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Open-Source Software and "The Luxury of Ignorance"
Bootsy Collins writes "Using the recent experience of trying to configure
CUPS
on his home network, Eric Raymond has
written an interesting new screed on poor design of user interfaces in general, and configuration interfaces in particular, in open source software, entitled
The Luxury of Ignorance.
A sample quote: 'This kind of fecklessness is endemic in open-source land. And it's what's keeping Microsoft in business -- because by Goddess, they may write crappy insecure overpriced shoddy software, but on this one issue their half-assed semi-competent best is an order of magnitude better than we usually manage.'"
JWZ was trying to get video to play on his box. More than a year old, but still a good guide to interface design.
So, if you are out there writing GUI apps for Linux or BSD or whatever, here are some questions you need to be asking yourself:
Well, if ease-of-use is paramount, why aren't Macs more popular?
There's your problem right there "I have a desktop machine named 'snark'."
- Nick Busey
www.pedalbmx.com
www.nickbusey.com
That's not necessarily true. Mandrake set up CUPS and just about everything else I've needed with no problems at all. It's all about what you're doing. For some programs under some distros you need to be a programmer to install and / or set them up. Under other distros, and with other programs, it can be a breeze. (Just look at how well Knoppix does!)
I had a very hard time configuring cups for the first time, but after I learned how to do it, it proved to be '''much''' easier to administer and manage than it is in windows. It was also easier to change configurations without breaking multiple user's print settings. This is true with a lot of open source things. Hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, there is no going back.
The Television Wiki
What a rant! Im going to send mod points to Eric Raymond's house by mail.
Ignorance and the user won't step out of their bounds beyond their Internet Explorer and Outlook. Unfortunately, others like Gator and BetterInternet will do it on their behalf.
In the end, a computer is more like a car than an oven, capable of great power but requiring a good deal of knowledge to use (and not run over people in the process).
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
...ESR was found beaten severely, with the names of several CUPS developers found tatoo'd on his forehead....
It is punditry, but it's also something that has been said quite a few times before, including by Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame.
Really. There is a ton of OSS software with really shitty user interfaces, but anything involving fonts or printing seems to be crappy beyond belief.
Congratulations on perfectly illustrating the attitude that keeps anyone from solving the problem. Congratulations to the moderator who gave you +1 Funny for doing exactly the same.
Anyone who can't use an interface you understand isn't as smart as you and therefore is not worthy of consideration. Is that it? You can see where this leads when a developer hears criticism of the UI - they designed it, so of course they understand it. Stupid users! Of course it's their fault.
And then they go and blame the same users for choosing windows...
You mean a bunch of volunteers didn't always think about the (l)users and created a bad UI? Wow, none of us knew that!
This problem does exist, and is being worked on. C'mon, just look at the GNOME Project. They have a whole team of UI designers working to make it better for the common man. I know ESR has been a big contributor to open source, but in this case: submit a patch or shut up. Identifying a problem we all know exists isn't that amazing.
Everything depends on what system you are configuring CUPS on. I'd agree with you for Mandrake Linux, but configuring CUPS under Slackware is anything but easy. I think one of the major problems is that people come out with great tools (i.e. CUPS), but they require a certain amount of effort / sophistication to use / configure, so distros like Mandrake, Suse, and Red Hat write their own configuration tools. Only problem is that because each distro is set up slightly differently, configuration tools aren't portable across distros. Perhaps what we need is a collaborative effort by the major distros to create 1 size fits all config tools.
The entire nation considers your written and spoken rants both condescending and highly obnoxious.
Are you kidding me? This is precisely the thing that we need to concentrate on. If we can't be critical of ourselves - MS sure can.
Dear Anonymous Coward, The entire slashdot community considers your written and spoken rants both enlightening and amusing. Please, be our leader, and write more opinion pieces. Thank you, Everyone.
How Important developers of the GNU and Open Source Movement are living the obscure land of kernel hacking and going to write some userland code. Many times, in Free Software, the underlying system, the lower level development is made by the most competent developers, and so is robust, stable, actually the best out there, but the front ends, well, they just don't have the same quality, so, for the unexperienced user, it looks like crap. I think it's time that we change this, and start showing that GNU can also be reliable on the Desktop, not only showing how fast it is, but also good end-user interfaces. It's not that i don't like KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc,etc, they are ok, but i think that if we put the best people to work on it, they will be even better.
Linus has been talking about this recently, are we going to start seeing things like Linusorganizer, Linword??, hehe, that would be nice.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
It's true that the OSS community needs to beef up many area of the developpement process.
Software isn't just about the code the same way that a car isn't just about the engine.
For people to want to use it in the first place, to enjoy it once they've started using it and to stay with it, a "product" needs many qualities.
This (often) explains why an inferior design can becomes the norm.
So lets get cracking with artists, GUI/interface designers and and documentation writers!
I will anticipate the "Well, why don't you do something! Where's the patch?" posts and answer:
I'm doing what I can with the talents that I have (often amounts to writing suggestions to developpers, bug-reports, spreading the word on new stuff and donations).
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I honestly have not ever heard someone use that term outside of The Clash. I shall use it tomorrow a minimum of twice.
.-=Wit is educated insolence=-. -Aristotle
If the user interfaces are so poor, why don't you help fix them? Instead of approaching this in a manner designed to piss people off and create enemies, why don't you say things like:
- "It seems to me that the cups configuration wizard could be a bit more intuitive. Specifically at these points..."
or (shockingly) even better:- "Here's a patch that I feel makes the cups configuration wizard more user friendly. I was able to have 10 of my non-linux friends successfully configure a networked printer from my wife's workstation with the patched version. Can anyone find a way to do things even better?"
More of us would listen to you if you stopped insulting people left and right. We might even take heart in your suggestions and join in the fun of making a better UI.Dear ESR - :)
We will accept your critcisms of CUPS when you fix it. It is, after all, open source
-Your OSS pals.
I know that something called "CUPS" exists on my iBook. I just don't know what it is or what it's supposed to do. And yet, I've never had any trouble accomplishing any task on my iBook that I've set out to achieve. I guess this is why OS X is better than Linux in some ways.
Anyone who can't configure CUPS shouldn't be talking about ignorance...
Do you even KNOW who Eric S. Raymond is?
Your credentials had better be damned good before you go around casting aspersions like that. There aren't too many names in open source software bigger than his.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Talk about luxury of ignorance. I pitch open source software to family/friends/bosses every chance I get. Now this one time, I was telling my boss about OpenOffice when MSOffice bailed out on him.
Boss: Damn. This MSWord thingy sucks.
Me: You should try using Open Office once. Its a good sub and its free!
Boss: Free? I am telling you one more time. Stop downloading things off of KaZaA damnit
Me: No. No. No. You got me all wrong. Its free as in 'free as a beer' free.
Boss: Does it have Clippy?
Me: What?
Boss: I looovvvvee Clippy. He is so cute
Me: Well, it doesn't really have a Clippy per se but...
Boss: Oh common. How do you expect me to use it if it doesn't have Clippy. I am a PHB
Me: What?
Boss: I am a pointy handed boss
Me: Handed? Ohhh well. Nevermind.
At that point I just walked away defeated by clippy and luxury of ignorance.
Free XBox, PS2
Although CUPS is easier than hell to setup to me, this is a major problem with OSS, ease of use. We geeks write software, and most of the time don't think about the pee-brained morons on the other end. And even sometimes we don't think of just simply the normal person at the other end. We create interfaces, and leave them at that, assuming we do create GUIs. Installation is usually a bitch, and the layout of a GUI generally takes some time. Please note that this is not a majority problem, the majority of OSS software is actually good in the interface design. But, this is true with a lot of commercial products also, so take this with a grain of salt.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
Uhm, I guess you've never heard of ESR before. When he talks about the open source community as, "We," he really means "we." He is actually doing the work.
ESR is part of the community. He's not some teenager whining that the software doesn't work - he's a respected figure pointing out a problem in hopes that it will be recognized and fixed.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
The problem is in Fedora, not Cups. Cups works just fine, and more or less like he wants it to, if that is all you ever use. Fedora, using whatever configuration system it uses placed some unuseable stuff there.
Granted Cups could use a lot of help, but he wasn't using a Cups configurator, he was using some other configurator that can work with not only Cups, but also SMB, LPR, and a bunch of other stuff. I don't know the solution, but bashing the Cups guys won't get you any closer to it.
Either I can take his side and be called an idiot because I'm sure someone will claim to have an easy solution to my problem. That's what someone claimed the last time I mentioned I couldn't get MPlayer working and then of course the suggested solution didn't work. Or, I can stay out of the discussion entirely. I think I'll do the latter instead.
That rant, to me, sounds like another programmer who can't cope with the idea that most people do not think like programmers when it comes to understanding software, and would rather blame the user than have the strength to take an honset look at the situation and what he/she could do differently to improve it.
I know writing GUIs is a pain (I'm not a professional programmer, but I've had to do nothing but coding for 2 years), but programmers have to stop blaming the users and other people who point out things like this. It's just a denial that 95% of all people using a computer need something simple because, to them, IT IS JUST A TOOL, and they need to use it to produce a product, not to hack on and explore.
ESR has a good point -- if FOSS is going to replace closed source, or hold its own, or even continue to grow, FOSS programmers will have to get realistic in understanding how users think instead of blaming users because the programmers don't want to make the effort to understand the other side of the issue.
For the good of the FOSS community, ESR needs to speak out more, and people like the above poster need to "please shut up" and listen to other points of view, instead of hiding their head in the sand in denial.
First of all, as a self-taught Linux user I am delighted that someone as talented as ESR can have a hair-pulling session doing something like setting up CUPS. I have had many an evening like this. Excruciatingly close to getting something done, something that should be simple, and instead spending hours feeling stupid and incompetent. He's right, and he's right about the fact that this is why there are countless unused Linux install discs littering desk drawers under Windows machines, tried and abandoned by people who hate Micorosft, hate Windows, who would LOVE to support an alternative, but can't make it work.
The user is the loser. There's a clubby, exclusive, snotty attitude among user's groups. The online resources are hopelessly disorganized or relentlessly dinged with ads. The vision that Stallman has of software as knowledge, rather than product, is lost among the throng of sociopaths that spout RTFM at users that ask the same questions over and over.
Well, you know why people have the same questions over and over? Because the software is obscure and the documentation is unhelpful. GNU is based on people solving their own problems and then giving other people an opportunity to use thier solutions. Documentation, at best, is an afterthought. Once you have solved a problem, there's no need to go back and explain it to yourself, any documentation that does exist arises purely from the virture of developers, not because they need it themselves.
The fact that the most useful thing you can have with this enormously powerful gem of human progress (the computer) when trying to use Linux is a printed-out HOW-TO, probably downloaded and printed from a Windows box, is more than ironic, it is shameful. The tools for providing context-sensitive help are there, they just are unused. The developers don't care about the user, they've solved thier problem by this time.
If OSS developers needed robust documentation in order to distribute their product, they would either develop it or not distribute their code. But they don't. There's no reward for the developer.
This brings me around again to the notion of licensing software developers and then making them accountable for the usability of the product. Not as an avenue for exclusion, but to build a community of developers devoted to the user, a Mr. Goodwrench sort of certification standards, that tests it's releases against naive and novice users. How you make this work I have no idea.
Red Hat should be doing this already, but they've clearly left the home user at the altar.
The best way to do is to be.
I spent HOURS AND HOURS trying to get CUPS working on my Linux box with ONE SIMPLE PRINTER on LPT1! It spit out vague error messages and error codes and google searching turned up nada. I eventually gave up and installed LPRNG which only took JUST A FEW HOURS after tricking out magicfilter to work properly (I still had to force the stupid printcap file to find the appropriate directory). Face it, setting up printing under Linux can suck.
I always try and get an open source-coding friend of mine to understand this, and it never seems to sink in.
Interface design is an incredibly important part of any software project - it's like the clothes you wear to a job interview. Sure, you *might* get the job if you wear your regular jeans and t-shirt, but if you take the time to dress up, you will create a much more favourable impression on the potential employer you are meeting.
Similarly, taking the time to make your user interface polished and intuitive is one of the best ways to end up with happy end users who tell other people how great your software is. It lets them know that you care enough about the software you create to spend a few extra hours making it look nice instead of shoving it out the door as fast as possible.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
You're all missing the point. Trying to configure CUPS does suck if you're on your own trying to figure it out. Anything with Linux is this way. I'm not a college-aged dork sitting in a dorm not getting laid with 20 other dorks playing EQ. I'm trying to figure out how to use this powerful tool, and if I have to spend 3 days studying dusty man pages to set up a frickin' printer - forget it. Takes me 10 minutes to write a script to install a queued novell printer when I click on a NAL - and then leverage that against 10,000 machines that I don't have to touch. Will Linux do this one day? I hope so.
- [no response. evar]
- This is different from Windoze - I know that! I don't want "Windoze" (how cute, BTW) I want to tell you that your fucking design sucks rocks!
- If you want stupid, use Windoze instead - Again, very cute. Also arrogant and stupid.
- This is how it's done in Linux - Well shiieet, of course it is. That doesn't mean it's correct.
- Did you RTFM|Google? - Well of course, for the last fucking 4 hours, just.
- The next version will have... - That's great except that if I Google for what you said about this version I see the same thing. Wow, Usenet is great, eh?
- We're not going to add that, that's stupid - Of course!
- Use [x] instead - Yeah, except that [x] has been in alpha for the past nine years.
- Check out [this page] - Fantastic. If that's not a 404 I guess I'll have to learn Japanese! Weee!
- You're welcome to ask for a refund - Wahahaha!!!
It takes a rant from ESR (who despite his pretensions doesn't know much about human interaction) to get people to do things right? Wow.I always get a chuckle when people compare Linux to OS X or Windows in usability terms. KDE looks absolutely fantastic after I log in, but the fun stops there. If I actually want to do anything else I have to fire up vi and edit 1,000 conf files. Give me a break.
And yes, ESR is right. This is one of the things that keep Windows users in Windows and perpetuate what you folks call "monoculture". Whining about it and blaming everything on "M$" won't fix anything. Great software ultimately sucks if I can't use it.
It's unfortunate, but it seems that most of us (myself included) deal with endless yelling at people who don't understand/value what we understand/value by deciding that everyone else is an idiot. Some of us become a fire-breathing libertarian. Some of us eschew all organized religion, or at least replace the one we were brought up in with one that we find amusingly unorthodox. Sometimes we just become an arrogant ass (that's the one I settled on).
Am I over-analyzing here? I'm honestly not trying to troll or flame, just navel-gaze.
