in luck the person who wrote the news was in the channel, so I could ask him. Well getting him to tell me took about 30 minutes. He keep complaining about users not figureing things out themselves and how I should RTFM. Well he then said something about a bug report about this problem. Looking through the Debian website,I found the bug report which showed the fix. He could have typed one line to show me this fixed but no I had to go through 30 minutes of interrogation. Also he could have put a link in the new item to this bug report. But I guess he wouldn't get a chance to show what an asshole he was then.
Having grown up with BASIC on a Z80 machine, then with DOS on a 286, I had relatively little Windows usage before moving on to Linux. I cannot see why drag and drop and other GUI candies are intrinsically easier than command line. I'm not saying they are worse, either - it's just a different world.
If people are honestly willing to convert from Windows to Linux, they should accept the fact that the systems are different. And the fact that if they want more power, they need to learn how to harness it. If they just want a Windows clone on X, I don't see why they should change in the first place.
Of course, there is the all-important point about a migration path. The problem is that if people get a perfect Windows clone, they may not have an incentive to learn alternative interfaces. I admit I started my Linux experience with Gnome, but it had a sufficient number of quirks that led me to try out alternatives.
In any case, the reality is that Linux is still being written by geeks, for geeks. No matter how laymen complain about it, we will make it what we want. It's useless to turn it into another Windows because there already is one.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I found about 5, (including Yahoo's 'official' client) and tried them all. None of them has all the features of the Windows client. Some were ok, some were downright sucky. Ironically, if the five guys that wrote those apps would have worked together, they might have created something the Windows people would have envied. Instead, we've got 5 incomplete clients, none of which works as good as the closed source Yahoo-brand one.
No one can force developers to work on specific things, of course, but everyone would benefit if people would think twice before embarking on authoring yet another text editor/audio player/messenging client/etc when what really is needed is one KILLER app in each category.
If you think you want to write an HTML editor, maybe pick a nice existing one and contribute to that instead. (Please note I'm not disparaging the work of the Y! client authors, I just think developers in general need better judgement.
"Look, I can copy this web link from one window and paste it into my browser. Oh, wait, that didn't work."
_______
2B1ASK1
However its the programmers doing the testing, so the situation is pretty bleak unless you help with useability and arent an expert.
Ive been trying ot help.
An idea i had was to allow us to give feedback on important new features almost in talkback fashion, it was shot down because its said that a group of 5 people is all thats needed to properly do useability testing.
Problem is if all 5 are programmers, you have a serious problem.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It's not just Linux
Groups Google thread regarding HTML usage
and I finally decided it was easier to just dl the popular browsers and test my stuff thru them rather than deal with....... well, HTML is an interpreted language, not an institution as my last response (maybe yet to be posted +1 correction) states.
Though I did make this comment on slashdot a few days ago.
My roomate (not a computer user) started playing around with gnome the other day, and before you know it was using mozilla, star office and a slew of games without the slightest bit of coaxing or help from me.
In my opinion the main problem with linux being accepted is the average persons fear of change/the unknown.
Good. They can't get connected to the Internet, and you brush them off by giving them URLs. Very BOFH-ish.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I must be missing something. I installed RH 7.2, I think Mozilla has the same shitty X fonts that Netscape had. Maybe they are a tiny bit better, but this was really my major gripe upon installation. It's downright ugly. I love GNOME using the anti-aliased fonts, but like many other things for X, this isn't universal.
I fired up AbiWord and guess what.. ugly fonts there too. I'm sure there is a way to set up a TrueType font server under X, and get all your programs to use nice fonts, but I'm sure it involves a bunch of steps that I just don't have time to do.
The M$ FUD machine has convined people they can't do anything for themselves. People are capable of and enjoy far more difficult persuits. Who out there is afraid of setting the gaps on their spark plugs and changing their oil? How about cooking? My mom knows how to prepare food as well as any trained chef. If people had the M$ no can do attitude about other things, they would be taking the public bus to McDonald's everyday. People underate their ability to get things done on a computer and M$ has been encouraging it for years. The touchier and more prone to failure their stuff is, the less likely anyone is to experiment. Then they wisper that M$ is a easy as it gets and act mysterious with their closed source, cost lots of money to learn junk.
Then there is the device driver issue. Why should a USB hrd drive be difficult to use? It could ship with little disk that does the whole kernel recompile if needed. But then big bad Bill would withhold vital API info and the M$ stamp of approval. The same tricks have been used to encourage non uniform interfaces to devices, depite the obvious saving of co-operation and standardization. How many different kinds of NE200 network cards are there, with all their goofey brand names? Thousands? Yet all can be run with a single linux driver. HA! The end result is stuff that does not work anywhere. Got an XP driver for that old winmodem? Good luck! Good luck getting information from the vendor if you feel like making a driver yoursel. Yet you can get a driver for a modem with brains that's Hayes compatible. Anyone doing PC set up and upkeep knows that the prommised simplicity of M$ junk is a lie. When you get down to it, the M$ world is much quirker and more difficult to penetrate.
