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Is Windows Ready For Joe Longneck?
Carewolf writes "Is Windows ready for the desktop? We have heard it year after year, that now is the time for Windows on the desktop. But is it really time? Richard K. Yamauchi at OSNews don't think so and has writen a piece that list a number of issues that needs to be solved before Windows is really ready for the masses and "Joe Longkneck"."
No, really - why do we care? The real milestone will be when a desktop UI in the public domain is ready for Joe Sixpack - then the world will be a better place.
We should also realize that Joe Sixpack is going to naturally become a more proficient and knowledgeable computer user than he is today. He's decidedly better than he was five years ago. If Joe Sixpack is learning how to use a desktop UI, isn't it far, far better for everyone if he becomes familiar with a publicly owned desktop, instead of one controlled and sold by a private corporation?
Windows definitely *is* ready, however, for your friendly neighborhood trash compactor...
In the article they point to netcraft which lists a windows 2000 box as being up for 2 years, in the same list (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.last.html ) they also have Mac OS X machines that have been up 1340 days which puts it's last reboot at 3.67 years ago, but the problem is Mac OS x was only released in early 2001, so it could have been up for at MOST 2 years, me thinks these stats arent worth anything.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
HOW can you possibly say that with a straight face and mean it? Unless you really believe it. Please tell me, AC, how different from NT 4.0 or 2000 that XP really is? Oh wait, it boots faster? Or hold on a sec, the games are in a completely different place. Or maybe it's this new fast-user switching?? Gee, that is kinda rough.
Now how about copy-paste? Still CTRL-C, CTRL-V huh? Hmm... Alt-F4? Still works. Still got the minimize, maximize, close and system buttons on the title bar... doubleclicking the titlebar still maximizes... pgup pgdown still work...
Please, I'm VERY curious to know. Just how unusable is XP? Really? I mean, this row of secretaries over here saving dozens of trees by using Word Excel and Email are really confused because they're getting their jobs done with an obviously broken operating system...
</rant>
Funny article ...
My Dad , a "Joe Longneck" indeed, really Likes Windows XP. Go figure. He digs the Media Player, the new GUI and the stability (he upgraded last year to a Dell P4 1.4 from a Whitebox P2 266 running Win 98)
His only complaint is that the GUI should have defaulted to the old look so he knew where everything was. Didnt take long for him to figure out ho to change it all back.
Go Dad !
"Corporate rock still sucks. What are you gonna do about it?"
If the distro had:
-an MSword clone (and plug and play printer support)
-a p2p app
-a CD/DVD player
-a CD burning app
-a browser
-an email client
if all these things had an icon on the desktop that they could just double-click and use; if all of these things had a decent UI so you could use them without having to learn how; if game developers started making the latest games available on linux; and if, and this is the most important if, if people understood that switching to linux would mean that their 1.8 ghz pentium 4 which right now runs like a 386 because it's so smothered in adware, spyware, and conflicting whatevers, would actually run as fast as it should AND it wouldn't crash 3 times a day; they would switch in a second.
If at any point they have to type "make," or even look at a CLI, forget about it.
c-hack.com |
Run my X11 software? No? How about the best page-layout software? Hmm, mostly need a Mac for that, huh? Okay, well I'm sure Windows will work great with my Firewire-based A/D audio rack... Oh look, all the Windows users on the discussion sites report not having any luck all, and are either giving up on the hardware or buying a Mac for their studios. Hmm... Sounds like there are some things you can't do with Windows after all.
That can't be said for any other operating system.
Asside from AutoCAD and some games, the same can be said for MacOS... and MacOS will do a lot of stuff that Windows won't.
The fact is that Windows is sometimes the right tool for the job, but I would usually reccomend either a Linux or Mac solution for 90% of the stuff people use computers for.
There is one reason, and one reason only, why Windows continues to dominate the desktop market, and that's the vendor lock-in we all suffer from the ever changing ".doc" format of MS-Word. If you do not have a Windows machine with the latest version of MS-Word, you might not be able to read that document your boss sent you on Friday night asking for your response by Monday morning. Sure, you can use StarOffice (or any of a number of other .doc editors) in Linux, and Office for Mac on the Macintosh, but we all know that Microsoft will just release a new version of Word "Any Day Now" which will completely break all compatability with everything else, so FUD demands that everybody keeps a Windows box handy, and most people do not wish to have more than one system.