The configuration problem is simple. I have a desktop machine named 'snark'. It is connected, via the house Ethernet, to my wife Cathy's machine, which is named 'minx'. Minx has a LaserJet 6MP attached to it via parallel port. Both machines are running Fedora Core 1, and Cathy can print locally from minx. I can ssh minx from snark, so the network is known good.
(my emphasis)
He's given up his right to claim newbie ignorance right there. Aunt Tillie couldn't even conceive printing through a network.
It's a reference to Eris, Goddess of Discordia. Give this a read, and DO NOT take it seriously. If you do, you have missed the point. ;)
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Yes... exactly his point. IF you want Linux to succeed on the desktop, you will have to one day realize that the *vast* majority of users will have little to no technical experience or expertise. Not only will they have criticisms but they will not, and have absolutely no desire to, fix such issues. Instead, they will abandon it and go find something else easier to use.
It's attitudes exactly as yours that will relegate Linux to a niche. You are not helping Linux and OSS, you are hurting it.
show me the code, or shut up
Have you looked for the code?
Your post tells of smacks of an attitude all too typical in open source... You believe only code gurus should criticize software. Eric may or may not be a code guru, but that argument is flat wrong. Bad interface is why Linux is taking so long to make inroads on the desktop. It's a legitimate problem that needs to be addressed and maybe *JUST MAYBE* people who write code are not the best user interface designers. Maybe users are simply not as deterministic as software.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
He got so pissed he couldn't type straight!
Buy the President
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
The article was insightful, and it contains some things I still did not know after wrestling with integrating CUPS, Turboprint (crappy Canon printer) and Samba, but to be fair to the CUPS developer, they did not write redhat-config-printer; Red Hat did.
CUPS and Turboprint works well, as it turns out, the problem is that printing from OOo (Linux), printing from OOo (Win) using CUPS' postscript driver, and printing from OOo (Win) to a Windows printer results in different page margins being used. Bummer. At least the fonts look identical if the same fonts are used on both ends.
And for those people with new Winprinters wondering why raw printing from Samba does not work anymore, you need to add the Windows user as a printer admin. Not documented *anywhere*.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Perhaps Mr. Raymonds' problem is that he EXPECTS all open source stuff to work flawlessly first time out of the box instantly just BECAUSE it's open source.
In the Windows world it's always a little like being a landmine tester by hitting it with a hammer. So we expect that the configuration dialog for the printer device will just hang or crash for no obvious reason. We expect that MS common UI design isn't and most of the critical functions are never in the same place.
Predictable Failure. We hope for a minimal effort, at best. But in the OS world we think sheer brilliance will save us all no matter how obscure. So when it doesn't we experience a level of frustration and disappointment we're not accustomed to.
Why does Microsoft do GUI design better? Because if you pay a programmer a lot of money, he'll do whatever boring work you want him to. They may even have some folks who find GUI layout and design interesting.
There's the problem. Anyone know how to make GUI programming more interesting?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My mom and dad have a computer (but 10 years ago they wouldn't touch mine) and there's no way in hell they'd figure out how to configure Linux to print, or network or even change the display resolution. The number of people with personal computers today is astronomically higher than it was 10 years ago and one of the core reasons for that is that they are no longer intimidating to the uninitiated; if you take all those people and throw them back to the usability of ten years ago they'll just give up on computers like they did back then.
You can shout RTFM all you want, Joe Blow doesn't want to read it. So if you want Joe Blow to use your wares make them as easy to use as the competition.
With closed source the responsibility lies solely with the company to solve the problems.
With open souce, problems are just an excuse to try to force people who find problems to "join the cause" or you can just ignore any problems they find.
Here's a crazy idea members of the Open Source community such as yourself need to get through your thick skull: take responsibility for the crap you write. If you write the code, it's YOUR responsibility to fix the problems. No one else is obligated to fix a line of code and is more than free to point out the flaws.
He didn't write CUPS so why should he feel obligated to fix it? He's a USER. He didn't write the code. He didn't design the interface. As a USER he's in a position to criticize. It's what users do.
Whinning he doesn't treat you like a king and kiss your feet for blessing him with what he sees as crap, is not going to do anything to win support for the project.
This is why I choose what Open Source projects I use very carefully and rarely recommend them and never because they are Open Source.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
The way to get help with your linux problems is to troll and say "Linux is teh suxx0rz because XYZ doesn't work!"
Then 4,000 penguin-fanboys will come out of the wood work, each with a distinct solution to your problem!
Now had you asked for help, they would have said "Read the man page! n00b!"
As for me, I can't really help you. I run AIX. And some other window'd operating system that allows to to remotely access my AIX boxes.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
All in all a pretty decent article.
I agree with many of his points, if there is one thing I dislike in the *nix culture it is the elitism, and holier than thou attitude that many people in said culture have towards users. This is just one more sign of that elitism, we spend hours and hours making very good stable, well designed software, and then we demand that you read a 1500 page book to be able to use it... That's stupid, now you can say "if they don't want to learn they shouldn't be using this software" but that's dumb too... my dad is an attorney, he wants to work on cases, and do legal research and the like, thats what he's interested in, he doesn't want to spend an hour a day figuring out how to share printers/files and send emails, and he doesn't want to have to pay someone $150/hr every time he needs to add a printer to his network. My wife is a psychologist, she wants to care for her patients, and work on her book, she doesn't want to be bothered with figuring out how to configure her computer, and she shouldn't have to be... That said, the author shouldn't have been bashing the CUPS guys, the configurator in question is an inhouse product by redhat/fedora, no other distribution uses it, and the default setting of having the broadcast turned off was also a decision by redhat/fedora not the CUPS programmers (well it might have been made by the CUPS devs, but redhat/fedora had every opportunity to change that default behavior). I appreciate the article though because he is right on in critisizing the community for their lack of vision in this regard. (btw, I admin a 7000 node network, and the entire thing is controlled by linux and unix servers, there are windows nodes, but I would never run windows on the server side, and I rarely use it on the desktop either so don't count me as some MS apologist)
Contrary to what you think, the least expensive Mac is the entry-level eMac, which costs $799. Check it out for yourself.
Ignorance like yours -- particularly to compare a $300 Intel box with a Mac -- is a huge reason for Apple's lack of market share. Apple has made a LOT of mistakes on its own, but people like you who THINK they know something about Macs are just as big a source of the problem.
It's really easy to jump on the Anti-Microsoft bandwagon when it's time, and say "Linux is ready for the desktop, it's high-quality and easy to use, why doesn't it overtake that crap from Redmond". But, when push comes to shove and sombody points out the things that scare off non-technical users from using Linux, OSS "advocates" really seem to have a hard time accepting constructive criticism.
Look -- if it's just a hobby OS, fine, this criticism is totally baseless and cruel. But, if you all want to see your labor of love have a real shot at the desktop market, you're going to have to take criticism like that and work with it -- if it seems angry, it's because end-users get frustrated when they're promised an easy-to-use system, and they have to spend more time wrestling with configuration than actually doing what they need the OS to do.
Either take the criticism as advice and use it to add value to your software so it can be accessible to a larger audience, or accept that your OSS project is just a hobby.
Communism was just a red herring.
It seems to me that at least one major locus of the problem is being missed here. ESR says:
One of the autoconfiguration features that CUPS provides to make life easier for the user was disabled! Now, maybe off should be the default, as a security measure, but from the point of view of ease of use, either the default should be on, or the user should be provided the opportunity to enable it during installation. I don't know whether the default was set by the CUPS people or the people who put together the distribution, but it seems to me that handling this kind of thing is exactly the role of the people who create distributions.
anatomize-1. dissect in order to analyze; "anatomize the bodies of the victims of this strange disease"
...so, your problem is what, exactly?
2. analyze down to the smallest detail; "This writer anatomized the depth of human behavior"
(www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn)
http://www.farmerbob.org
Well, in fact, setting up a network printer in Windows is certainly not better.
You have the choice between "Local printer" and "Network printer". If you do have a network printer like an HP with a JetDirect card, the correct choice is NOT "Network printer". It is "Local printer", and later you have to add a "Standard TCP/IP port". ("Network printer" is only to add a printer shared over SMB by another computer)
So while he has a good point on a bad interface, and while it is true that for some things Windows may have a better interface, it certainly doesn't for networked printers.
I remember trying to get fetchmail to work. What a nightmare.
The kernel configuration system back in 2.4 was crufty and not very user-friendly. So Eric decided to build a new system, CML2. It ended up not going in for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was probably a lot of people don't like him all that much. However, in that case he was practising exactly he is preaching here - making software easier for non-gurus to use.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It's fine to say RTFM to a spotty student who spends his entire free time in front of his Linux box, but ESR is making a valid point that no-one seems to pick up on:
.conf files to get Linux working, only to attract abuse from the same people who encouraged me to use it in the first place?
Most of us don't have the time
I work from 9am to 3am every day, including weekends. I would love to run Linux, purely because Microsoft's pricing and attitudes bother me, but the last time I tried to set up Red Hat, it took me 4 days to get the system to even recognise my video card.
We're not just talking about Aunt Tillie, we're talking about Joe B. Power User, who may have the skills to work it out eventually but simply does not have the time.
Wheras, I plug my Windows XP machine (and yes, I know this is only a recent thing) into the network and Universal Plug and Play makes network printers accessible without my having to so much as touch the PC. Now that's what we want from a Linux distro, and it's not even hard to implement. Why should I have to wade through a dozen
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
This is especially true if its a non-trivial piece of software. Several times new programmers have come into software packages I've been working on, don't bother to read the structural documentation or even the useful other code that serves as examples for how to improve and extend upon the existing structure.
Instead they try and do things their own way, often end up doing things redundantly or breaking something else and just otherwise fouling more than they contribute.
The best person to improve upon software is the person who designed in the first place! Or someone who's worked on it extensively enough to know the quirks, the reasoning behind non-obvious parts and knows the rest of package throughout.
Telling a user to fix a poor piece of software is incredibly frustrating and lame to those of us who, god forbid, have other things to do in our lives.
-
I've held a fairly obvious view for a long time with regards to interface design (be it computer or otherwise):
;)
Unless you're working under a predefined framework, chances are, your design is going to differ from someone elses when you both attempt an identical solution.
This isn't an answer on how to deal with this issue, as the answer(s) are everywhere, it's more of a thought process that keeps me from going crazy.
How many times have you worked with a piece of software or hardware only to move on to another one that was similar in concept, but totally different in execution? It's gotten to the point that I've stopped trying to become an expert at everything, and simply want things to work (maybe I'm just getting older, and have less time and/or memory).
Maybe that's why companies like Apple have a strong following, with a mantra of "it just works".
The next time that Joe Administrator is getting cocky with "oh, you didn't know how to configure file XYZ for ABC", remember, they're just being programmed to use an arbitrary interface, thought up arbitarily by some designer.
And that folks is why I'm working to get out of System Administration, and into programming
[end rant]
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
The better point might be that there are fewer names in open source more derided than ESR.
Here's my idea of a dream setup: the best of both worlds. The consistent GUI of Windows or Mac OSX, and then the rest of it consisting of all that is good from linux(stability, etc).
.conf file. Why would you only have a few configuration options?
I envision mullet computing. Windows/Mac in the front, Linux in the back.
I love how I have some nice GUI configuration options for Samba(in Fedora), but to completely configure it, you still have to dig in the
Come on, are you telling me when something ticks you off about a piece of code you download the tarball or cvs the code and learn the whole thing and dedicate yourself to its betterment??? I hope nothing about the kernel or Mozilla or Mysql tick you off or you are looking at six months of hard study.
Last I checked to print to a network printer under Windows using IPP or LPR you don't choose Network, but instead choose Local. Network printing really means print server printing under Windows, but esr somehow holds that up as an example of a standard to live up to? No thanks. CUPS may be a little rough, but at least when I connect to a printer using ethernet I don't have to choose non-network as the printer type. Of course really it is a print device under windows since according to Microsoft Introduction to Network Printing "The printer is the software interface between a print device and the print clients". Yeah right.
Meetings: None of us are as dumb as all of us.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I notice that most of the comments thus far seem to be along the lines of "We don't need to improve the interface, the users need to get better because they're too dumb to use it right, and they should just learn cause then they'll realize how much better it is!"
This is a common mistake made by programmers. The problem is that not that users are actually all that stupid. The problem is that we tend to think of things in terms of how they're doing something, whereas users want to think of them in terms of what they're doing. For example, I want to set up DHCP to distribute IPs to my OSX box so I can use SMB to pull MP3s off my XP box. This is not the way a user thinks; the average user wants to hook his Compaq to his Mac so he can move around his music. He doesn't want to know what any of those acronyms stand for. He just wants to accomplish a simple task.
Bottom line: the best way to write a good interface is not to think in terms of "what is my software doing" but rather in terms of "what is my user doing." Like my human interface design professor used to say, if people can't use your software, it's not because they're stupid, it's because you designed it poorly. Users prefer usable software to powerful software, when given the choice.
Another point to consider is that, in the eyes of the Managers of potential corporate users of your system, any time employees spent learning all the details of your software is time taken away from getting actual work done. Not to mention that sloppy interfaces that haven't been properly checked often actually COST most companies money, since their employees actually often take longer than it would have otherwise. Good interface design is not a luxury, it is a mandate.
I think its worse than ESR makes it out to be. CUPS is worse than useless. It looks like a printing system, but it is (in my experience) inscrutable and very, very unreliable.
I just threw away a printer, which in its lifetime probably printed 3x more postscript-as-text than actual rendered output, because CUPS is unreliable: try to print, get postscript gibberish, reboot, it keeps on printing gibberish, turn off printer, shut down cupsd, reboot, turn on printer, repeat 3ish times, and I'd occassionally get lucky and it would print non-gibberish for me. I expect that without this added wear, the printer would still work fine.
You might think I should consult the CUPS FAQ, but the CUPS FAQ is itself useless, doesn't answer any questions except "where to read cryptic documentation about printer internals" that you just don't give a shit about.
CUPS should be renamed CUTS: Common Unix Timewasting System.
I generally take ESR's rantings with a pinch of salt. I understand where he is coming from but I think sometimes he has a tendency to go over the top. However in this piece he is right on.
/etc/rc0.d is for.
I am a geek. Not only do I know a shitload about computers I actually work in the industry as a field troubleshooter technician. I have to say though, that although I use Linux on a daily basis on my work PC as my main OS, it still throws me for a loop sometimes when I go through what ESR went through with whatever piece of technologically advanced, functional but ultimately borked UI software I happen to be trying to set up at the time.
He is right - this IS keeping Microsoft in business. Case in point - I get customers constantly asking me if there is a better alternative to Windows. There is of course, but I would NEVER recommend Linux to an end user who just needs to get on with the business of running a business simply because of the lack of intuitive UI's for Linux apps.