People have been taught to believe that the CLI is "backward" and impossible. If that were really true, no one would use the tools we enjoy. Face it, our tools were made by very energetic people who would do just about anything to avoid work. Just about anything can be accomplished and automated by memorizing a few dozzen less words than a cat can remember. I don't consider myself so bright for being able to memorize them. I consider myself bright for understanding why I should. Small up front efforts taken save great effort later. I'm teaching my wife a few basic commands, one word at a time. She seemed to have gotten it last night. Instead of searching through a tree with a mouse she told me, "what, you just type the word? That's easy." Exactly.
With a little help from device manufacturers who want to sell more of their stuff, the world will get much easier very fast.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
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...
I know by experience that I am one of the last class. It's my job to be. I wrote the Gedit help file a while back just because it's what I can do. When one of the techs at my company says a customer can't get on the internet I tell them step-by-step what to do rather than present large overviews of the process. This is a skill that we all should try to learn.
If I want a point-and-click environment, Windows is where I want to be. If I want a command-line, stellar networking, and total control I go linux/freebsd.
I rarely use KDE and never Gnome because they are not yet as useful of GUIs as Windows or MacOS are. However I rarely open a DOS window on Windows when I can just telnet/ssh to the linux box and do 40 times more there.
Use the right tool for the job. Why must the idea be forced that there can only be one operating system. It's like telling a carpenter he's only allowed to have one tool in his toolbox.
Granted, this is an OS that not many geeks would like. However, there is a tradeoff involved - one can run a good, but obscure OS, or use a popular, but buggy and restrictive OS.
I am so sick and tired of these kneejerk assumptions about Linux and average users.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that that an Everyday Linux for Average Joe would automatically wipe out a Linux geek's Superduper Power Linux setup.
What could Everyday Linux do to you? Would it nullify the GPL? Somehow kill off vi or emacs, or destroy OSS developer communities? If you think so, how? I can't even imagine why folks are so worried.
In case you had forgotten: LINUX IS OPEN SOURCE. Also, lots of related software is open source too. Nobody can take your carefully crafted Power User setup. Nobody.
Or put another way: Existence of Simplified Linux =! No More Linux for Power Users.
Additionally, it would be in Everyday Co.'s best interest to keep Everyday usable by Power Users and average users alike, without alienating either group. If the OSS community gets drowned somehow, the company would lose their developer base, right?
So please stop with the "simple & stupid will absolutely destroy powerful & smart" Linux arguments already. If you want to put it that way, you are simply wrong.
Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare; but if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
My girlfriend and I both use Red Hat 7.2 on my laptop. This is because it's easier to get all the networking set up (802.11b, DSL using PPPoE, IrDA) under Linux than under Windows, since the drivers are terribly buggy under the latter. She understands that sometimes web pages won't behave perfectly because the average HTML writer does not understand that people use platforms aside from Microsoft Windows, but since this is ostensibly my "work" machine, she's okay with that. Moreover, everything "just works" and when it doesn't I can log in remotely to fix it.
Contrast this to when I was just getting started... I expected people to know things or at least care why the computer acted the way it did.
Boy, was that a crock of shit!
I have nontechnical users merrily sending mail from Mutt and Pine on OpenBSD now because I simply give them a set of directions, say "It's not perfect, but it's a compromise, and in 3 years we've never been hacked; please play along nicely". Since my users all accomplish what they want to, they are happy, and since they're happy, I have more time to twiddle RAIDframe, play with Coda and Heartbeat, and generally nerd out.
The more experience I get, the less experience I expect my users to have, and the happier they are overall. Next week the marketing guy will be switching over to using RSA keys for SSH access from his cellular modem. I'm not kidding.
It doesn't have to be intimidating or nerdy to do the job right!
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Did anyone see that SNL skit "Nick Burns, The Company's I.T. Guy"? I'm working on linux from scratch now, and I can tell you, the mailing list is currently choc full of "Nick Burns"'s. If you haven't seen the skit, by "Nick Burn"'s I mean that there are a lot of people who, while being *somewhat* helpful, appear to be contributing to the list in order to get revenge on all the people who made them feel stupid for not knowing some important, but not well known, aspect of linux by doing the same to others. In fact, the world of computers has a lot of these people, who have fallen under the illusion that they are of a class of "knows" in a world of "know nots" when actually, they specialize in a field that exists to give the "know nots" the same ability as the "knows".
For example In the 1700's, you had to be like Gauss to visualize a surface like
z = sqrt(sin(x^3/e*pi))*cos(y^(4/5)-y^2+pi/2)/x^95,
but these days, all you have to do is type that into Mathematica (tm) or whatever math program floats your boat. You don't have to be Gauss. But a lot of people think they are, just because they know about Mathematica, and you don't.