If the world really wanted to take down the MS monopoly, step 1 would be to break the near-universal reliance on MS-Word. Until then, Windows will keep coming out on top.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I'll have to disagree with you on this here. In its shipping configuration, windows xp CAN make cds, but cannot eidt video (the version of movie maker that ships with XP is a joke), pictures, and windows media player is one of the most confusing programs in existance.
On the other hand, Macs do this out of the box. Cd recording, movie editing, image editing, and audio all work well and intuitively OUT OF THE BOX.
In windows' defence, I will say that I recently bought a sony PC which had a slew of preinstalled software at no extra price - Premere LE, Sound Forge and ACID, Photoshop LE, and a media player which wasn't as good as iTunes, but definitely beat windows media player. If the normal version of windows did all of this, I'd be happier, but it doesn't, and requires a lot of extra (expensive) software do it. Apple bundles utilities to do all these things INTUITIVELY, and intergrates them well into the OS. If you want something more powerful, go get Final Cut, photoshop, premere, etc. But, for most people, the iApps are fine.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Found out today that the server that we use for authenticating 100's of users on our very large IRIX DB server is Windows.
How did I find out? After it caught a virus and was down for the whole day.
Sigh. Perhaps management will learn something from this...
I do tech support for a government agency, and all that they really care about is how it looks. You replace someone's 15" CRT monitor with a 17" LCD, and the first they they whine about is that it doesn't match the color of their kb and mouse (none of them have yet to ever notice the tower behind all their space heaters, so that's not an issue.) They don't care about the performance of the monitor, or what it does for eyestrain, or what its maximum resolution is...all that they care about is that it isn't as pretty as the other one was. So yes, appearances are everything.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
Instead of duplicating MS-Windows, we should spend a good part of our effort changing the way people think about information.
I'm glad you think the same way. I first used KDE/GTK after a long history of using a wide variety of GUIs - on suns, amigas, ataris, macs and windows. There's good and bad in many of them, and windows fares as just pretty average. It's not downright horrific, but I find there are parts where the simplest options - those which would benefit from a well-designed gui - were hidden in a mire of complexity.
Upon mentioning to a friend who's a staunch OSS defender that I'd finally used KDE and Gnome apps and found them "to be just like windows" he replied with "Yes! we're coming a long way aren't we!". He'd totally missed the point that so much effort had gone into copying what is popular, not what is -right-.
Sometimes I'm still amazed in very well-designed utilities that I can be presented with a GUI that contains perhaps 2 buttons, a display window and 4 menu options - absolute minimalism, that at first glance looks so limiting, but then also finding I've jumped straight into doing more with that utility, and in less time than I thought
While I think Windows isn't without it's significant usability flaws, I have to say that I tried KDE 3 seriously for the first time today, and it was an absolute usability nightmare. I have no idea what people are talking about when they say that KDE is kindly-yet-computer-inexperienced-grandmother-frie ndly. I've been using computers seriously for 20 years now, and there were oodles of things that I either couldn't figure out how to do in the hour I used KDE, or that were incredibly unintuitive. I won't even begin to critique the KDE control panel. Talk about a nightmare of ambiguity, poor organization, and far too much complexity.
Not to mention - who thought up that hideous default sound scheme? I know that I'm going to have nightmares about it tonight. My skin was crawling for the few minutes it took me to figure out how to turn it off.
Not that Windows control panels are much better... Windows control panels are also hideously disorganized, with things in completely nonintuitive places (sometimes you have to access the control panel, other times you have to access certain features that you'd logically expect to be in control panels in menus instead, and other times you have to resort to running command line programs to get to windows that provide you with what you're looking for - e.g. ipconfig, msconfig), but I find that the user isn't quite so overwhelmed with options in Windows as they would be in KDE.
Mac OS X is the first operating system where the equivalent of the Control Panel (System Preferences) is logically organized and not overwhelming. I think that software designers should take a usability lesson here.
Whatever happened to the unwritten Linux creed, borrowed from Ghandi:
First they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.
I know the article is supposed to be funny, but at its core it comes across as bitter and whiny. If Linux is better, then let it be better on its own merits, period.
Im not quite sure what they mean by desktop? Windows has been every where since at least 3.1, wtf do you mean is it ready? Every one and their grandma is using it.
----- The aluminum foil helmet is for my protection!
provide one, and only one, way to access the hierarchical list of files. If clicking on icons to open folders full of more icons is how people learn to use the window manager, then why doesn't the save file dialog box allow the same interface?