There are great, shining examples - K3B, Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Openoffice, Evolution, KDE control centre etc. Let these apps serve as an example to UI designers for other projects.
It's one thing to have all the functionality in the world, but that amounts to sweet FA in the eyes of a gumby user that would rather give money to Microsoft than learn what
"And then I visited Wikipedia
It's hard to know whether it's worth replying to an anonymous moron who can't understand the point of a post. But just in case there are any other children out there who also missed the point, the guy I was responding to quoted a price for the least expensive Mac that was 50 percent higher than the real price. THAT was my point. The poster was displaying gross ignorance about what Macs cost. And if you are stupid enough to believe that a $300 white box from Uncle Fred's Computer and Taxidermy Shop is the equivalent of buying a Mac, you're displaying vast ignorance, too, but just of a different kind.
Seriously.
Try having your grandma setting up a printer with gnome or kde. Better yet try a usb printer.
Send grandma a small video and watch her try and figure out how to play it on linux.
Or best yet watch grandma try and use xcdroast.
Try reading through man pages for stuff like ssh keygen, or X, or any other sort of technical software. Is it really that hard to give human readable description of how to use the shit?
this is what will do, here is an example, here is another example, dont try and use it to do instead should be used.
instead of stuff like this
-e Convert OpenSSH to IETF SECSH key file
?????
seriously documentation is so damn important, and so easy to make. If you write some software, you know what you wrote, so just write a paragraph for each feature, it only takes like 5 minuets and then your software might acually get used.
The same principals go for graphical interface as well as command line interface. Think of a gui as just a extention of cli. This doesn't apply for all software, obviously things like openoffice dont have a cli. But these apps are pretty rare, and the few that exist work pretty good, browsers and office and stuff.
Bottom line, this guy is right. We need better quality apps and configuration utilities for linux.
Adam
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
Why? Because he's a USER. Not a programmer. Developers have a responsibility to listen to their userbase. If you want market-share, then when your users say "I don't understand X", you DO NOT say "well, FINE, fix it yourself!" That is ENTIRELY the wrong attitude. ESR may be confrontational, but you're even more so.
Why doesn't your approach work? Because they're simply going to walk away. Software is so complex these days that many people, even programmers, couldn't possibly contribute without investing a serious amount of time. Hmm, which is a better use of resources- 12 hours of a user messing around learning your functions, conventions, library calls etc(and probably introducing more bugs than features)- or 15 minutes for you to add the button yourself?
I know -exactly- how he feels. Countless times I've found software that has a super-spiffy web page, touts how damn good it is to anyone who's reading- but you unpack the source and Jeeeeesuschriiiiiist you can't figure out which way is up- and I've been building and compiling unix packages for almost 10 years(when i was yer age, we had to edit makefile library paths ourselves! None of this automake...) Then, if you get it built, you run it and menus have confusing names, there's no help file, there are secret options nobody mentions that are in the ~/.myprogram directory, and so on.
The mldonkey p2p client was an excellent example. The developers continuously worked on all sorts of weird theoretical schemes for this and that, while the userbase clamored for a manual(there was none), a description of what each setting did(ditto- the developers would cheerfully add some oddly-named option and not explain to ANYONE what it did), or for features that were common in other clients. Such as the ability to share a file without having to restart the client(shocking!) But hey, you got three different algorithms to pick from for how it managed sources for files. Yaaaay!
Please help metamoderate.
And here I was all set to moderate. Oh well.
.dvi preview and a TeX eq -> eps Service) I could switch to open source for all my work.
pdfTeX, Latin Modern, and FontInst to name three opensource projects involving fonts and printing which are absolutely fabulous.
pdfTeX in particular is so robust it's used to do things like provide railroad timetables on-demand and to run commercial printing imposition systems. Take a look at http://custompub.aimsapp.com to see an interactive example.
Latin Modern is an excellent example of taking an opensource thing (the venerable Computer Modern), applying a new opensource application (MetaType1) and getting a new result (an up-dated and corrected and Type 1 font which is Unicode encoded so as to be suitable for use w/ a wide variety of the world's languages)
FontInst (a font installation utility for TeX written in TeX) is in a class by itself, and anyone who wants to be humbled should read _The TeXbook_, then look at its source code. Amazing. The only thing in the same class is the BASIC interpreter BASIX which was written in TeX (find both on http://www.ctan.org)
Other new and up-and-coming projects include: Scribus (page layout) and Cenon (drawing) and pfaedit (interactive font editing). If there were only alternatives to / equivalents of Adobe's TouchType.app, Fauve Matisse / Corel Painter / Alias Sketchbook (natural media painting) and Creaturehouse Expression (and a handwriting recognition program), TeXView.app (IPC
The want of something like to Creaturehouse Expression is especially painful since Microsoft bought out Creaturehouse last year, and despite a promise, purchasing of the program did _not_ come back on-line in November of 2003.
William
(PS - and Latex3 should be in the works soon now that _The LateX Companion, 2nd Edition_ is soon to hit the presses)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
My recent experience was trying to print to an inkjet connected to a windows machine. Since it was remote, I decided I didn't need a spooler, so I didn't install cups. Instead, I found foomatic, which is supposed to cut through the many layers of drivers in one slice. Through no efforts (reading several confusing and inconsistent tutorials) could I get foomatic to produce a file in my printer's format. Nor did it give me intelligible error messages. I finally posted to the main list at linuxprinting.org (lp.general); but in the weeks I've been subscribed, I've not seen a single useful reply to anyone's question!
Oh, I finally got the printer working. I just have to run gs -DSAFER -sDEVICE=ijs -sIjsServer=ijsgimpprint -sDeviceManufacturer=EPSON -sDeviceModel='escp2-c82' -sOutputFile=out -DNOPAUSE -- file.ps , and send the result with smbclient.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Is that where OSS is suppose to be?
The point here is that while a great deal of open source software is as good, if not better, then what you can get commercially it tends to not to be easy to use. Things have always been this way and likely will until there is a shift within OSS.
If you have been using computers since you were 6, when you see a dialog saying, "Port?:" you know what it wants after that point. Most users are going to have a vague clue what is meant by port. Move something somewhere? A kind of wine?
Large corps pay many people to create pretty graphics, write pretty books and make sure that ease of use is present. OSS has a large pool of programmers but a much smaller pool of OSS graphic artists and technical writers. These (and others) are the people who need to be brought into the OSS field.
It is a double bind: if you love computers and want to give back you are more likely be able to give in one area and not others. The real challenge is to help other people outside of computers to give back, people that may have few computer skills. In fact, it seems to me that most OSS is not setup to receive help from people with little computer understanding.
If OSS is not easy to use it will always be a third choice of three. I don't think that is what most people who contribute want.
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
I always find it amusing that the man who wrote XScreensaver complains about usability.
... a decent try at best. At first glance it alienates me a _LOT_ less than lprng, which is fully managed with an arcane /etc file that lists configuration directives in no particular order.
But that doesn't mean that CUPS is all peaches and roses. I had to discover what `foomatic' was in order to figure out how to extract a driver for my Epson Stylus C42UX from a large xml file. Its wizard to create the printers was rather friendly, although a belaguering dropdown box full of stuff I didn't have asked me where my printer was. Luckily it identified itself as USB PRINTER #1 (EPSON C42) so I could choose that - but most wouldn't have the slightest idea of what to choose and just stare at the screen glaze-eyed...
Really, all I wanted to do was print a school assignment. I fully agree with esr on this issue. This whole CUPS ordeal should have taken me 10 minutes, not 10 hours (on and off) to get working. And it still doesn't fully work, for example with printing to a SAMBA host.
But CUPS is the best we've got for Unix now. Isn't that sad?
It takes a real man-geek to admit "issues" when installing new software or configuring devices. He loses points for his longish rant though.
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf file.
However, I found myself nodding in affirmative at EVERY single step he took during his trouble shooting. I made a lot of the same assumptions (wrongly). The funniest was when he finally figured out he had to configure the server machine to broadcast, and then he couldn't connect to it. HAHA, it took at least 15 minutes of loud swearing for me to figure out how to configure the &*#&#((#&$&^
You know you're in trouble when the first like in the man page is RTFM.
I swear, if I have to configure another CUPS network, I'll go postal. It works... ssssh, don't touch it, and speak in hushed tones when in the vicinity.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
The biggest problem I've seen with open source programs is that when you do get end-users to test things out, be it a UI issue, or some other functional issue, is giving feedback.
Most of the times it seems that they don't want to look into issues or fix items. The advice is always "what does the debug output say?" or "submit a patch for it". Neither is something that the end user, who we are trying to convice that Linux is so much better than windows, is going to be able to do.
Let's be honest, all the GUI Wizard issues have nothing to do with CUPS, right? They are part of the Fedora Admin/Setup GUIs and we're likely written by Red Hat. -nicfit
Listen up everybody out there in Geek Land! User interface design is hard . Read Landauer's The Trouble With Computers .
I like "free as in freedom" software, and I fear the society that will be created by proprietary stuff like Windows, but we won't get the freedom we want if we can't deliver the benefits of freedom to the average user. If you can't be bothered to read the book, remember this: test, test and re-test. For really important stuff, borrow the most clueless of your relatives and friends, and have them try to use it while you are watching (keep your damn mouth shut, though). If you do this, you will create easy-to-use software, and if you believe in the political value of F/LOSS, you need to take this seriously.
The developers of CUPS have scratched their itch. I personally have no desire to scratch Aunt Tillie's itch. She isn't paying me. Neither is Raymond.
My printer works. If Aunt Tillie wants hers to work, she can pay me to set it up for her, or she can pay me to write software that makes it easier.
Why the hell is it CUPS's (or anyone else's) responsiblity to do this? If IBM and Red Hat are going to profit from easy printer sharing, let them write good config utilities. The CUPS team got the reward they were after. Their printers work.
When someone gives you a gift, try not to kick them in the nuts and ask for more. They have every right to stop giving.
"Joe Blow" could have written the same article and it would have been just as pertinent, and would have deserved being listed on the front page.
The point is that people know his name, they use the software he wrote, they read the crap that he spews, and he's more often right than wrong.
Front page because we'll read it, we'll coment on it, and we'll debate whether or not he has sufficient celebrity status (which brings us right back to your point).
It's not that he's profound, and it's not that he's well spoken (he's definately not). It's not that he's a well known blogger, as most probably don't consider his claim to be due to his blog. He's been around since before you could reach the keyboard, and he's written utilities that were once among the most widely installed on unix boxes. Even those of us who may think he's somewhat of an ass still like being notified when he's got something poignant to say.
He might be considered front page material because he's not really known as a blogger, but because even those of us who think he's an ass probably are using or have used software that he wrote or maintained, or because we begrudgingly acknowledge that he often has something worthwhile to say.
Read, L
If CUPS makes printer setup/management even one iota more transparent, then good on them.
Raymond is right, though - things like enabling the print queue broadcast should be asked when installing a local queue, and the default behaviour should be to display available queues on the network when adding a new printer.
To make it on the desktop, Linux has to become as easy as Windows, because most people would rather shell out a couple of hundred (insert currency here) than have to think about making what is after all only a tool do what they want it to.
I don't mind - I like to tinker, and I like to know how things do what they do. But I'm not Joe User, and it's Joe User who needs to be convinced.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
That's an "ad hominem" attack, which is a known fallacy. In other words, attacking the man does not make the argument any less valid. You may disagree with him, you may think neo-paganism is wrong (and, while your at it, could you please prove it?), and dislike, disagree, or consider any of his other beliefs false, mislead, or just plain crazy, but thta does not effect, one way or another, the validity of his argument.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day and even the most outrageous politician speaks the truth once in a while. Even if ESR is proven insane, that does not mean his comment is invalid or valid. The statement has to stand or fall on its own, not on your views of the person making the statement.
(And a moderator was lacking in intelligence enough to not realize this and mark the post informative?)
Sorry, this is one that Eric Raymond should have researched a bit more. Not because the interface he's talking about is any good, but because he's firing at the wrong target, as others have pointed out. I wouldn't expect someone who doesn't know Linux to figure this out, but Eric should have been able to tell the difference between a Red Hat hack and CUPS proper (at least the localhost:631 web interface).
While I haven't used it myself, the number of complaints about it on the linuxprinting.org forums (vs. the lack of complaints about Mandrake, SuSE, etc. in this regard) suggests that there's a problem. From my standpoint this is a real nuisance, since a lot of the people blame Gimp-Print for their problems (reasonably enough from their perspective -- I don't blame them for that). However, ESR should know better, and should be able to pick his targets more accurately.
Here is my quick account of setting up a Mac (10.3.2) to print to a Brother MFC-8820D.
I plugged one end of there ethernet cable into the printer and the other into my laptop. So far so good.
Being a highly competent user, I then went straight to the Printer Setup Menu and click add printer. I chose IPP printing. Then I turned to the sales guy and asked for the default IP address of the printer. He didn't know. I didn't know. It wasn't in the manual either.
I cursed. I yelled. I was annoyed. I sent two people off the go and find out the default IP of the network card.
While sitting there quietly spouting profanity I looked in my list of currently configured printers. Well buff my nuts and serve me a milkshake! There, in the list was the Brother printer all configured and ready to go. I didn't have to do anything.
I selected it and pressed the "Configure" button. It launched a web browser and brought up the configuration page.
I fell off my chair.
I later learned that the printer supports ZeroConf network discovery. Apple takes that further by selecting the correct driver automatically. It work just as well via USB, only if I think want to share it to other Macs I then have to follow the very complex task of clicking the "Share Printer" box in the System Prefs.
I had already, through a lot of pain, setup my printer when I upgraded to KDE 3.2 but i just checked the printer manager in 3.2. It looks very good and easy to use. I didn't try to setup my printer again (not that brave) but the interface looked clean and well organized and you can use it to setup a CUPS printer. I guess somebody already "submitted the patch".
I submit that it *would* confuse an inexperienced user. I personally found it easier to sit down and read the man page for fetchmail. This is not because I love me a conf file, but becuase I tried fetchmailconf, and was confused by it.
Take a look again and tell me why
#1 There are ok/quit/save buttons at the top and what they apply to,
First, if you have't read the original Macintosh user interface guide, do so. There are some strict rules, which today even Apple forgets, but which all competent programmers must know.
One of the basic rules in that manual is this:
-
You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows.
What this means, in terms a programmer can understand, is this:From a design perspective, it's useful to divide information the system knows into "definitions", "references", and "caches". "This printer is called FOO" is a definition. "BAR normally prints on FOO" is a reference. "FOO is a PostScript printer" on BAR is a cache item. Caches must be regeneratable. References must be checkable. Definitions should be protected against inadvertent change.