I imagine the originator of this post has run into more than his/her fair share of people like Nick Burns...because this kind of "instructor" - I have more choice terms like ***** and ******* but - is not relegated to the Linux community.
'If a piece of physics cannot be explained to a barmaid, then it is not a good piece of physics.' - Ernest Rutherford
I've found in practically all situations (Marine Corps, student teaching physics labs, library work) the good purveyors of knowledge are able to keep things simple yet understandable. For example, if one is trying to show a person how to fire an AR-15, there really isn't any need to show how much you know by taking the bolt apart to show them the function of the firing pin retaining pin.
Right now I'm having a fun time with Redhat Linux 6.1 installation on 200MB root/50MB swap partitions (the other 250 MB is for Win3.1). I've got it loaded and working but there isn't much there. Now I'm trying to figure out how to load stuff to the root that I can use (the only editor I have right now is vi). I haven't yet found the right book for my needs even though I've checked out four huge monsters.
-J
http://carpediem.da.ru
Microsoft products tend to include a fair bit of online documentation - heck, they even used to ship printed manuals! The thing with documentation is that you need skill and motivation to write it in a way a "lay" end user will appreciate. The result of this is that people don't tend to write it for free.
Therefore: To the people who pick up Linux for free and stumble, may I suggest spending $30 on a book? Yeah, the whole thing's no longer free now.. but it's closer to it than $200 for Windows, and will probably save you from beating your head against a manpage or two.
I recently configured Linux on a Sony cute Picturebook. One of the questions the owner asked me was if there was any easy way to allow the user access his Windows shares through the GUI. I just flat out said "I'm not familar with doing that. Can't help you." and left it at that.
I had heard that Corel made a tool that could do this, but zero experience with it. Or if it was even available anymore.
He writes me the next day and apparantly he had read a few pages on smbmount and just put the entries into fstab and all was well.
Duh. They wouldn't need to map shares at random. Just his personal files once. It just never dawned on me. *smack forehead*
I agree with the tone of the article -- this basically disqualifies me as someone to help newbies. I recently went to a LUG meeting, where some relatively new Linux users demonstrated all the GUI tools you can use on Linux. I didn't even know what "Evolution" was until I went to the meeting.
I suppose the best advice for the newbie is to find some kind of user group and meet people with common interests and/or struggles with their systems (usually the slightly-less-newbie types as proposed by the article).
disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with this project, other than the occasional bug report...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
You'll see me breaking it down for the newbies on a daily basis. I've thrown in hundreds of posts and fit perfectly into Roblimo's sub-geek category. I'm the guy who knows some command line and some gui tools. I never claim to be a genius but do solid research before giving answers, and most of the time they're right and I get props.
Linux doesn't have to be hard folks, it's just that some people, in order to maintain their 'leet linux egos, make it that way.
Linux is complicated, and so is windows. Intelligent, experienced users have windows and linux breaking all the time in thousands of ways.
Less technical users (i.e. normal people) have no hope of dealing with problems: unless things are exactly as they expect and work perfectly, they are completely lost. (This is not a criticism, but rather follows inevitably from the first paragraph.) With windows, they are endlessly frustrated, but they have memorized a few dozen "tricks" that work. With linux, a different set of "tricks" are required and they are completely lost when one of their tricks fails. Linux ends up looking harder simply because it is different.
Had they been raised on linux, then windows would seem impossibly complex.
"Backward compatability" (i.e. desktop behaving like windows) is essential for linux to make headway on the desktop. Perhaps this is a bitter pill. Sorry, that's life.
The problem is just the same in Windows: if you're using the internet without keeping up with security updates and security policies, you may be remotely compromised and your computer may be trashed or may be used to attack others. Wanna guess what percentage of Outlook and IE users are still vulnerable to the half dozen exploits found in Microsoft's HTML components this year?
The solution is just the same as in Windows, too: run up2date, MandrakeUpdate, Windows Update, apt, or whatever such tool your vendor provides.
I can teach you how to boil water (an easy task) in one of two ways -- we put some water in a pan on a stove burner; we turn on the stove; when the water bubbles, we're done -- or we can use a microwave.
I can teach you how to make eggs benedict (a medium difficulty task) in one of to ways -- we toast some english muffins; we fry some canadian bacon; we poach some eggs; we make some hollandaise saude (But wait...I have to teach you how to make english muffins and how to poach eggs and how to make hollandaise sauce.) -- or we can buy some english muffins and fry some canadian bacon and use a little metal tool to make poaching eggs easier and we still have to make the hollandiase sauce.
I personally choose to make my own english muffins and to poach my eggs by slipping them in to a pot of boiling water. Why? Because I like the process of cooking. I know the easier ways of doing it, but I don't like them, and I don't begrude the extra time that I spend in order to have total control over the process.