The user goes to Save the letter to Aunt Gazelda they just crafted, and all of a sudden they're thrust into a new universe - files listed by filename, with little "plus signs" next to folders! The "current directory" on their desktop is not the "current directory" of the file chooser! This new tiny window looks totally different than anything they ever saw on the desktop.
This single issue has been confusing my parents for many years now. When I visit them, I have to search around their hard drive to find all the files they accidentally threw in the top level directory, or other wrong directories.
The concept that you can have multiple views of your files and folders is just overwhelming, for some reason.
Besides being the pioneering IDE (text editor, compiler, debugging runtime, runtime library), the whole freaking thing was a less than 40 kilobyte (yep kilobyte) image. My guess is that the runtime library was the first 10-12 kilobytes because that is what got grafted on to your apps. The rest was text editor (I still use the WordStar idioms with Borland editors to this day) and compiler. The belief is that the whole thing was written in assembly language, but my guess is that only the runtime library (largely Int 21 and Int 10 function calls -- remember those?) was in assembler -- no big deal as it was largely hooks into DOS -- and the rest was in my guess written in Turbo Pascal itself -- probably initially hand translated to bootstrap itself.
And you could peek and poke both memory and IO ports and make any DOS Int 21 or BIOS Int 10 or whatever calls you wanted that weren't in the runtime library -- who need assembly language, I used it to control everything from video cards to A/D boards.
And that runtime environment caught runtime errors and put you in the editor at that line number -- what a concept. Too bad something like that doesn't work today. I find that no current Borland product these days produces a useful runtime error line number anymore, mainly because the bombs I get these days are from supplying wrong parameters to the Windows API (as an old Turbo Pascal hacker I have no need for this Delphi VCL stuff, I program to the API), and Delphi throws up its hands because it can't trace crashes into the bowels of Windows.
oh how very very very true.
Why play around with silly junk when all I WANT to do is ABC. I try to tell my family how to use these things. They will never 'get it'. Because they see the computer as a toaster/vcr/tv/car. The see it as a magic box. Push a button and poof it does exactly what they want. Unfortuantly computers let you have LOTS of buttons. OH and you must get it in the right sequence or it will not work.
I have heard it a hundred times 'all I want to do is ABC'.
Most of them have also fallen victim to 'you must have a computer'. Press them for WHY they bought it, and you will sometimes find 'just because'.
There are several reasons people buy windows over linux. They are both about equal operating systems these days. Cost is usually not a factor because it comes with the box. That is the only time most people upgrade. So you better have a very good reason to change the OS on that box. For it is not a trival thing to do. Linux does not have that reason. They are both about the same. There is no 'I MUST HAVE THAT'. You will never get major numbers of people to switch without it. You can also get them if they feel they can have both at the same time and it will not be a problem.
There is no real compeling reason for anyone to switch. Then the only time you could possible make them switch is when they buy a new computer. They do not think about OS's. They could care less. 'All they want to do is ABC'. You could probably find a ABC like program in linux. But they KNOW the app ABC, and ABC runs on windows and thats that.
Not only do they want 'ABC'. They do not want to have to stand on their heads and recite the first four lines of a random star trek episode to make it work. They want to push a button, and it WORKS. For the first computer that comes along and does ABC but they do not have to recite the declaration of independence to get it to work they will jump at.
When my family comes to me for advice on a new box. I do not even bother with 'how fast is it', or 'how much ram is there'. More than likely these days its way better than my box. I steer them towards companies that have decent tech support, and can help them out of a jam. They may not end up with the BEST computer. But they usually end up with something that can be fixed. It matters not if the box is somewhat slow. They will be chucking it in a few years anyway. When they buy ABC version 2.3 that does something they MUST have. And ABC version 2.3 requires way more computer than they have...
The other reason people will never switch is because of 'i hate this stupid thing'. I have heard that thousands of times. Even said it myself a few times. Usually it is doing something you do not want it to, or not at all. Linux can be a complex beast to get ahold of. And can be way more complex than windows could even dream of. This does not help Linux.
The orig poster forgot one of the rules of computing. Not everyone knows as much as you think you do. Just because you were able to find it in the obscure HOWTO that you were able to google with their usenet archive. Does not mean my family will be able to do that. They probably have no idea google even exists!