One of the big problems of the Windows registry is that it mixes all three types of information. This is also true of the contents of "/etc" in the UNIX world.
Once you start thinking of the problem in these terms, it's much clearer what to do. For the printer case, it's obvious that the system should find the printers in the neighborhood by itself, and should probe them to find out what they are and whether they will let you use them. It's also clear that if something changes (a printer is replaced, for example), the system must notice this and do something reasonable.
Once all the heavy machinery for that is in place, the user interface for "configuring a printer" should go away entirely. The ordinary print dialog can do the work. It might need a "search for more printers" button. But there's no real reason from a user perspective to have to configure printers at all.
We will now hear from the "just edit the /etc/xxx file with 'vi' and send a SIGHUP signal to the daemon" people. You guys are dinosaurs. Give it up.
I hate the CUPS UI also, but the writer lost me here:
If the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows programers) they'd probe the local network neighborhood and omit the impossible entries.
This is exactly what I would expect from Windows, and what I don't want in Linux. Because eventually a) something will be greyed out when I know it shouldn't be, or b) something will be greyed out when I think it shouldn't be, or c) I know something SHOULD be impossible, but I want to select it anyway for troubleshooting or experimentation. Who's to say I don't want to configure my print queue before I go down the elevator to bring the printer host online?
Evil is the money of root.
Okay, so let's play a game. You tell me what you have to do to install a printer on any flavor of Linux you want, and I'll tell you what you need to do to install the same printer on WinXP.
Let's use a HP Photosmartt 7350 (semi-random printer make and model I happen to be familiar with, since I just set one up for my mother. It's also USB, which is getting more and more common nowadays)
I'll go first:
1) Plug in printer power
2) Connect printer to computer
3) Turn printer on
4) Wait about 30 seconds for Windows to detect the printer
5) Click "Okay" a few times (about 4 times I think...)
Sure, you won't have the super-duper software (which you'ld have to install seperately), but you can hit "print" and it'll print. For fairness I'll exclude the software because there's no Linux version anyway.
Okay, your turn!
=Smidge=
ESR has little experience with configuring printers under Windows. It can be an absolute nightmare: networked printers are installed by making them local printers and then entering an IP address for the port number, local printers plugged into USB fail to be recognized, you have to select from zillions of nearly identical printer models, etc.
The way Aunt Tillie gets this to work on Windows is that she calls up Johnny, the good little nerd, treats him to her chocolate cookies, and has him suffer through this problem.
CUPS itself, for all its internal messiness, can easily presented with a better UI: Apple is using CUPS for OSX (even Apple's GUI is somewhat confusing for non-geeks), and how easy or difficult printer installation is on Linux depends more on the distribution and the UI it has chosen than on whether you use CUPS or LPRNG. CUPS also comes with an internal GUI (web-based) that is semi-decent.
Sounds like the distribution ESR uses (RedHat?) has a bad printer installation GUI, one that actually is worse than what CUPS comes with; he should complain to his distribution vendor--that has nothing to do with CUPS or OSS.
I understand the frustration with a lot of OSS GUIs, but in my experience, Windows GUIs are no better, and often worse.
The following needs to happen before any Linux distribution can be accepted by the masses.
I can sit down with 3 networked computers with printers attached. Two with windows pre-installed and sharing turned on, and another fresh out of the box. Without having to read through a HOWTO file on the internet, I should be able to:
1. Install Linux on the new machine.
2. Install Linux on one of the old windows machines, while preserving the data on it.
3. Get the network to work and see shared hard drives on any machine from any other machine.
4. Read and Write to shared hard drives, and set up passwords and security if I want to.
5. Be able to print to any printer from any machine.
6. Access the internet though dialup and DSL.
I tried various Linux distributions over the last 5 years, and sadly, none of them come close to meeting all six requirements. These are pretty basic requirements that users will regularly have. If Xandros or Lindows or someone can set up a lab and work on it until their distribuition can handle them, they should dominate the market.
What if you've RTFMed, googled for answers two hours (finding three contradictory solutions) *before* you asked the question?
meh
Exactly, if MS engineers and QA guys decided that all they had to do was design an OS and a UI that *they* could understand, they'd end up with something very similar in look and feel to Linux, and it would probably be almost as fragmented. It might not be as good as Linux under the hood, but then if MS had the same UI as Linux did, it would have died out to Apple or OS/2 or just about anything else back in '95.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
So, I'll concede that they are not the best examples of usability, but I do think that they avoid all of the points that the article was ranting about.
The ones who eat meat substitutes and those who don't. If you go into your local supermarket you will probabaly see veggie burgers trying to come as close to meat without being meat. I thought this was what vegetarians ate and had great admiration for being able to stomach that stuff. Turns out this is not the case for all of them. Some never borther with trying to create a non-meat hamburger and instead eat dishes made out of vegetables.
The first group basically wants to eat hamburgers but without it being made out of meat. The others simply don't want to eat meat at all and can live without having hamburger like products.
Some people seem to want to run windows but without it being Microsoft. Others just don't want anything to do with MS or similar at all and can live with it not being easy to use.
Sadly these two groups often seem to get in each others way. I myself must really control myself to not call Eric Raymond a whining kid. Oops. Others will applaud him for saying what they are thinking. Point is neither of us is right. We just want different things out of our software.
Problem is that most of the developers can't really be asked to cater for the first group. Why? Because to them it seems logical and easy. It reminds me of a dentist who can't understand why patients fear him more then constant tootache. Choose between cups and lpd? I find it hard to imagine a single cups developer not being able to give the correct answer any time of the day. So they think it is obvious for everyone. People that easily adjust to the fact that others do not know what they know are called teachers. Good teachers. How many have you met in your life?
Basically you would need the interface and manuals co-designed by someone without a clue. These people are of course kinda hard to find for anyone who can't afford to hire them. Only companies like Red hat/Mandrake/Suse/IBM/HP will be able to spend the money that would be needed to truly make easy consitent configuration tools.
The cups people can't really do this. To them the subject matter is too well known to realize where the users hand needs to be held. At the same time at least half their users will be wanting them to concentrate on improving the core program and not to waste time fannying about with useless gui wich they never use anyway.
I think it is called being caught between a rock and a hard place. Now if only somone would start an opensource configuration project. But that is the problem isn't it. Those who could build that don't need it and those who need it can't build it.
This dillema is usually solved by the exchange of money.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
ack, apparently I can't use any interface, so take anything I say with a huge grain of salt. (the submit button submits the post, can you believe that?)
I'll have to recreate them here, but my other points were
(some of the problems can't be seen from the screenshots)
The ui of fetchmailconf is completely different from any other mail configuration program I have ever seen. (yes, IMO very different == less usable)
It suffers from the usability problem of "configuration modes" - advanced/beginner mode.
It segments the parts of the dialog very strangely
Poll interval is to be entered in unspecified units
If you click edit, it pops up an error telling you to select an item from the (empty) list.
I'll stop there, there is really a lot wrong with the program. I'm guessing you have never used the program, but it is definitely not a shining example of usability, not just due to its use of tkinter.
-Mark
Yes, the fact that the dialogs don't follow an established STANDARD does hurt the usability, but I don't think that they are BAD.
Yes, that is pretty much the definition of a bad GUI program.
I live in a giant bucket.
Eric has some excellent points, but just to muddy the waters a bit, Windows often isn't any better.
For example, I have to set up printing to JetDirect network printers at work under Windows, and it's horribly unintuitive.
1 Run the printer setup wizard
2 Say you're setting up a LOCAL printer, not a network printer
3 Un-click "Detect automatically" and press Next
4 Say you want to create a new port. Selecct TCP/IP port from the dropdown. A new TCP/IP port wizard pops up. Type in the IP address of your printer
5 Select the printer make and model.
It would probably be easier to set up CUPS on a JetDirect printer than Windows, based on the menus Eric cites. Too bad that wasn't what he had.
D
I've been using Linux as my main OS at both work and home for about 7 years.
/etc/X11/Xf86Config. All accompanied by extremely liberal doses of docu searching online, of course.
Here's a list of my recent hardware config experiences on my home machine, which dual-boots Gentoo and Windows XP:
1. Canon Powershot A40 digital camera. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. On Linux, it required two kernel recompiles, and searches through several sources of information (gphoto2 manual, message boards, Google) before I finally got the command-line interface to gphoto2 to work. Never got any GUI front-end working.
2. Creative Webcam Pro NX. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Despite hours spent banging my head on the problem, it has yet to function under Linux.
3. Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Linux: kernel recompile, install additional Xfree86 module, tweak, retweak, and re-retweak
I love Linux like my brother, but seriously, hardware config on it is a huge PITFA, and provides the single largest contrast to the Windows world.
I long for the day when I get a new gizmo, plug it into my box, and it "just works". Man, that would be so cool.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Please just remember that part...
:
:
I happen to have recently installed a Laserjet on my gf computer, and it's Win2000, and the whole process took me 5 minutes (1 config failure, 5 seconds of intensive neuronal action and then the right click on the right button)
I simply used KDE printing tool that came with the nice Knoppix-Cluster cd, and took 5 seconds before hitting buttons.
Also, please remember
COMPUTER WEREN'T MADE FOR PEOPLE !!! Computers were made for experts in companies, the fact that windows is "easy to use" (damn, it hurts !) or even "intuitive" (I actually wrote that ?) has been the main cause of problems, because the configuration was a "One-Size-Fits-All" solution.
=> Most Windows computer are configured almost all the same, default, and so more or less all exposed to the same problems. They work "perfectly" (my hands start shaking) as long as everything is in the "Normal Scope" (everything open and accessible from anywhere, except if you change it, which users don't)
=> Microsoft made 2000 and XP. One is clearly a server Os, where even access to cdwriter for users has to be configured by hand. Many things are accessible, but you have to RTFM a bit and you can get it almost secure (MS notwhistanding)
XP, on the other hand, is a nice "plug-and-play" thingy with lotsa grease and help so that even Aunt Milly can do it herself (or pester her nephew/son/grandson, as in the 99.99% of real life cases)
You want an easy to use OS ? get a playstation.
You want a desktop computer that just works ? get XP.
You want a hard, rugged and stable server ? get linux.
You want a nice Linux desktop easily running in no time ? be ready to lose most of your security, or wait some more time... MS had 20 years to learn how an UI should look, and they do extensive usability tests, have specialists, teams, and so on dedicated to the problem.
It will come in time, but Linux wasn't thought for the desktop, so the transition will take some time. The poor guys making cups did an excellent job as the server works 100% (for me). If you dislike the UI, please follow usual Open source procedure
1 / Email the dev and tell him (gently) what's wrong in your opinion and what should be done. If he has the time, he'll fix it. (99% of real life cases ?)
2 / DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP COMPLAINING FOR CHRIS'SAKE !!! you are a guru Linux wizard, so get emacs runing and do your conf files, or write a better UI.
Ahh ! No point in this post, but I somehow feel better 8)
Linux is about choice and RTFMing : always had, server-side, never will, desktop-side...
If Users knew how to do it, they would be sysadmins...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
ESR's rant reminds me of an early assignment in my first professional job (principally hardware design but I generally found many of the software bugs for the programmers I was assigned). This particular assignment involved writing technical documentation in the form of a user guide for another project. Don't laugh - companies actually used to do this kind of training.
Anyway, the acid test for any documentation was to take it to a secretary. Have the secretary read, understand and successfully use the project gear solely from reading the documentation.
This proved to be an incredibly effective exercise for designers/builders/coders: a humbling lesson that something bright/shiny/cool you've created is virtually worthless if no one but you can actually use it. For many in the OSS commuity, this seems a lesson not yet learned. There is progress - but I often find myself thinking thoughts not so far from ESR's when I'm trying to configure this or that on one or another Linux box.
Why isn't the OSS community looking at those with proven interfaces? Apple, of course comes right to mind, as well as BeOS. The thing is, programmers could have all the graphic designers working on their projects that they needed - IF the graphic designers had a way of creating a GUI without having to learn some new esoteric scripting language!
Do I (as a graphic artist and layout guy) expect a programmer to:
1) Come up with a fantastic, beautiful, informative interface to their software?
2) Spend a year on the GIMP or Photoshop or Illustrator to learn how to make one?
3) Understand that the super-cool lens-flare skull with glowing eyes might be a cool T-shirt for a poor high school metal band, and not for the interface to his software?
No. Just like I'm not going to learn the ins and outs of C, ruby, python, perl, etc. I don't want to. I'm good at what I do. I'm good at what I know. I'm getting better at the things that interest me.
Listen. Make it easy for artists to submit interfaces. A plugin. A skinner. A template. I don't know, IANAProgrammer. I do know that I was able to build an interface in 5 minutes with Apple's tools. Again, I know NOTHING about programming.
The point I'm making is this: You (the programmer) make it possible (read: easy) for me (the artist) to make visual GUI changes, and I'll do it! For nothing! We like to do stuff like this!. Make it possible and together we can get this linux thing on everyone's desktop.
Continue to avoid/ignore/and deny this issue, and it'll be a short time to Longhorn, which from what I've seen, has the worst Winamp skinners already sewn up.
1) aptitude install foomatic-db hpoj hpijs hotplug /usr/share/cups/model/HP-PSC_750.ppd /etc/init/hotplug restart
2) foomatic-datafile -d hpijs -p HP-PSC_750 >
2) plug printer in
3)
4) http://localhost:631, add printer, not hard
As I said, I had to put in a bit of work up front learning that, but it's not that hard.
The downside is the extra effort required on my part to learn stuff. The upside is the cost and the freedom.
I'll tell you which I'll pick.
Not only are you right, but it goes beyond user interfaces. I'm a mac user but I install linux on my old pc every now and then to see what kind of progress you guys are making. My latest dist to evaluate is Ark Linux which is supposedly being built specifically for the desktop. Ark bundles KDE but not GNOME. One of the things that's really gotten to me is the process of choosing an application to open a file. What would be nice would be if I could just be presented with a list of installed programs that are able to open the file. There's far more to ease-of-use than GUI design. I suggest some of you read up on some HCI books.
I do think that it's possible to get linux to the point where it can be ready for the non-technical user's desktop, but I also fear that making that happen will end up stripping out everthing that linux (and most of open source) stands for. (Forking, in particular just won't work.) If the community can get behind that idea though, linux on the desktop should be doable.
--- Don't ever trust a woman until she's dead- B.B. King
Designing a useable interface is difficult and the skills required for it are dramatically different from those needed to implement the back-end software. The CUPS wizard that ESR described was designed by programmers. Microsoft's equivalent was designed by usability experts.