If I am going to teach someone how to cook, I'm going to teach them the way that I like while perhaps mentioning the "easier" ways.
People are going to teach things the way that they do them.
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.
Linux is not hard. It just has many options. Some Windows immigrants may complain it has "too many options". It's a paradigm that needs to be redefined given that the typical Windows desktop user is not familiar with "options". For example Windows OS's do not ship with a variety of Web Browsers to use...only Internet Explorer. Out of the box you do it Bills way or your left to figure it out for yourself.
...whatever. But by far the biggest origin of Option Anxiety is from what I call the "Big Three".....Email, Web Browseing, and Word Processing. Pine, Emacs, Mutt, Kmail, StarOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, Emacs, Mozilla, Lynx, Netscape, Konqueror, etc, etc .... a Windows user can easily be tormented by which or what to use.
Option Anxiety is the result of having at least a half dozen different ways to accomplish a single simple task! Take the Linux ditros themselves for example. Each one has a different way of installing the OS. Each one generally has its own preferred way of managing software, either apt-get, rpms, tarballs
I actually had a client say to me, "I just want my email, search the net, and type business letters that my clients can read on thier computers. I don't wnat to know about all that stuff."
From the article:
"People using their computers don't need to know much beyond "Push button A and action B results." They don't need to get confused with a lot of complex commands while they're just starting to figure out the way to do things in Linux that they already knew how to do in Windows. That basic level of knowledge is enough for a start - and for a good while afterwards."
I totally agree with that! What I think is more important is that Linux and Linux distros keep getting more and more "approachable" by novices while still allowing seasoned Linux users the freedom and ability to do what it already allows them to do.
Integrity is what you are when nobody is looking.
the Macintosh is fairly free from virii mainly due to the obscurity argument
As a Mac user, I'll confirm this. There aren't many Mac viruses, and the ones that do exist aren't usually very malicious. Two primary reasons for this:
A) Mac users are usually generally good people, and don't want to inflict harm upon others needlessly. The handful of people that decide they want to write a virus usually write one that does minimal damage. Mac users love Macs, and don't like to hurt Macs. (Buggy code may cause unintended damage, of course.)
B) People who write malicious viruses for Windows wouldn't be caught dead using a Mac long enough to learn how to actually code a virus for that platform. Disdain for all things Apple runs even deeper than the desire to cause harm.
Mac OS X will begin to change things. As more users move to the platform, it's inevitable that one or two of them will write some malicious code. Also, as the platform becomes more attractive, more malicious coders will start playing with ProjectBuilder.
By the way, the only case I know of where the desire to cause harm overrode the disdain for all things Apple was an exploit in AOL's servers that allowed Mac users using a hacked version of America Online software to steal or suspend AIM screen names. The Windows script kiddies actually ran Mac emulators to allow them to do this. Many thousands of screen names have been stolen (mine included, although it was eventually given back to me). Three-letter screen names are especially prized, and are traded back and forth. As far as I know, AOL still hasn't patched the hole - they did one patch that prevents it from working with AOL for Windows, but the Mac version apparently works slightly differently, and they didn't bother patching for that too (or fixing the root of the problem).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
My experience has not been good. I'm probably an intermediate user, and have been using Linux on and off for about 5 years, and have done a couple of clean installations of RedHat and Slackware, including X and KDE. Right now, I'm doing my first useful application with MySQL and Apache/Tomcat, and the configuration was a major hassle. Here are some problems that I run into:
1. Documentation that assumes too much. This has been mentioned above, but I'd like to stress this as a number one problem. After all, what good is a free operating system if you can't use it in a meaningful way without buying 2 or 3 books. Some of the HOWTOs will walk you through setting something up in one particular way, and don't give much guidance on general principles. I guess that's the definition of a howto, but that's really a poor substitute.
Installation program: What packages would you like to install?
New User: Huh? I DON'T KNOW!
2. Too many configuration files. When I first started using linux, one word came to mind: Chaos. Configuration files are all over the place and they all have their own particular formats and quirks. And 99% of the time, the defaults don't work for anyone but the developers. This is getting better though. Some of the more professionally developed applications are better at this. MySQL really shines in this area. It was a breeze to install and the things that it asked for were clear. It is a very peaceful, well-behaved piece of software. But I really wish software developers would include configuration wizards. Lengthy editing of text files just for basic functionality is unacceptable. This is such a problem that I'm considering helping open source projects by specializing in documentation and ease of use. Configuring the kernel has gotten easier in recent years. Modern configuration tools step you through the process and help is readily available if you don't know what something means. Even better, it tells you what you probably need. This is a step in the right direction.