I have been doing this long enough that people think I am awsome at this. I am not. I probably been banging my head harder on these computers just because I am stuborn. I just have more welts on my head than they do. I have also found you can show someone at most 1-2 steps at a time. Past that, they will be asking you to show that to them again.
Take my dad for example. All he wanted to do was sell things. Once I showed him ebay. It was like a fish to water. Before that I was lucky if I could get him to turn the computer on/off correctly. Now hes opening apps, clicking on things, and so on. But past that though, oh boy. I pushed it a tad to much and bought him a digital camera. WAY to complex for what he needed. He has no problem with film and a button. But a computer and button, too much. I KNOW he will never even touch the thing. Just because he has no nead for it.
Oh wait. You're...serious? Please God no.
If Linux as a modern consumer operating system could be said to have a weakness, its Xfree86. It's a fucking toy-- A broken one at that. Xfree86 is the achillies heal of every Linux zealot who is worth his weight in flour, and the fact that you're pimping it as a serious alternative to Windows just goes to prove how utterly little you know what you're on about!
I like how you're so quick to call 'FUD' on everyone's arguments against X in this thread, when for most users, the points they're making are the absolute black and white truth. I also admire your sheer fucking gall to call Windows unstable by comparison. By making this statement, you're either affirming yourself to be a bumbling fuckwit unable to keep the most widely used OS in the world working straight for more than a few hours, or you're just trying to hold obsolete versions of windows up against the latest releases of X and hoping no-one notices. I hate to break it to you, but either way you lose, seeing as how even the older versions of Windows are more stable and better featured than even the latest builds of X, gnome, KDE and every single fucking 2-bit window manager out there. Combined.
If you took 5 minutes out of your fucking fantasy land and actually looked long and hard at your average X session, you might be able to see what normal, every day people have to put up with. But then you probably pull out X-kill so many times a day it's as to you as swatting flies is to a man living in a house made of elephant shit.
Does anyone remember those 'amazing discoveries' infomercials? With the hideously bad actors who potrayed simple, day-to-day activities with so much confusion and fear on their faces that they looked as if they were trying to tie their shoelaces using only 1 finger on each hand? And then you'd cut away to the sheer glee on their faces as the Amazotron 6000 tied their shoelaces for them in only twice as long? That is how I find best describes the X zealot. Whereas normal human beings are content going about their day-to-day lives using tried-and-tested ways and methods, these fuckwits just can't stand to conform to the 'norm. They'd much rather be off pioneering new and exciting ways to do menal tasks that everyone else has no problem with. The only problem is: They're still about 5 years behind everyone else! and they're not gaining any ground at all! Oh No!
See folks, while Linux is an excellent, versatile, stable platform ideal for nearly every server-app under the sun, Xfree86 is a half-arsed crack at the wonderful X windowing system, which isn't even fit for gabage. never mind the desktop. Us Windows users have got that covered, thanks.
Please stop trying to "advocate linux to everyone". Just...stop. Teach them, Help them, Educate them and Support them...but stop trying to convince them.
That's called a learning curve. Ask them how much they knew about Photoshop or any of the Office apps until they took the time to learn? And offer to help them learn.
Good. Don't advocate GNU/Linux. Educate people to the point where they can evaluate GNU/Linux vs. Windows on their own merits. GNU/Linux is not a "Godsend"...it's an affordable option to proprietary, expensive, invasive software.
I couldn't agree more. We, as a community, need to focus more on education and less on Microsoft-bashing. If we're right, and GNU/Linux/*BSD/Mac are Good Things(tm), then showing people their options does us much more good than bashing Microsoft. (Besides...MS-bashing really is like shooting fish in a barrel to anyone with a computer security background.)
Well, you kinda veered into FUD-ville here. Can you qualify any those statements? Or...wait...Bill, is that you? I didn't know you were still trolling slashdot!
Wow, you really went off the reservation of simply disagreeing with me with this one. Where did you read that I advocated "coercing" people into running GNU/Linux? You're entitled to your opinion that people are better off running Windows and I won't argue otherwise; I'm too busy showing them the alternatives and letting them make the ultimate decision.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
That is the most frigging brilliant observation of typical user technique I have ever read - and I do read a lot. That's it, right there. Perfect.
This is not only why most Linux configs are not ready for the masses, but also why most Windows configs break so goddamn fast. Classic MacOS generally only threw a modal when the above characterization was basically a rational response, because it probably wasn't going to give you a second chance. It was going to crash hard. Soon.