The thing is, most people think of software development as just writing code. It's not. Writing a useful program requires first understanding the problem and its possible solutions. It requires experts in the problem domain. That's why all of the really successful OSS projects have been things like programming languages, libraries, development tools and operating systems--those are all are things that programmers are already experts in.
It's possible that a naive-user friendly Linux is beyond the abilities of the open-source community. Maybe there are no good usability experts willing to volunteer their time on some of these projects. In that case, somebody is going to have to pay for the work. So far, some of the distributions have already done just that and I keep having less trouble with Mandrake on each new release, so there's hope. Maybe in the future, different Linux distributions will be compatible but completely different in look and feel, each targeted toward a different market segment. That wouldn't be so bad.
However, if the OSS community wants to solve this problem in an open-source way, we need to take it more seriously than just telling the programmers to smarten up. Linux is infrastructure, written by infrastructure experts. The configuration tools need to be designed by usuability experts and implemented separately from the things they are configuring.
We need, in other words, a collection of UI geeks, a group of people who know how to deal with non-technical users and by programmers who will listen to them. This is the group that will write the control panels and configuration wizards and spend their time and energy making them better and more usable.
The CUPS team (to pick one) isn't going to do that and shouldn't have to. Their job is to understand printing. Usability is a different problem entirely.
You might even go so far as submit a patch for the documentation. Then everyone can find it easily.
To many of the other people who had/have troubles with cups seem to think the cups development team owns them something and seem to think their time is worth more. Doesn't work like that. It only works if users put energy back by submitting good bug reports and patches/fixes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Some of the most usable UIs don't conform to an established standard. For example, there are shopping cart apps that can be used by people who've never used a computer before, yet they don't get in the way of the expert user much either. Some custom-designed kiosk systems serve their purposes very well without following any standard other than "touch me".
Apple and Microsoft seem to throw out their own guidelines whenever they feel the need to "innovate". There's no hope of improving usability if no one's allowed to experiment.
Check out Alan Cooper's books if you want some solid reasoning behind this (better than I could give you). Edward Tufte is also a classic.
True UI experts are not exactly short of work. Why work for free in a very complex job when you can be paid big bucks?
UI development is a lot harder then "simply" coding a daemon. Mostly because the coder only has to know his subject matter. A good UI designer has to know his own subject matter, the subject matter of what he is designing a gui for AND every possible user of that gui.
You can even wonder is this is something people do as a hobby. Cooks can cook for fun, coders can code for fun but marketing people don't marketeer for fun (do they?). Do UI designers design for fun?
We got opensource lawyers, writers and coders. Now we need opensource UI designers. Gotta catch them all. (sorry)
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Anyone looking to get into Linux need not be afraid. The Nick Burns' of the world do not bother to read newsgroups or participate in help-forums. And the trolls are pretty easy to spot.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I don't know about you guys, but I'm just stoked that "feckless" is an actual word. That's the big story here.
Bzzzzzzt. Wrong. This guy was talking about setting up a network printer. You know, a printer you plug into a router that is *NOT HOOKED UP TO ANY COMPUTER*. He's right, you know. After you click "local printer", it gives you the option of specifying an IP address directly to the printer itself. What the fuck is that doing there? That should be in "Network Printers", except that Microsoft considers a network printer a printer configured locally on another computer accessible via SMB.
So, I guess TCP/IP is not considered a network, according to Microsoft.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Don't forget sound. Linux sound is shitty beyond belief too.
(I finally got ALSA working properly last week.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So? Are people without indebt knowledge of unix worth more or something? You see the problem is that you don't have the time to learn linux BUT we don't have the time to teach you or to write tools that we don't need just to hold your hand.
There are basically two groups in the linux camp, those who want linux to rule the desktop and server market and those who couldn't give a hoot. When you say you prefer Windows I personally couldn't care less. It is no different then saying you prefer coffee and I prefer tea. If you then go complaining how you really don't like all that caffeine in it or how the coffee bean growers are treated then I will just shrug.
Just stop trying to turn my tea into coffee.
Elitist? You bet. May be a dirty word to some but I wear it with pride. If you want windows then run windows. Good luck getting microsoft to listen to your complaints. Opensource can't really be of service to you. By geeks for geeks. Go ask the people who want linux on every desktop. They have the agenda they should give you the code.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yes, a self contained kiosk can use whatever UI suits the data. This isn't a self contained kiosk, it's a gui app using standard widgets in a nonstandard and rather confusing way.
When designing a form using standard widgets, use them in the standard way. Think about it this way, would you purchase a car that had a rediciously nonstandard dashboard? I wouldn't.
I live in a giant bucket.
My question is - How can *I* easily setup a printer in Linux? Without the easier GUI offered by KDE or GNOME, I've found CUPS and other printing systems virtually impossible to configure. I have an HP5L printer. I'm really happy to see ESR write about this.
I'm a fairly adept technical user. I prefer to use Slackware and a bare minimum Window Manager ie Window Maker. KDE and GNOME offer nice GUIs to configure CUPS but its overkill to install either to setup a printer.
I've been planning on switching all my essay writing to Linux for practical reasons. One of the only reasons I'm using Windows to do work on is that printing is really hard to setup on 'Nix. I'm not using a lot of fancy fonts - mostly Times - but I do all my writing in either OO or AbiWord. My understanding is that of the older printer daemons don't work/output.
What options do I have?
Your comment about the Mac using CUPS and yet being easy to configure for printer sharing goes right to a point Eric Raymond completely missed. His problem is primarily with the KDEPrint user interface and not with the CUPS print server. The Art of UNIX Programming, written by a very bright guy, does a good job of explaining the desired separation between the UI and the server.
CUPS is an amazing print server full of options that can be configured to suit a particular environment. It is the best print server in the Linux/UNIX world and, I would argue, the best all around print server in existence. (Bonus points because, in the finest Linux tradition, it is an active open source project being led by a uniquely talented individual)
KDEPrint is also a very nice piece of software, but it suffers from a failing common to many Linux/UNIX user interface programs: it presents too many options to the user. Rather than presenting a few simplifying assumptions to the user, these programs try to present the full power of the server. This is great for the advanced user but it floods the general user with too many choices.
The Mac user interface on top of CUPS is a counter example. When the user hits the "Share my printers with other computers" button the cupsd.conf file is altered to broadcast the availability of printers and to accept jobs from machines on the local subnet. The print server is then restarted. This one simple button takes several steps that are very useful for most users; it does not however provide access to many of the more powerful, less common features of CUPS.
And so, at the end of the day, I think Eric Raymond is noting that KDEPrint does not "dumb down" the presentation of CUPS options enough for the typical user.
Lemme say, I'm not a mac nut, but I play one on /.
I don't use a Mac much, but I have to say, as far as GUIs go, they take the cake. The OS and its respsective progs (that I've used) are the easiest to use, setup, and/or work productively in, especially from a noobs perspective to the OS/Platform, that I have ever used. As a designer/code-monkey myself, user-centered UI design is one of the most challenging things I do. So my hat's off to the Mac OS and Prog UI designers.
For OSS to gain mind/market share in the consumer OS world, UI design is the key. It must be accessable by Joe-moron, who doesn't know his printer from his bunghole, also allow the technical (read:geek) user to configure and customize to his hearts delight, and fill all the gaps in between. This is one of the most difficult challenges a designer faces, but one that must be solved effectively to have the "big year of OSS" I keep hearing reference to.
As a side-note: programing and UI design don't mix (at least in my world) I have to take of my code-monkey hat off and give myself some time to get into design mode before I can do anything useful in a design sense. I dunno, but if someone, as an OSS contributor/programer, doesn't have the design sense God gave a goat it might be a good idea to holler at a designer (who does this stuff every day) to help ya work out the kinks of a tricky UI problem.
Anyways, just food for thought...
Every non-technical user I know has similar sounding Windows troubles. And me, who rarely uses Windows, has to figure it out, and let me tell you right now - it isn't intuitive or easy to use in any way for the non-initiatied into "One Microsoft Way". This whole rant could well have been about any number of Windows sub-systems I've had to struggle with over the years.
Honestly, this problem is pretty much endemic in all software. And that's not a good thing - it's a important lesson for *every* software developer to learn.
Absolutely, I can't believe ANYONE was holding them up as a pinnacle of good design. They truly are horrible.
So...just thinking to myself, um, what happens if Linus is...snuffed out? ;)
Well, you got Alan Cox and the rest of Linus's trusted lieutents. Their will be chaos, a power struggle, and life will go on. If they don't get their act together, then their are the BSDs and the Hurd. The kernel is such a small part of linux. Even GNU/Linux is such a small part of what is linux. Their is so much non GNU free software involved in what we consider linux. You have X, KDE, VIM, xmms, mozilla, samba and alot more.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
"To accept this choice, click OK. To cancel, click CANCEL".
Well fucking duh. You know what I'm talking about: For an example, enter your computer BIOS (press 'Del' on most PCs during boot), and read the "help" for any of the entries. Do you know what every single setting there means? Quickly, what's Spread Spectrum Modulation? What are its effects and side-effects? What are the potential dangers? When would you want to use it? Can you answer any of these questions by looking at a UI that is packed with acronym laden yes/no choices? Probably not. I doubt most people outside of a motherboard design company could explain in detail what every single option does.
Users aren't all stupid, even the non-computer literate ones. It's the user interface that is at fault, for not providing all of the information required to make a decision. Given sufficient information, most people can make the right decision. Given a yes/no question full of acronyms with no other information, even programmers and computer scientists can be stumped.
A great example of how effective providing information can be, think back to the original Norton Disk Doctor for DOS. The dialog boxes in that program usually had several paragraphs of text, and asked one question. The text usually explained:
Now, I clearly remember relatively computer illiterate people running that program, and making highly technical decisions without even realizing it. My father could easily decide whether he wanted to mark a sector bad, what kind of surface scan he wanted, and how he wanted to treat corrupted files.
While Windows is in general mediocre (not great, just mediocre) in its UI design, at times it has glaring flaws. My favourite examples are applications that ask for a DSN connection string. Do you know how to construct a DSN connection string by hand? I don't, and I've been programming with databases for years. However, the doubly stupid thing is that the ODBC control panel already includes a dialog box that automates the process! So why do some applications, including some written by Microsoft, still ask for a DSN string?
Command-line software (open source, or otherwise) is particularly prone to exhibit this problem, often to the same extent as the BIOS example. When executed with a "-?" option (or whatever), most programs will give a list of options, but rarely tell the user anything other than the existence of the option. This is no better than a dialog box asking a yes/no question with no further explanation.
What I always miss in free software that I try to use is examples. Some command-line software I try to use has all the options cleanly documented in very specific terms with every possibility labelled and indexed by date and whatever the hell else, but it's missing one thing: examples.
Try running hdparm for the first time, and you can see a pretty good example: if you mess up your syntax, it gives you the --help, without actually saying what it was you need help with. If it said 'invalid option' or 'you must specify a device', then that would be fine, but instead it gives me a screen and a half of junk that I've *probably* seen before (honestly, could you ever *guess* how to use hdparm and get it right?), without actually telling me what's the dilly-o.
I'll say this once more, to all the documentation maintainers: if you have a command-line tool, you need to follow a few steps.
If the parameters don't hash, tell them what the problem is. Don't just repeat the --help over again, that *NEVER HELPS*. Tell them what went wrong. If possible, tell them how to fix it, e.g. instead of 'invalid argument to -B' say 'argument to -B must be in range of 42-69' - bonus points if the argument range depends on outside variables that you can detect.
If you have a man page, provide examples. Figure out the syntax of the most common things people will use your program for, and provide a few examples to give them a solid idea. Parameters are good, yes, but a lot of people don't have the mind for reading a bunch of variables and putting it all together mentally. We'll catch on faster if we can see an overview of the whole thing, instead of miles of microscopic detail that we have to piece together.
If you don't have a man page, make a man page. Make an info page too, if you're bored, but don't spend too much time on it, no one uses them except the GNU zealots anyway (ok, that was a troll, I admit).
If you have a GUI, take out any options that don't NEED to be there. Put anything that NEEDS to be there but won't be changed by most users into an 'advanced settings' dialog. Take a lesson from the Apple folks: you can make programs with only two changable preferences and still have it be a usable program for thousands of people. If you need to have that many preferences, maybe your program is too complex. Apple keeps its fanbase because it can do one thing: get out of your face. Because you don't have to worry about the assload of shit that Windows and Linux programs throw at you, you can get down to work and get your job done.
And finally, to reiterate, autodetect whenever possible. It might take you longer, but it'll make for a better and more envious program - 'hey, I like how your program automatically detects networked file shares and adds them to the pop-up' or whatever. Another day of coding means the release date gets pushed back one day, but it also might save hundreds (or, depending on how well you do, thousands) of people a few hours (or days) configuring.
--Dan
But of course that doesn't sit well with those who have an agenda to get Linux to fight their crusade. Or even worse to get them to not to have to pay Microsoft anymore.
But it is a sign of the time we life in. Give someone dying of a heart attack in the street CPR and they will sue you if you break a rib. Write an excellent printer sharing protocol and people will only bitch about how they need to read the manual.
Opensource doesn't just work with developers on one side and users on the other. If it is going to work then we need manual writers, forum guru's, gui designers, beta testers, patch submittrs.
Users are like customers. MS loves customers because they pay. Opensource is free. What do we care how many customers we have? 1 * $0 is the same as 1000 * $0 but it costs a hell of a lot more to have 1000 people asking stupid questions.
Rant: Old saying is there are no stupid questions only stupid answers. This was true before the invention of the net. Read any forum and you will see time and time again the same question being asked because the asker can't be bothered to first look. Then they will bitch that noone helps them. Obviously their time is more important then everyone elses. Recently saw the worst of all. 9 pages down a ***** said "I am not going to read all those pages give me the answer". ARGH!
End rant.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Begin here http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-12/msg00800.html , tangent how you see fit...
"We blow this stuff off because we want to make it workable for those smart enough to deserve to enjoy it then quickly move on to the Next Great Thing that Needs to be Made Now."
I think you've hit the nail sharply on the head there... the problem with far, far too many nerds is that they are entirely utalitarian... if it works, well, dang it, that's good enough. I've proved I can get that to work, so I'm bored with it now.
There kind of needs to be a whole set of other 'design nerds' who come along after the 'worker nerds' have done their bit, and make it all pretty and sensible to use... these 'design nerds' would have a good understanding of what the 'average Joe' is comfortable with in an interface.
Either you are one of the few technical writers or you never developed a software project.
Writing a good manual is damned hard. In many ways even harder then coding itself. Why?
Compare it with being an expert in your field and being an expert teacher in your field. Wich would you say is harder? The latter really needs to be good at three things. A good coder, a good writer and able to imagine how someone not intimatly familiar with the subject would look at it.