3. Dealing with dependencies. Linux gets a lot of praise for quick bug fixes, which can be a good thing, but its a double-edged sword. You have to juggle kernel versions, glibc versions, and GNU tools. If Linux is trying to reach a mainstream audience, do you expect the average user to have to recompile their kernel and rpm half a dozen other dependencies just to install the new web browser? Windows software developers have a much easier time - you know that an app that will run on one Windows 95 machine will run on just about any Windows 95 machine. Occassionally you run into things like needing X version or a above of DirectX or something, but that's a minor upgrade. Linux applications don't often check for their needed libraries.
I feel your pain on the gaming thing. Once 98's gone and done, I'm going to have to decide what to do next with my system, move all the way over to Linux or keep that other partition around.
:-)
While the gaming style is different, I think that moving all your gaming over to a console may be the best option. Granted, you don't get such gems as Civ III, but you do get a solid library of titles. This is what I'll probably do come 2003.
The other option to consider is the Mandrake gaming pack, which can run the Sims. As far as I know, it's based off Transgaming's product, which makes it able to run a fair number of games already.
Either way, you're sacrificing some amount of gaming by not going with Windows, but it's got a few more options than just going with Mac. The amount you'll save on software could go towards your console too
Anyhow, if you've got the hard drive space to spare and know someone with a copy of partition magic (or are willing to buy your own) installing Mandrake now would be a great move. You'll get to play around with the whole linux thing and see if it really does fit you before you decide to make a jump to it. You can ease yourself in to it and really enjoy the system rather than make some frantic decision later on only to have a ton of problems. If it frustrates you too much, then you can go to Mac and still get a great system.
Anyways, best of luck!
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Many 'gurus' teaching new users about Linux make it look harder than it needs to be
You might want to check out this case from a social psychology point of view. People who are not real experts but perceives themselves to be experts might want to emphasize their expertise by showing the new user how smart they are in comparison.
It should be noted that real experts shouldn't (at least in theory) have this inferiority complex, which makes the interaction for them with newbies much more straightforward and purposeful.
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?"
Or is it they don't know that much but think and want others to think they do?
When they really want something to work and they can't figure out how to make it happen, they read the documentation.
It's usually not much more helpful on the windows side of things, but then it's less necessary there as well.
I'll bet almost everyone who has a cable modem or DSL has looked at their manual. And I'm sure that Office users who want to do a mail merge look it up in the online help, or maybe just ask a knowledgeable co-worker ("guru").
But none of that is really the point- if someone is willing to try linux, then you're not doing them any favors telling them to rtfm if the fm is impossible to decipher/out of date/etc. A user who has made the commitment to *try* linux at all is probably willing to read a few manuals, and whether this becomes a habit is probably directly proportional to the degree of success she has on her first few tries getting help this way.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Not everyone can be an arrogant bastard. I'm surprised I haven't heard this from an OpenBSD user...
This is a aggressive operating system. You probably won't like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the interest or sophistication to be able to appreciate an OS of this quality and depth. We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory - maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it's made in a little development house, or one that implies that their unstable ugly weak OS will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make an OS work better. Perhaps you're mouthing your words as you read this.
-- Adapted from Arrogant Bastard Ale.
- passion
Down, slashbots, down! Just stop and think before you flame, OK? I didn't say that all of Linux UI was from the 60s. I'm well aware of the GUIs available, the user-friendly installers, and so on. What I said was that expecting average people to use that sort of UI (at all) is silly.
This isn't just about command prompts vs. GUIs; I'm well aware of the advantages of each. This is about the fact that the command names are needlessly cryptic, and there's no real tie-in between the command prompt UI and the GUI to get the combined power of both.
This is about the fact that the major Linux GUIs, while pretty good, are still several years of UI development behind recent MS Windows or MacOS offerings.
This is about the fact that I've never yet seen a Linux system get up and running without several manual edits to configuration files first, whereas in other modern OSes the same would be accomplished via a hard-to-get-wrong UI with constant help available.
Just compare the average Linux HOWTO with the average MacOS or MS Windows help page, and spot the difference.
As the original poster said, Linux is a mostly system written by geeks, for geeks. A geek has no problem with any of the above. When this sort of thing was all there was, back in the 60s, everyone using computers was an expert anyway, so it didn't matter.
But today, if you're hoping to appeal to a wider user base, you have to accept that not everyone will be an expert. They want the power you've got, but a much more usable interface on the front of it. Most of all, they don't want to ever have to go down into the depths of their system when they first set it up, to get everything configured properly. It's all very well pointing out that Linux has decent GUIs and user-friendly installers these days, but if the user must still go play with the low-level stuff -- even a little bit -- it's all irrelevant. At that point, as I said, you are expecting your typical users to use stuff from the 60s, and that's absurd.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This is half right. :)
Users won't read documentation if they can intuit what they want to do from the program's user interface. If they can't, most of them first turn to the online help. Today in most cases the online help is the main documentation--an increasing number of programs don't have printed manuals at all, or if they do, the manuals are structured as reference material for advanced users.