It seems to me that most people simply don't even begin to think that they could pay attention to all these strange little things their computer does "on its own" and start to see a pattern... and that 90% of the time that pattern would point to user error (whether the user is really at fault or not).
The scary, important part is that they shouldn't have to.
[|]
Listen, Betamax was a better format than VHS, and I knew this. But did I ever go out and buy a Betamax player? No. Why not? Because Blockbuster doesn't carry Beta. Because my friends, my mom, and everyone I know don't have Beta.
Now, I use Linux for my webservers, and it works fine there. Just like I've (okay, my production people have, not me) used betamax for video production in the past. If you need professional grade, and you're not trying to acomodate the end user, these tools are great.
But I *like* being able to go to CompUSA and actually be able to buy a game. Not go to CompUSA, look at a huge shelf of software and hunt for the 5 titles that have a *nix version, out of the 150 titles they have in stock. Hell, the situation is better on the Mac, and it's still not to the point where I'd own a Mac, even though I know that OSX is supperior to windows in many ways.
I honestly think that trying to "win the hearts and minds of joe sixpack" over to *nix is a BAD thing. With windows, we have a standard. I could argue for how great the wierd little wall outlet plugs they have in Europe are, but I'd be a moron to install them in my home if I lived in the USA.
The Atari Jaguar was a much better game system than PS One, but it had crap for software, and not much of it at that. So it died. Should we have pushed for everyone to go buy a Jaguar instead of a Playstation because it was better? Never mind the fact that the games people wanted to play were on playstation. No, this is about good vs evil! We have to figure out a way to prop up Atari!
It's the same thing. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but once something achievs a certain critical mass of market penetration, it becomes a standard. And trying to change these standards to incompatible ones hurts.
Now, the audio market has made a shift several times. Records -> 8 Tracks -> Tapes -> CDs
Video has done this once VHS -> DVD. But with each of these, there was compelling demand for bringing something new to the table. And in each instance, the old format was looking very long in the tooth.
But someone please explain to me why we need to topple windows (Which in my opinion is more mature for the end user than any OS except for OSX) rather than developing it further? Or in this case, being closed source, alowing (and encouraging) Microsoft to take it further? I won't let this become an open source vs closed sourse debate. It's irrelivant. I've never looked at the code of 99% of the open source software I run. And I know that the fact that I've looked at source code at all EVER puts me in a very small minoriity. MY MOM DOES NOT NEED THE SOURCE CODE TO HER SOUND CARD DRIVERS!!! If *you* like to tinker... if *you* like to hack the code, more power to you! But why does this mean that we need to overthrow Microsoft's monopoly, and install one that only a minority want?
Is Microsoft a monopoly? Yes. Are they abusing that? Yes. Should they be punished? Yes.
But itself Windows is not bad. It's a good OS. It is not evil. It is a product. I hate a lot of things Sony does, I hate their stupid useless standards that they try to impose, and I hate how they ran MiniDisc into the ground rather than letting it compete as an open standard against CDs. But I love Trinitrons. And I feel that Sony makes better TVs and Mointors than any others I can afford.
I make a distinction between companies and their products. I buy Sony TVs, Camcorders and DVD players, but I refrain on Playstations (I'm a Nintendo fanboy) and anything involving memory stick. And I write letters to Sony telling them why my money goes to Olympus, rather than getting a shiny new Sony Digital Camera with the Carl Zeiss lense, or why I decided not to opt for the Aiwa stereo and went Pioneer instead, or to Nintendo and Panasonic, urging them to bring the Gamecube/DVD player hybrid goodness that is the Q to the U.S., or to Microsoft urging them to bring features like the ability to keep one user's apps running in the background while another user is logged in and using the computer, which I'm told was just introduced in XP.
Companies listen to users, they want to please their customers, so that they can make more money off of them. I have a brand new copy of XP sitting on my desk waiting to be installed, because I'm hyped about some of the new features it brings to the table over Win2K. Microsoft is pleasing me on the OS front. But I don't use their browser. I use Mozilla. People have every right to freak out when something isn't the way they expect. These hybrid cars from Honda and Toyota are great because they work like cars, not golf carts. You don't have to plug them in. They fuel up at the same fuel station as everyone else. People are used to that. Just like they are used to MS word, and being able to port documents between home and work.
You can name thousand and one reasons why Windows sucks. But I don't see any advantage in throwing it out and improving on *nix to get it up to where Windows is now, rather than improving Windows to make it better.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.