Maybe you are a natural at this but most are not.
For a laugh ask say a doctor to explain a complex medical condition in layman terms or a lawyer to explain SCO vs IBM in english. Now why should coders be any better?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Fedora, CUPS, whatever...
PC here. Printer there. Make it so.
In clear, precise, EASY directions.
...too many chiefs, not enough braves.
we don't have the time to teach you or to write tools that we don't need just to hold your hand.
Those who want free software to become widespread on computing novices' home computers need those tools. J. Random Hacker may not need those tools on her own desktop, but she needs those tools on somebody's desktop. If those tools are on somebody's desktop, then PC vendors may start to pre-install a free operating system, and the peripheral vendors may become more likely to cooperate with developers of device drivers for free operating systems. Bottom line: By making free software easy to use for people who buy peripherals, JRH would ultimately benefit from a larger selection of affordable peripherals that work with free operating systems.
Ok, personal OSS rant.
RMS says that coders should give code away. You work as a waiter, or do something else for a living. I don't want to be a waiter. I want to write code. So, "something else" has become service and support.
Here's the rub -- when you make your pennies on service and support, you have no economic motivation to make it easy and self explanitory! You make MONEY when it's hard to use.
This I think is the downfall of the current OSS business models, and I haven't found a way out of it. OSS projects are destined to remain difficult as long as there is no economic motivation (and we've already established that there's no artistic/ego motivation) to make it beautiful and easy.
I'm not saying that Windows is right or that Mac drool-proof design is right, or that OSS is fundamentally wrong. But I'd like people to understand the motivations that their choices steer them to. I feel bad when I get harangued by OSS types for making non-OSS products. Just understand that not everything is as cut and dried, and that most OSS business models have yet to be proven successful.
Let the GNU/GPL/RMS/OSS/ESR flaming begin. I'm ready for it. I've thought this out for a long time, and I make a living writing software. And no, my software is not a paradigm of simplicity, but I'm not having delusions of taking the desktop away from Bill G by conquest.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
I notice a big difference in installation and configuration difficulty between 'traditional' distros like Mandrake, RedHat, etc, and my Knoppix hdinstall.
I was a Mac (System 7, OS8, OS9) driver for more than a decade before I switched to Linux almost a year ago. Began with Mandrake and ended up with Knoppix on the hd. Knoppix gives few, if any, problems compared to the distros I've tried that require a more 'normal' installation - RedHat, SuSE, etc. I'm not saying all the interfaces are perfect or that things, CUPS incuded, don't bork once in awhile. But really, Knoppix is quite good. Much easier for a n00b who can use Google than the 'real' distros.
IMHO, the LiveCDs should be the first priority for GUI and interface improvement. They are, after all, the primary tools used to evangelize new Linux users and are much less intimidating to the uninitiated.
As I gained a little experience with Linux, I couldn't figure out why should I spend an hour wading through Debian's old text-based installer when I can literally have the entire Knoppix distro onto the hard drive and running in 15 minutes or so. Come to think of it, I still can't. I use apt-get all the time to install software (will never consider RPM again), and every peripheral I own plays nice with Knoppix, almost all right out of the box.
That includes a MacAlly USB KB, Logitech USB Trackball, SB Live, nVidia card with 3D drivers, Adaptec U160 card, 3COM Gigabit NIC, HP Scanjet 6200C SCSI Scanner, Apple Laserwriter 16/600 printer (local/parallel), and Olympus D-280 USB digicam.
When I read a mailing list detailing the plight of some poor slob trying to install some simple device unsuccessfully, one of the first things I think is, "Well, it usually just works on Knoppix." Perhaps we need to try and discern why that is the case.
I am very appreciative of the efforts of many folks that wnet into all the packages on Knoppix. Because of them, I'm composing this on a dual 2100MP box with a free OS that ended up costing about $1300 less than a G5 tower. I can't give you technical reasons why you as a programmer might want to build on or extend distros like Knoppix. What I can pass along is my personal experience that it was easier to configure and use than anything else, even if a few things could be laid out a more logically.
RTFM elitism aside, at the end of the day, that ease of use plus the overall stability is what keeps me using open source software instead of something from Redmond.
Free software is not perfect, but you have to compare apples to apples here. Any user who can figure out M$ networking can do just as well with free software.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
ESR needs to get a clue. It's evident by his initial environment description that he's quite out of it in terms of what "Aunt Tillie" will be doing with her computer.
Aunt Tillie will not have multiple systems, let alone have a small personal LAN. She will have a boxed Gateway or Dell that comes preocnfigured with a printer. If she needs anything more done than plugging in cables, she will call you, her dear nephiew/niece, to come "fix her printer" for her.
What's more, most detect such things on install just fine. There's not much of a chance she'd not have her stuff set up physically prior to installing the software, if she ever felt so bold to try Linux.
The only people claiming that Linux is ready for the desktop of mere mortals - or will be anytime soon - need to get out more and meet some common folk. Computers in general aren't really ready for common folk, but they're lucradive enough for companies to sell them, and cool enough to make commoners want them anyway.
I digress.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
here's my experience with setting up a HP Color LaserJet 4600:
win 2k/XP - find way to add printer->select local printer->turn off probe for PnP printers->create new port->select standard tcp/ip port->enter printer ip number->click custom device type and then settings->click raw protocol and enter port 9100->enter printer driver info->click a few more next/finish buttons->print test page
linux (RH9 & FC1) - go to system settings->go to printing->enter root password->click forward->enter desired name and description->select networked jetdirect->type in printer hostname->click on printer manufacturer and then model->click finish and then print test page
OS X - go to the printer configuration utility and find the printer already detected, configured, and set to be the default
sure, the linux config could be worded somewhat more intuitively, but windows is a complete disaster for any non-SMB networked printer. the whole having to select 'local printer' to do it is just hysterical. at least linux refers to it as networked.... my only real niggle so far with the RH/fedora printer config tool is that the sharing properties are hidden under the Actions menu and it doesn't let you configure sharing on a per queue basis.
that all said, the rendezvous support in the HP printer is pretty damn sexy. any mac on the network sees it automatically and understands everything it can do. that's the way it's supposed to be. once i enabled the printer's CUPS support, then the linux boxes were almost there, too. poor windows users still need to go through that long drill, though....
tim
hiding in shadows / i hear you coming closer / you will explode soon -- a quake haiku
I'm busy. I have things to do. I don't have time to fiddle with someone else's idea of cleverness, or a badly designed interface that can't decide on how to assign command key functions consistently, or which lacks any useful help (the CUPS example is just a case in point). Nor am I interested in solving puzzles or pondering the greater mysteries of my Inner Tux. I just want to get the damn thing up and running so I can get on with what I wanted to do in the first place.
Perhaps it's a matter of perspective: If the computer is an end unto itself, then things like usability for a wider audience aren't really relevant. But for a lot of folks, myself included, the computer is nothing more than a tool with which I hope to get some useful work accomplished. I'll use whatever works, even if it is Windows. Occasional crashes and lock-ups aside, Windows does help me get the job done and I don't have to spend half a day reading man pages and badly written "manuals" trying to figure out how to install and configure something, and that's what really counts for me.
The bottom line is that I'll rm -rf a badly written tool's source tree just as fast as I'll pitch a cheap pair of pliers into the trashcan. They're both useless to me if they waste my time and impede my progress.
Eric Raymond sums it up nicely with the statement that "the problem is that these simple things never occurred to developers who bring huge amounts of already-acquired knowledge to bear every time they look at their user interfaces."
So the next time you look down your nose at some poor slob who just can't figure out how to install and configure something that you could do in your sleep, just keep in mind that there's a reason MS still rules the desktop, and it has a lot to do with millions of those poor clueless slobs.
"If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out, signifying..."
Greying out menu items is one area open source can actually surpass Mac OSX and Windows. When I try and use a new desktop app I have never used before I am always puzzled why some menu options are greyed out. Everything else I find intuitive. Greyed out items confuse me.
Why is is greyed out? How do I get to it? Why can't I get to it now?
What would be really nifty is some tool-tip text saying something like "This menu item is only available when you are in xyz mode."
Am I the only one who experiences this difficulty?
Apparently, ESR's still trying hard to popularize the term "Aunt Tillie".
:)
Any mention of GhandiCon in the article as well?
OSDL is possibly the one organization that could help various projects test their usability. It would be expensive, and we would really need to squeeze large corporations like IBM, Novell/SuSE and Oracle to provide some serious funding. Perhaps the reason they don't is because the developers could still simply ignore suggestions or demands for improvements. Of course, perhaps the major distributions could choose not to include programs that don't meet some minimal level of usability or conform to one of the guidelines listed above. That might provide some incentive.
I'm a grain farmer. I don't know the first thing about programming anything and didn't have a computer until Windows 95. My tractor was built in 1967. I'm not even close to being a techie kind of guy, but I had zero trouble getting CUPS going and I kind of liked the GUI setup tool.
Actually I've never had any trouble getting printing going on linux and I've been using linux since RH 4.2. I never did upgrade from windows95, don't like it. Might boot windows two, three times a year now max.
I can hardly believe it, I just came home after giving a talk to a Perl group, talking about a bunch of stuff (freedom, accessibility, diveristy in the tech culture, how things need to change, etc) and the user interface was a large portion of it. Maybe things have finally begun to change! Anyhow, an outline of it is here:
:)
http://abuzar.com/
Please, feel welcome to give me feedback
If it wasnt for the French, you yankies would still be singing God Save the Queen.
Your nations founders were nothing but a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkeys. Rely on the French to help free them because they could not do it themselves, but when the French asked for help a few years later, you were nowhere to be found.
Take a look at your president now. He looks just like a baboon. What other country would VOTE in a baboon?
ESR also did fetchmail. Fetchmail has an *excellent* configuration interface.
* First, the config file is simple and small. A typical configuration should be simple and small. Take a look at the difference between the size of a basic sendmail and a basic postfix installation, and you'll notice an astonishing size difference -- thousands and thousands of lines.
* Second, fetchmail enjoys good defaults. If you enter the minimal set of options in the config file, it generally works properly.
* Third, and this is the biggie, fetchmailconf is an excellent GUI config tool. It can autodetect most of the configuration, and if there are multiple supported protocols/auth methods, it uses the "best", which is really better than most commercial email clients can do. Note that one *still* has full access to the simple, readable output that it produces. It doesn't hide anything from you at all, so it doesn't hurt power users that know exactly what they want the software to do, but it makes things much easier for new users.
May we never see th
Look. I love the UNIX printing system. It's a real pain in the ass to configure things, but it's also terribly powerful.
I've used LPR and then LPRng. I get network transparency, ability to batch-print easily (this is *not* trivial...try printing out hard copies of 200 source files pretty printed in Windows). I can manage print queues.
The thing is, UNIX printing systems are usually lots of little parts cobbled together with some scripts that vary from distro to distro, and then a config GUI that the distro maintainer puts out. The UNIX printing world is terribly disorganized compared to most other things in the UNIX world.
Can you identify the function of and tell the difference between all of these? LPR, LPRng, CUPS, gimp-print, foomatic, Omni, gnome-print, printman, printtool, desktop-printing, enscript, a2ps, ghostscript, pna2ppa, samba, hpoj, gsview, gv, ps2ps, ggv, redhat-config-printer, printconf, and mpage. All of these printing-related utilities and more have been on my system in the last few years. Keep in mind that I don't even use KDE, and that most distros vary the choice of what to use and you have an interesting set of knowledge to amass. The different print spoolers have different auth systems and config formats.
On the other hand, I have an old Apple LaserWriter without enough memory to print much of anything. I salvaged it when my old university threw it out. I hooked it up, and started cobbling together bits into a print filter. Sure, it took some doing and learning, but when I was done, all pages on the printer were rendered on the computer (where all the RAM in the world was available), converted to a bitmap and compressed, and sent in an embedded postscript file to the printer. On Windows I would have been simply SOL.
So, I'm not sure that an all-in-one system would be great. I *do* think that the printing situation could be cleaned up a lot, that the distros *really* need to get together and standardize on an interface (if you want to differentiate yourselves, please don't do it on something as basic as printing, which is a huge impediment to office use everywhere), and that it'd be nice to have some degree of autodetection of intelligent defaults (After a click on "add printer", "You have a Model Foobar attached. The proper driver is being selected.")
May we never see th
Software is bound to be hard to use as long as the developers is making their interfaces. Its also very easy to be blinded since you work on the application a long time and you think things are easy because they are logical to you. KISS is not enough, there need to be a layer of logic ontop of the application in most cases, shielding the user from the computer logic and making things make sense.
Perhaps its time to invite designers into the developing process?
That said i dont really agree with Eric Raymond. I work as an admin all day and i more often find Windows harder to use than linux. Windows is very quirky and backwards in so many levels. Try installing a TCP/IP printer in Windows XP and you get the picture, not something for the mere mortals. Linux is in my opinion better than Windows but there are room for improvement. I dont think people should embrace usability Wizard style like windows. Make the apps easy enough from the start instead so you wont need a wizard to be able to do your stuff ey?
HTTP/1.1 400
Without having read the article, I'll put in my 2 cents worth on what matters most to the average joe-user:
1. It installs easily.
2. It works properly (for the most part).
They don't care enough about security to do anything. They don't care about the license agreement (open source, what's that?).
The only thing that matters is they can install it and it does what it's supposed to do.
Open source programs usually covers point 2 extremely well. Point 1, however, is a serious issue with far too many otherwise excellent programs.
"./configure; make; make install" is easy enough for us WHEN IT WORKS. A few too many times, however, I've run into dependency problems that caused some headaches. Using RPM has the same problem. It works great if the dependencies are already installed, but falls flat on its face when something is missing.
Debian's apt-get is a huge leap forward, but because of old programs, is nearly useless if you use a default woody installation. Yes, I know Debian's premise is stability. What does that have to do with anything? The average joe is running Windows, so stability isn't an important issue!
What is needed? Something based on Debian's apt-get, but GUI driven, and specifically designed for new software (as opposed to Debians stability mantra). Shiny buttons that let the user choose the "stable" versions , a specific version, or "the latest" would help. It should automatically grab dependencies unless specifically told not to.
Lastly, a database of package locations (distributed, of course). The tool would query the database to find out where to get the packages that are needed. The database might also return dependency information, or it could delegate that responsibility to the actual location. This could be almost DNS-like.
Just a few random ideas off the top of my head. Feel free to shoot huge holes into it.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The truth is, that despite the intensity of the point, the point still holds truth. I love linux, I have used it for almost 10 years now, and have done everything from kernel hacking, to my own C programming etc.