So I'd say the original point still stands. Users don't necessarily read manuals, but a lot of users do know "click here for help." Online documentation needs to be quickly, easily navigable, and both indexed and searchable unless it's of a very trivial length. And ideally it should be context-sensitive (i.e., when you press the help button, it takes you to a help screen related to the action you were trying to perform if it can).
In my experience, most Unix programs are abysmal in this respect. Their help documents are all too often clearly afterthoughts, and even relatively good ones rarely have context sensitivity or useful navigation (usually it's limited to a table of contents and links reading "previous," "next" and "up" on each page).
What can't I do with windows 2000?
Point and click is wonderful and happy. Every now and then you absolutely have to edit a config file. vi is about the most user-malevolent program I have ever seen. Yes, it's incredibly powerful, and I intend to use it someday. That day is not the day I first install Linux. On my first install (Red Hat 5.0, without external guidance) I was thankfully able to mount my windows partitions so that I could copy over my bashrc to edit it in Windows. Due to disk space concerns I had to abandon that installation, since it was a family computer. Now I have my own, and I'm running Debian. I installed sudo. It demands that you edit the sudoers file with its own version of vi. It took me about ten minutes just to add one line. Afterwards I browsed the package lists and found nano, a pico clone. I love it. I can actually get done what I need done. Yes, it's a very simplistic text editor. That's the point. I think I've passed the beginning phases of understanding Linux, and I have recompiled my kernel. I think that installers should either have different options based on familiarity, or a default (that can be modified) that assumes you're a moron and lets you migrate to being a poweruser.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I would say that one of the best ways to learn and understand Linux is to have a look at Linuxfromscratch
You get an excellent understanding and appreciation of what goes into a Linux system by installing ALL packages yourself. This is not for the faint of heart Linux user. It instructs you step by step on how to build your own custom Linux system.
Firstly a quick explanation of who I am: I'm 17/f windows user with a linux-mad bf. I'd never even heard of linux or any other operating systems other than doze and macs before. As windows users go, I consider myself fairly competent, but of course not an expert. I know how to use software packages, I'm developing a strong hatred of MS products and I spend my life on irc. So basically I come from the standard home computer user environment.
:)
Now as one who is just a normal computer user, I can say truthfully that I do not use help files at all- they have never sorted out the problem since they don't suggest anything that I haven't tried before. As far as manuals and documentation are concerned, I have consulted them occasionally if I specifically can't find a feature I want, but again as far as trouble shooting is concerned, they have never worked. Anything to do with hardware installation is a bit of an "ah scary get bf to do it" area. I did proudly install my modem though
So getting to the point, if we are trying to get users to move to linux, the very first thing is let them hear about it! Nobody has heard of it! I'm not just being extreme, but I hadn't heard of it, nobody at school has heard of it, my parents certainly have not heard of it, and in an A level IT text book (I don't do IT but I was curious so I looked) it gets one mention under the operating systems bit, whereas MS OSs gets several pages. Is it any wonder very few non-geeks uses it?
The stigma is not about linux being for geeks only. People love their computers, love having fancy desktops and something slightly different (such as using winamp rather than the windows media player). People start on MSN messenger then go to ICQ because it's different. So they are just waiting for a different operating system too, just they have not heard of it. Perhaps if it was offered pre-installed on computers like windows is then people might well opt for it.
There is however a huge fear about going non-MS. There is a huge fear about the installation, and whether anyone will be able to help them if things go wrong. Perhaps this is why I myself have not progressed to linux. My reasons would not be that I need it for coding, it's just that it's different, I like the idea of it being non-MS, and it just looks so cool! So perhaps I am your typical example of one who is considering linux but not actually making the step.
So my reasons for windows over linux? It's simply that I'm afraid of the transition, and of messing up my computer. The reasion I'm afraid is because I no nobody in real life (my bf is miles away) who can help me and actually come round and sort out my problems. So the problem isn't really the documentation as such- windows users never use it, it's the fact that should something go wrong there is nobody to help, only the internet, which whilst is very helpful, if you're not sure what the problem is at all, its virtually impossible to find help.
What I don't get is that Be figured out how to integrate this into a "legacy" hierarchial file system back in 1995 with folders where you'd save search criteria with the folder and they'd update themselves constantly with little to no overhead. For example, I could attach the search criteria "any file whose MIME type is 'text/html'" and the folder would always contain a list of every HTML file on my hard disk. And the kicker was that there was essentially no speed penalty. It was truly just an awsome setup, and a functionality I haven't seen on any other OS. I can't imagine that this would be terribly difficult to implement in Linux, and the adition of a feature like this would definitely be at least close to a "killer feature" compared to Windows. Granted, a better solution ultimately would probably be to design a new OS around data bags like what the Newton did, but the BFS solution seems like it makes sense in the near term...
Vi may or may not be powerful.
I wouldn't know. I refuse to use it. It's not at all a good interface, as far as I can tell, because it says NOTHING about how to use it. Help? There's no help command. There's no indication of how to get to help. There's no indication of how to EXIT.
Before I get flamed for not RTFM or anything like that.... a basic usability concern is that if, by some strange chance, a user accidentally fires up something they didn't mean to/want to, they should at least be able to cleanly leave it. I always end up killing or suspend/killing vi when it gets called.
People tell me that vi is incredibly powerful for programming. That's funny. I code in pico and Matlab's program editor. All I really want out of a file editor is find/replace and line numbering, or at least cursor finding. Both of these do that, quite well. I'm perfectly happy to use them.
People who think things that are hard to use are innately powerful are stupid. You can have a simple, powerful program. Vi is not. Therefore, I will not use vi.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
With Mozilla and StarOffice, Linux now has a world-class browser and office suite. KDE as a GUI is good enough to compete with Windows. With distributions like Mandrake, installing and configuring hardware is easy and painless. There are programs to enable you to play and rip MP3's, burn CD's, chat, ICQ clones, games ,etc... Everything is in place EXCEPT for an easy and hassle-proof software install system.
.configure, make and make install, as well as changing my PATH to point to /usr/local/bin BEFORE /usr/bin (so as to run 6.0 before 5.8) and create an icon on my KDE QuickLauch.
Let me use an example. I recently downloaded Vim 6.0, and proceeded to install it on both my Windows and Linux boxes. On Windows, all I had to do was double click on the EXE file and the program, including the shortcuts, was installed and ready to go in no time. On Linux, I had to download a source tarball, dump it into a directory, run
Vim works just fine on my Linux box, and I found the install the be relatively straightforward. However, I'm confortable in a command-line environment, most newbies are not.
RPM is a bold attempt at making the install process, but it is fraught with problems and dependencies. For example, just for fun (don't flame me, I don't use RPM's), I tried to install the latest version of Mozilla (Moz 8.0 was the package in my distribution) with the RPM file from the site. I ran rpm -U and it complained about having to upgrade each COMPONENT of mozilla (mail, chat, etc) before upgrading the whole thing. I tried uninstalling it. It told me I had to uninstall all related packages first, including GNOME. Since I use KDE, I decided to do it. Only THEN was I able to install the 0.9.5 RPM. Now, needless to say, I simply grab the tarball for the latest distribution on dump it into a directory.
Somebody needs to come up with an accepted, standardized protocol to install new programs or upgrade existing ones onto an existing distribution that doesn't involve compiling from source or using RPM files. Mind you, the option to compile from source should remain for the advanced users.
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Pick a new window manager?
Well, at least with ACPI, you'll soon be able to use the power button.
However, the biggest problem, is getting things to print. I truly dread printing in unix. It is unnecessarily complicated. Granted, my experience with it is network printing where a printer has to be specified (I suppose you could set it up to default to one...but that of course requires manipulating some config file somewhere). Until printing is as easy as windows (literally, just click the icon and whatever is on your application prints perfectly)...
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Users. Don't. Read. Documentation.
Exactly. And there's very little need for documentation in most well-designed software systems. A program that is designed to present how it works in a clear and accessible fashion makes a manual largely unnecessary. Where there is a remaining need for software documentation is in geek-oriented systems like programming languages. For end-user-targeted software, documentation is just a CYA that companies still produce for legacy reasons.
"Hey, my web site works perfectly! It's probably your own fault. You did read the help page, right?"
Tim
I'm going to reveal myself as one of the crusty curmudgeons this article is talking about. What user interface could possibly be simpler than the one for grep or for tar, for example? Of course you don't know what all those fiddly little gibberinsh switches mean right away, but all of the documentation is right there in "man grep" or "man tar." User interface? There is only the command line, standard in, and standard out.
A lot of this BS about unusability is because people are assuming GUIs are intuitive. I don't see that at all. How the hell would I know that "Exit" is under "File" and that it means to end the program unless I was already immersed in the model? I wouldn't! And who the hell would think that they shut down their OS by clicking "Start" first?
People are afraid of the command line because it IS NOT WHAT THEY ARE CONDITIONED TO USE.
None of this invalidates the article's point, however, which is that the best way to introduce a Windows user to Linux is NOT to sit them down and have them type in a terrifying "find -exec perl -e blah blah \; | less" command line, even if that really is the fastest solution.
The biggest hurdle isn't even that it is different; it is getting people to understand that it CAN be different, and that different can be better.
FWIW, I don't care if a single Windows user comes to Linux (well, I do care, but not that much). Linux meets all my needs and I can interoperate where I need to.
Third party software is too hard to install on Linux.
It needs to be:
1) download setup.exe (or equivilant)
2) launch
3) click Next 2-5 times to install
And remember:
- One setup package needs to work on 2 years worth of Linux, regardless what what version or company made your distribution.
- third party software means "3rd party", not something included on the RedHat CD. Nothing which is fully centralized will scale.