However, what began as an enthusiasts project, became an essential part of my work, has now become to some degree tiresome, and laboured. It's simply because binary distribution and configuration designs between OS's varies so much, that it becomes difficult to release software that easily integrates into ANY environment. Permeatations on OS's means many more for the software.
However, it is up to successful programmers to fix this, and trust me, if it can happen, it will happen with linux, and open source, if not demonstrated by the current wave of self booting, nice looking Linux distro's, the installation menu's these days, etc....sure it needs more work, but it will have it shortly.
Just think of the next wave of Linux Distro's in 12 months time, how much easier even still they will be to use, install or download software.
Now imagine 24 months.
Now compare that to Longhorn?
Microsoft knows it's coming....
When you're reading a mailing list and someone emails "how do I do X", the usual response, as ESR has pointed out, is to simply answer them. If the problem comes up a couple of times, perhaps it goes into a FAQ. There is one missing thing, though, that doesn't happen. The author should ask "what could I change in the *software*, not the documentation or FAQ or whatnot, that would keep users from coming to ask me about this again."
May we never see th
But everytime I point out someone's interface flaws, someone in the OSS community screams at me "it's volunteer work" or "program your own version then."
Then I realize I don't want to work with a bunch of anti-social programmers.
I'm a longtime reader of Slashdot, longtime observer of the open-source community, never posted before, hope someone takes my opinion seriously.
I use some open-source applications and have installed Linux a few times. The reason I don't use it now is because of the exact problems ESR mentioned. Obscure problems, poor documentation, and having to wade through a zillion man pages just to get an idea of what the problem is.
Far be it from me to tell any programmer how to do their job, but most of us in the Real World don't have time for this stuff. We just want the bloody thing to work without too much trouble, so we can get on with our jobs and/or lives. Microsoft, for all its many and fundamental shortcomings, understands this. Far too few Linux developers do. Ergo, when an end-user encounters a problem like ESR's and can't muddle his way through it, he's just going to shrug his shoulders and take the path of least resistance, which means Windows.
I hate Microsoft, I hate their shoddy software, I hate their security problems, I hate their handholding, I hate their interfaces. I've been saying for years that if I ever meet Bill Gates, I'm gonna smack him. But I keep using his software, because if nothing else, at least I know it's going to do what I need it to do, dangnabit, and I won't need a computer science degree to make it work.
A similar diatribe to ESR's could be written on trying to burn a backup DVD under RH9. Gave up; I just FTP my backup over to my Lose2003 box, where the driver worky-worky.
No, no! The driver works *perfectly*, it's just that it requires correct entry of hardware parameters in one of the assembly language sources! Yeesh! Don't blame the hard-working open-source developer for your MCSE-like lack of computer knowledge!
Seriously, though, I'm so glad to see ESR ranting about the state of userland GUI stuff. I've been doing it for a while, but it's often dismissed as a FUD campaign by people who don't like what I'm saying.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Sorry, but I can get Linux to crash on my laptop thanks to a certain crappy ALSA implementation. Just recently my Gentoo startup froze for no reason. I literally had to power off and restart, which fixed the problem.
Windows, needless to say, works without even installing vendor drivers.
Linux users don't like "Joe Sixpack" for a reason--he's usually the jock who picked on them in high school.
A generalization, but it applies to most of the community--we're a bunch of generally shy and anti-social tech nerds who spend all day configuring an OS to use our mouse buttons correctly or play sound and think that means it's "powerful" and "flexible."
We don't want it easy, because the true reason people love Linux so much is the satisfaction they feel from getting it working. That's why they feel so euphoric about it. It's the subconscious, unspoken truth. Make it easy to do things in Linux, and suddenly you make it a tool to get work done instead of a tool to tinker, and you take away its hipness.
Which is why the Linux community is what holds Linux back.
We still have crap like Kroupware, Kallery, Xouvert, and a GUI system that still requires you to configure mouse buttons and specs through an awful text file (as someone else succinctly put it, it's like answering essay questions).
Microsoft has already moved on and is creating virtual machine run-times and a DirectX hardware-accelerated desktop. Linux is still trying to get a desktop off the ground with "cute" names like KDE and GNOME, each with their own sound servers, their own configuration formats, neither with a proper method of installation/uninstallation (because to Linux users, registries magically = bad because Windows happens to have something called the "registry"), neither with a proper interface (though Gnome is the closest), and neither having the snappy responsiveness OS X and Windows XP have.
I finished compiling KDE 3.2 today on Gentoo, using Pentium 4 optimizations. It still took 4 seconds when I first loaded up my Home directory. Loading My Computer in Windows takes less than a third of a second.
These are all the endless things that need to be fixed, but won't be. Instead, things will be forked, people will obsess over something "M$" did, and meanwhile KDE and GNOME will continue living in their own little worlds making pretty desktops that make for good screenshots on the back of the distro packaging, until you actually grab the mouse and try to use them.
The author seems to think that every other sentence must italicise words so he can get an idea across. I personally think that it gets annoying and may hurt your brain to stress too many words. You try and ignore his mess but you get some feeling you're missing important points. Rereading the sentence wastes valuable time and causes much frustration in such a long article. Can someone please tell me where I can get an html tag filter?
Sincerly,
aiyo
He was obsessed with the Macintosh being a work of art. He was so picky about the look of the damn calculator app, the designer got tired of revising it and made a calculator interface designer for him. The final design Steve made stayed with MacOS up into the 90s. He even had the Mac designers sign their names on the inside of the mold for the casing. That's a mentality I like--the connection between emotion and computing. The creation of a computer that blendds into someone's life as a useful tool and portal to computing.
What happened to that melding of art and computing? OS X still has it, but without support for x86, it's not exploding like it should. That leaves Linux--and Linux is completely missing the ball here because it's been written by developers for developers, and still is. It's massively technical and powerful for dev-heads, but the other front--the one that Windows lacks--is the intuitive, artistic side.
But, I fully expect everyone to stick with crappy XFree86 for another 10 years and espouse how great their poorly designed "KDE" and "GNOME" interfaces are. Five years after Longhorn comes out, KDE will finally get around to attempting hardware acceleration and also speeding up the horribly shit-slow app-loading.
Nobody's artistic about computing anymore, except Apple. We should be too. Obviously, that means rethinking the way people are writing their apps/environments, which ain't gonna happen.
Linux dev's should start thinking of their apps in terms of allowing users to achieve whatever they want to achieve, be it writing the next great novel and printing it out to hooking up the camera to see the new pictures of their newborn baby. The whole "empowerment" buzzword.
By not writing software for non-technical users the so called 'digital divide' widens so much that we are no longer 'in danger' of creating a digital underclass, but we are guarenteed of creating it. An interface to a piece of software should be elegant, simple and intuitive. If the ATM's we all use had been more complicated than remembering a 4-digit pin and pushing a plastic card into a slot, then the every-day consumer wouldn't use them.
ESR is right on the money on his observations. His response is prescriptive, and wise, and well thought out.
However, a constructive response is be even better than a prescriptive response. Eric's essay is an instructive example of the thought process that goes into debugging an incomplete user interface, and prescribes excellent principles for user interface design. The essay fails as a description of the process of bringing up a networked CUPS printer. While that was not Eric's purpose, I humbly suggest that his task is not complete until he does so. If he can find the time, he should create another web page, describing his CUPS problem, and the most direct way to solve it, now that he knows what he knows. Countless other users could find his example on the web, and emulate it if applicable.
Windows comes from a box, Linux comes from a community. The solution to the Linux user interface problem comes from the community, too. We can compensate for the rough edges of our software by sharing our experiences and solutions on the web.
If you encounter a difficult problem with Linux, and manage to solve it, don't just sigh and move on. Don't stop with a witty and cogent essay about the bad practices that led to your suffering. Figure out what worked, and write it down, and turn it into a web page. A HOWTO. A cookbook. Whatever you can write that helps others.
Put your helpful web page in a stable place, where other folks can find it and link to it. Keep it fresh and updated as you learn more. Add links to other useful sites (this increases your Google score, and is helpful to your readers). Every once in a great while, you will get a nice email from someone, asking a question or providing further illumination.
Write up your failures, too! You might warn others away from crippled software, or a wrong approach. You might help the authors of a FOSS application find an improvement. Best of all, someone might offer a solution to your problem - then you can change your failure page into a recipe for success!
Most of what I've learned about Linux has come from the webbed experiences of others. I've tried to add a few writeups myself (for example, http://www.keithl.com/linuxbackup.html ), a few pages per year. This has resulted in valuable feedback. There are thousands of people doing this now, many (like ESR) far more prolific than I am. If 10 times as many people wrote about their Linux experiences, what a wealth of helpful information there would be, only a Google search away. This helps more people join us, which adds to the problem-solving power of our community.
Best of all, someday some smart team will figure out how to gather the best of these contributions into help systems that are even more easily searched and evaluated than the search-engine/web-browser paradigm we work with now. Just as Linus Torvalds added a brilliant but relatively small bit of kernel coding to the nutrient-rich primordial soup of GNU free software, unleashing the power of Linux, so our small writeups and howtos will fuel the innovative user discovery systems that will drive the next wave of desktop computing. Open source will be a critical part of that - if user discovery engines can determine functionality from source code, it can relate configurations to behavior and guide the user towards solutions.
Again, Eric's thought provoking essay indicates a problem, and helps us sympathize with the user of a traditional standalone program, isolated from the Internet. But the Internet exists. The cookbooks and examples that can help any user solve any ordinary problem WILL exist, if we all devote a little bit of time sharing our hard-won solutions on the web.
If you can't do, teach. Even the best of us can't repair all the incomplete user interfaces out there, but we can still help others succeed with the interfaces that exist. Aunt Tillie is not alone; when she runs Linux, she can have millions of helpful friends.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
I do not say the CUPS interface is good in any way ( I only used it once to set up my printer and it worked for me without problems).
But thats what I had with WINDOWS:
1.) Setting up a network printer at work: We have a HP Laserjet in our network which I wanted to use for printing. I tried to add it with the Control Panel. It found this printer on several computers ( there is a list of "AUTO HP LaserJep MP5 on SomeMachine entries there ). Funny enough, the computer to which the printer is connected was not listed.
If I tried to print on any of the AUTO printers - no go!
Then I tried to add the printer with "Add printer" and selected "browse for network printer". The computer of interest was not listed and I could not find the printer. The "Aunt Tillie" would have thrown the computer out of the window by now.
I asked a collegue and he gave me a HP driver setup which scanned for network printers and installed the one it found as if it is a local printer. No help, no nothing told me that this printer needs its own driver to work over the network.
2.) A friend had a problem installing a HP DeskJet on his computer at home. The auto driver installation from HP seemed to detect the printer and installed the driver. But trying to print always lead to the error "Out of paper". But the self-test of the printer gave a good test print.
We tried several drivers ( from the WINDOWS CD and from the Website ) but nothing worked.
A few days later my friend told me he had connected the printer to another interface on his computer and it worked. Duh!
Conclusion: Windows also sucks at this point.
When it comes to documentation and making things more intuitive, you just cant blame the FLOSS developers,
they are developing all that software because of their love for writing software, when that software is in a proper functional state(according to their expectations) they start losing interest in that(and thats natural as their first love is writing software, not documenting it), they just want to handle complex programming problems instead of firing an editor and writing about how the whole thing works.
To them "Documentation" is kind of "shitty" work which no one wants to do, and thats where money comes in picture, in closed source or professional organizations you have to write documentation, you like it or not. and often you have dedicated guys who are responsible for that, also enough thought goes into look and feel of software along with core functionality of software.
I remember reading Linus statement somewhere where he said companies like RedHat did what he never wanted to do like documentation and i think that clearly conveys the point.
Linux: Self-mutilation is a snap.Be a geek!!!
I am SO happy Eric Raymond wrote this... just a few days ago I too was trying to set up my printer via CUPS, and ended up giving up/swearing up a storm. Bitchy comments from some Slashdot readers aside, we ought to listen to this man... Linux's main strength AND disadvantage is that the majority of the code writers/users are (like moi) tech-savvy geeks. But, the UI should not force us to become a full-fledge sysadmin every time we want to install a damn printer (or plugin, or etc...) Believe it or not, even though I am a geek, sometimes I just want to use the printer without giving a rat's ass how it happens as long as it happens. It's one of the few times that I don't hate MicroBarf or (cr)Apple. What many of the open source projects need is to recruit a local WinDoze/Macinosh weenie (their boss for example), and have them run through the projects' UI. If the user finds the UI easy, then great! Otherwise, it should be back to the (G)UI drawing board. Obscurity does not lead to usability, people!
With step 1, you've lost about 95% of the computing world.
I have co-workers tell me to "slow down" even when all I'm doing is telling them to go to a website to install a driver.
To you and me, "aptitude install foomatic-db hpoj hpijs hotplug" is a line of command consisting of shorthand names representing stuff. To everyone else, it's gibberish and it frightens them.
Fine, then don't bitch about "M$" being the dominant monoculture when you're to lazy to bother making your software usable for other people. If you only want to scratch YOUR itch, keep your software on your private network and don't let major distros pick it up. Understood, Mr. I'm-the-poor-unpaid-volunteer-developer?
Guess what? Users don't care either. They'll drop your shit like a bad habit and go back to what works.
To man page writers: do not exlcude the [opt] stuff. It is needed. but please, put in some basic examples. They are at least as important.
(same goes for API documentation, show one bare-bones-minimum-to-make-it-work example, one or two I-am-using-as-many-options-as-possible examples, and then document each option. )
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I've cheked out macosx's cups, and it's one of the most arcane things I've ever seen. How in god's name am I supposed to know what the URL to my printer is? What's a "class", and why would I want to manage it?
That truly is a terrible interface. It's not the layout, it's the verbage.
Plus, I think (but I can't tell) that if you go in and modify a printer it doesn't show you the current settings - it shows you the defaults. I never bothered to check because it's unclear whether the settings are saved if you hit "next".
Truly terrible.
My answers:
1. Invisible.
2. What GUI?
3. The end users shouldn't even know.
4. I hate it when that happens.
5. See 1.
My end users shouldn't notice at all. Everything needs to be invisible, not just easy to use. Tasks that used to require a good deal of work should disappear into a black hole that we call The Server. Accounting, filing, billing, spam filtering, if it's boring and dull, a computer should probably be doing it instead.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I installed a GNOME desktop for my wive. She has never used a computer before and just wants to use EMail and WWW.
The GNOME desktop works perfect for her. There are no obscure things that could mess up the system and she immediately was able to work with the system. I had explain almost nothing to her.
Before I installed GNOME for her, I had a look and KDE and found it terrific - from the UI point of view. Menus loaded with items rarely used, bloated toolbars and the like.