Today, even if I wanted to support this for my 3rd party software product, I can't. the tools and standards are not available.
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?
... ;)
That is not the term at all... The term is arrogant.
I don't get it people. Why is being a Newbie a bad thing at all!!! Hell! If i'd wanted to market a good and free OS properly, i would want a lot of Newbies! And i wouldn't make them feel like incompetants each time they ask a question. Even if the question seems stupid. ( Remember there are no stupid questions, just inquisitive
The problem with Linux teachers... THERE ARE NO LINUX TEACHERS!!! All i've seen up to date are smart geeks holding all the info for themselves, while laughing at the ignorance of others.
The problem here is selfishness and arrogance. Grow up!
If i could kick all your pretty asses, i would!
It would make the most beautiful domino effect ever!
I'll simply be puzzled if a significant number of people answer "Yes" to the second one.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
And I want to why?
It's sad that that's the best you can do.
That's quite possible. I didn't install *Nix on a desktop of mine until a year or so after I started reading /., AND I got an account, forgot about /., and returned many moons later. I fit both of those descriptions.
And, as you point out, this conversation has been mostly beneficial. Just as there are white-hat hackers that cause a positive end result, there are positive trolls that cause good conversation and get some helpful sentiments out there. There's a quote I've heard a few times, that a good troll is indistiguishable from a good post.
Yeah, I have heard that too. It is very true. One other thing that is kind of goofy is when people feed the trolls and it ends up being a real discussion.
Trolls good or bad are a necessary evil.
Blogging because I can...
Then of course as soon as anybody does anything other than xterm (like a control panel) that is laid out, and it runs on a screen that claims a different DPI, they fonts scale and the display is completely messed up! Then, instead of saying "well X is a stupid design" (which is the correct answer), they say "you should design an elaborate toolkit that scales the display to match the font" (which is stupid, besides doing that would be a lot easier if we could control how big the fonts are, anyway!).
Oddly enough MicroSoft copied this in their font interface (must have been an early attempt at sabatoge). They quickly realized their mistake and made negative sizes set the "pixel size", they also froze the systems idea of "DPI" to a constant so anybody using the old interface got predictable results.
What TheRev said -- why would you want to do that?
(I know why you might want to play with different window managers, but why would your pointy-haired boss, or the secretary in Marketing, give a rat's ass what window manager they used, so long as they could make PowerPoint slides, read Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets?)
Ask them - is a computer a magical box that can do everything you want it to? Or is a computer "that thing I use to make presentations, memos, and email."
There is no Linux equivalent to MSWord. Yes, yes, yes: I *know* there is StarOffice and others. But they aren't MSWord.
Please provide supporting arguments. I write professionally and recieve and submit documents from and to editors who use MS Word and Excel fileformat.s I also read a lot of highly formatted (ltables, inline images with captions, etc) documents from MS own site when I do NT work. I read them under So and since moving to the 6.0 beta the only error I've encountered when reading a very complex document - such as MS Case Study documents from their partner site - has been a hard Rock cafe logo that moved down 2CM because the page border was different.
There is no Linux equivalent to AccPac.
Er, the Linux euivalent of AccPac is AccPac, and its been out for half a year already
There is no Linux equivalent to Photoshop. Yes, yes, yes: I *know* there's Gimp. But it's not Photoshop.
Agreed one hundred percent. I barely consider Gimp useable, and I *know* how to use it - I just find its interface a fucking pain.
That's what you could get a shell script to do it.
If a distribution put that line in a shell script (and had error checking), you could just have a single command or a clickable or spoken interface, and people who actually want to look at the results of intermediate steps could do them individually.
The point is that it makes sense to have a number of smaller steps for those people who want them, and have a very simple program to run all of the steps for those people who want it to be simple. Automatically doing a bunch of steps is much easier than breaking up a single step.
So my reasons for windows over linux? It's simply that I'm afraid of the transition, and of messing up my computer.
Well, if you're that interested, but not quite ready to commit totally, you could get another computer so you can run both systems side by side. Assuming that's not an option (for reasons of cost, desk space, or just not being geeky enough), you could do what a friend of mine does: get another hard drive. Don't even think about messing with partitions, just install on a second drive and keep the two systems completely separate.
Put both drives in your case, but only connect one at a time. When you want to switch between systems, shut the machine down, pull the ribbon cable off the one drive, and plug it into the other. This is basically an extension of the advice above -- you're completely safe from "seeing the power of the -R flag in action when you least expect it". How could you possibly mess up your Windows stuff through any mistake you make in the Linux environment? The drive is not even physically connected to the computer at the time!
I don't know how your case is designed, but my friend's boxes have reversible drive bays, so for maximum convenience he can put the drives in backward with the cable connectors facing the front. Then he can switch the cables by just pulling off the front plastic bezels and reaching in -- no need to fully open the case.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}