Afterwards I had once installed WINDOWS XP on a square patition to run a specific program which only runs on WINDOWS. She had a look at it and - immediately wanted GNOME back. She could not stand the "Lunar" style of XP and also complained about this tiny task bar at the bottom.
I find that currently there is nothing better than GNOME for people who just want to do some specific tasks with the computer and who do not want to bother with configuration and tweaking.
While his style is, as usual, not quite professional, the points he makes are right on target. Usability is sorely lacking in most Unix/Linux setups.
But instead of pointing to various short user-friendliness rants and mini-howtos, I suggest reading a few books, to see what the current state of the art is.
I suggest the following two, which I am using for my thesis work on this subject as well:
Donald A. Norman: The Design of Everyday Things
This book focuses on everday gadgets and appliances instead of computer interfaces, but the advice Norman gives is perfectly applicable to our field of work. Highly recommended.
Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design
Now this book is pure gold. Excellent advice on user research, goal-oriented design and lots of insight on GUI design as well. Yes, Microsoft gets some praise for parts of their efforts - where they deserve it. They also are criticized properly - just like everybody else - where they failed. If developers would apply at least a little of this stuff, we would have vastly better software.
I agree with ESR's analysis, but not with the conclusion: What he found out was the usability problems in Fedora.
I've set up network printers in SuSE many times for years and it has never been a problem.
But what is a problem is that this mindless bashing discourages any improvement. So SuSE and Mandrake solved the issues. Do they get any kudos from ESR? Nope. To the contrary, they are lumped into the same category and it is claimed that they are as unfit as Fedora for the desktop. So those who have worked those usability problems are punished, too and get bad PR for mistakes they didn't make.
This is really sickening.
Nobody expects ESR to try out every distribution, but he should be honest enough to make conclusions and claims only about Fedora and not "Linux".
Although I happily agree that most OSS leaves lots to be desired in terms of user-friedliness, I don't like ESR's rant much. Here's why:
He criticizes CUPS for having a subobtimal configuration interface. I am impressed that it even has such an interface at all. A friend of mine once said that hackers often stop where the product becomes almost usable. This is very true, and the CUPS developers probably just focus on the implementation, rather than the interface, which, IMO, is the Right Thing to do.
Secondly, what he tried to do should have required no action on his part, as it says in the documentation. It's not CUPS's fault that the Fedora Core team decided to ship their system with the required feature turned off. There are good reasons for turning the feature off, e.g. security considerations: don't run services that are not required, and remote printing certainly isn't required for everyone. Sure, they should have mentioned this and provided instructions for re-enabling it, but remember that all this is under development; there is room for improvement.
Finally, I have to say that I have had both good and bad experiences with CUPS, but finally quit using it because it is much too heavy and complex for my needs. I just want to print, locally, and magicfilter takes care of this just fine.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The problem with bad GUIs and guides in open source software comes from the fact that creating a good user interface is the most boring and tedious programming task there is. One has to handle all the possible wrong uses (there are about 100 per correct usage) in a way that gives good feedbackt to the user.
Since most people developing software for Linux work for free and out of their own will there usually isn't enough incentive to do the boring stuff. An employee for a software company however could lose his job if he didn't do it.
Open source is the art of letting other people write your bad code.
There was earlier article that compared *nix and Windows programmers...
*nix programmers write programs for other programs to use (hence command line arguements that are easy to parse/create etc). Ie they do the guts first, then bolt on an interface later.
windows programmers write programs for users. ie they write the interface first, then the guts.
Would be interesting to see how the Mac guys concentrate their efforts.
It was meerly defending its self from the threat of use with a dot matrix printer!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I have repeatedly had the same problem ... whoever writes the help files and user documentation has NEVER follwed it step by step or watched a novice do it. They don't realize where their experience is filling in a critical gap in the information.
Why doesn't the software help file clearly state that? The insistence that Linux users ferret out these tidbits in order to get something to work is what is making people stay with MSFT. I installed SuSE 8.2 and discovered that it didn't install a functional DVD burner even though it was distributed on DVD... there was vague mention of some things I had to acquire and install and configure if I wanted to use a DVD burner. To hell with that ... Win2000 happened to be available and the DVD burner software that came with the drive works fine wiith it.
That's a lot of typing. Not only is the parent post absolutely correct, but lots of typing introduces the possibility for typos. Typos make things not work. When something you don't really understand doesn't work it's very frustrating because you have no idea why it didn't work, and thus no idea how to fix it.
For example, you have no step 3.
Think of it this way: Every time a person has to touch something, the chance of them screwing it up (either by accident, apathy or by their own lack of knowledge) increases. Microsoft has reduced installing a printer to four "touches" - Plug in power, plug in data, press power button, click "okay".
You method required about 164 "touches" to type all that in... and that's not counting all the "touching" you have to do looking for and reading various documentation just to figure out how to do it in the first place!
Also, I'd like to ask how you know where "http://localhost:631" came from. Nobody associates printing with the internet (And EVERYBODY associated http:// is "the internet"...) This step is especially confusing. It's completely non-obvious. You can not use "experience" as an answer, because the average user will not have any.
Why can't "hotplug" do that for you?
The fact that much of the Linux community is so condecending towards users who "don't get it" isn't exactly helping the cause, either. Unless you're already established a name for yourself in one of the social circles it's almost imposible to get any real, straightforward, one-on-one help.
You also mention cost. I don't know about you, but my time isn't always free. This point has been brought up by other posters already.
And considering the Linux Revolution has yet to happen, despite it being heralded for years now, maybe one is better... I'll give you a hint in case you misinterpret it: Microsoft. It may be crap but it's crap everyone can use, and when you get right down to it the job gets done. That's a pretty steep mountain to climb.
=Smidge=
Maybe OSS needs a central repository of OSS development "best practice".
A collection of technical howtos (subversion/cvs, patches etc), articles on UI design, documentation writing, managing distributed volunteer teams, handling users. Things like "Dos and Donts", articles from experienced OSS developers and users - maybe a little less inflammatory than ESR's, though. A Wiki maybe?
All this information must be out there, distributed in mailing lists, forums and developers' memories. Surely it would improve OSS quality if new developers sent a few hours reading through that sort of material before starting to contribute.
In any case, Windows terminology dictates that a JetDirect is a 'Local' printer (in the sense that there is no computer on the network managing the print queue to qualify it as a 'Network' printer, equivalent to the Unix terminology of 'remote') and in order to set up such a printer one must Add a Port (Standard TCP/IP). It is at this point, and only at this point, where various versions of Windows will attempt to autodetect something. So ESR is giving Windows designers credit for far more than they've actually done
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
While I certainly agree with you that following standards may not lead to a good user interface for all applications, I would submit that (at least for end user applications on mainstream PCs) it is usually better than not following the standards, and that most attempts to "innovate" are usability failures. To wit:
This is true. And as a professional developer using Visual Studio .Net, I'd like to thank Microsoft personally for giving us:
and all the other "innovations" that cost me several minutes of my valuable time every day.
To their credit, Microsoft's developers (at least those I've talked to) do seem to have a genuine interest in improving this, and their hearts are in the right place. Some of the nasty context-sensitive stuff can be disabled in the 2003 version, for example. But a lot of these "usability innovations" gain me nothing, while slowing me down and/or wasting valuable screen real estate.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's one thing to be said for Windows - the GUI is tiiiight.
I agree wholeheartedly with the article, and it's not just CUPS. It's pretty much everything open source. Guys like me are very open to pushing open source into the workplace, but until these problems are solved, it will not happen. Period.
An example of a good product made correctly is Mozilla.
Mozilla was easy to roll out, starting with the development teams. I just told them, "run the installer". Then I show them tabbed browsing, javascript debugging and error description, and better W3C support...and BANG...50% of the developers are now using some flavor of Mozilla and/or Firefox.
This is the ONE THING keeping OSS from real influence.
Software designers need to realize that the clueless users aren't the only ones who have trouble with the software; plenty of intelligent programmers and sysadmins are just as screwed when it comes to configuring complicated stuff like printing, sendmail, and Apache. The problem is that there are just too many options. Sure we can read the documentation, when we have the time, but there is rarely time to read the hundreds of pages of documentation that go along with a lot of really complicated software packages. It's not that I don't appreciate the flexibility that all the nifty features provided by large software packages, it's just that I rarely use most of them, and don't have time to sift through the documentation.
If you want to add cool features to the software, go for it. We'll love you for it. But if you want us to actually use the software, stop every time you add a feature, and make sure that you are providing simple, straightforward, easy-to-find documentation, or create a nice GUI. Otherwise I'm left with the options of sifting through my book collection and google results or just using Windows software with a nice automatic setup wizard.
If we get some top-grade developers motivated to work in this area, it will all get fixed. I actually think that it will happen quite soon. XFree86 configuration is another place that comes to mind, just try even an advanced distro like SuSE, with a popular Nvidia card, and a 1600*1200 monitor, and you will see what I mean! it ends up in a black screen of death every time, because the stupid configuration program runs in X, misconfigures to the point that the monitor gives up (or goes bang?), and dies. The bit which is without excuse is that if you get it working with a manual edit of the config file, and later run Sax, it blows away all your hard work.
SuSE is no worse than the others, in fact it is better than most, but like a lot of excrement found in the Redmond sewage system, it tries to be too clever without knowing all the facts.
Samba is another thing that needs attention, same sort of reason. I have full sympathy with the Samba developers, there are only so many hours in a day, and they have to interwork with bug-infested, undocumented protocols that change as often as Sir Bill changes his underwear. So, it needs more people, working on the user and administrator interface. It does not help that every distro does its own thing, needlessly duplicating effort. In the case of Samba, almost all of the work could be common across all Linux distros, BSD, BeOS, Solaris, even the hated SCO.
I hope these issues get serious action soon, it will enormously help in the process of getting OSS established on the desktop. It is even far more important than developing the next version of the kernel, after all we have reliable kernels now, thanks to the hard work of Linus and many others.
Although he might be right about OSS having poor UIs, it's really getting to the stage where there are so many things in general UI design that are broken that it's becoming ridiculous. Let's see:
.INF file to add the connection name. Ok, UI folks, another principle to bear in mind: anything the computer knows may be wrong.
[i]Trying to be clever and failing[/i]. The author wanted server autoprobe. Funny, that, it wouldn't be the first time when I've wanted to tear a configuration system to bits because it insisted on using an autoprobe and offering a selection box, when I [i]knew[/i] where the appropriate server/connection was but couldn't select it because the autoprobe wasn't finding it and there was no free entry box. This even got to one stage where I had to manually edit an
[i]Using the passive voice[/i]. As in "the system is waiting for the Close Programs dialog box to be displayed". Um, excuse me? That's like me sitting in my office saying "I'm waiting for my work to be done". Just as it's my job to do my work, it's "the system"'s job to display the Close Programs dialog box, and it isn't doing it.
[i]Abuse of OK and Cancel[/i]. I should not have to say that an error message is "OK". Unix had this alright with "Dismiss".
[i]Nested OK and Cancel[/i]. Got IE? Tools, Internet Options, Delete Files. Are you sure you want to delete files? OK. Now you're back at the Internet Options screen, but there's still an OK and Cancel button showing. Does clicking Cancel cancel the deletion? Nope. So why is it there? Again, "Apply" and "Dismiss" avoid all of these.
[i]Not saying why things are the case[/i]. Tell me why options are ghosted, tell me why errors occured. I know [i]you[/i] know why, because you just came off the if statement that checked the condition in question.
[i]Confusing information with help[/i]. Information is possibly unrelated facts. Help is directed at progressing the task the user is doing. If you aren't smart enough to figure out how to do that, you can't offer "help", no matter what you name the button.
[i]Non-temporal progress bars[/i]. The progress bar should show the % of time left, out of the total time the process will take. I don't care about the arbitary tasks your program breaks the function down into, I just want to know how long I have to wait. Oh, and a 100% progress bar should never appear. At 100% progress the task is done and the progress bar disappears. If you have other things to do with the results of the task, then from my POV as a user, that's all part of my wait so should be part of the task the progress bar allows for. Setting a progress bar to 100% should be an assertion failure.
If you install SuSE 9.0, which is the current release *and* is available for free now, you'll notice that k3b was updated. Presumably you're using the default windowing setup - KDE - and the default install - which includes k3b (which is really about the best darned Linux program I've used recently). Anyway, the new k3b has support for dvd burning, and the underlying tool set includes the dvdrecord stuff. It works. Well.
There are many universities that have technical writing programs. If you asked their professors to assign or accept documentation for OSS as course work, you could probably find plenty of fledgeling tech writers who could join the project and clean up the writing and the GUI.
Furthermore, it isn't like it is with cars, where half the wrenches needed are Metric and half the wrenches are English. There is a custom-unit set of tools that you need to service each and every part of the vehicle. Putting on a new alternator? Better make sure they included the wrench in the set that fits the provided bolts to install it. Better make sure you didn't lose the wrench used to install the old one.
---
I use iMovie to pull in my video of my 2yr old girl running around like a fool and send it to her grandparents on the other side of the north american continent.
I've never found it unable to 'do what you need to do' other than the ability to make lasers shoot from her eyeballs or something fun like that.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Dude, I'm sorry but I have to reply...
.01 seconds - BUT WHAT THE HELL GOOD WOULD IT DO ME.
About your "4 seconds to load home" thing. The problem is you aren't seeing the fact that Konquerer is ATLEAST 400% better than windows explorer.
You can't do ANYTHING with windows explorer - you have to load up a hundred different programs to get the same functionality. With konquerer you can quickly preview just about ANY file format. You can open most formats directly in the window. You have tabbed browsing, in your file manager! (which internet explorer doesn't even have).
You can connect to many different protocols (such as: smb://, http://, ftp://, nfs://, imap://, fish:// and a whole bunch more) and manipulate the files just as if they are on your local machine.
And a WHOLE BUNCH MORE!
Everyone keeps yelling at the KDE people because of startup times for opening the home folder. They keep comparing that time to opening My Computer. The problem is - that's like comparing the startup time between Windows 3.1 and Windows XP. Sure I could start 3.1 in
Quit ranting about shit you don't stop to think about first.
Derek
Some things are very rarely used but still important in some situations. Some options will rarely be used because they were not easy to find, which can also skew your stats.
Way ahead of ya. (I have the bad habit of thinking about these things.)
If there's a feature that requires three or four commands in succession, you should be able to see the drop-off over time. (Of course a feature should be as simple as possible, but sometimes you can't avoid the fact that they need to enter three or four bits of information, possibly in sequence.)
If there's a pet feature that I like, but nobody uses it, at least this gives me an opportunity to ask why, rather then blindly assuming that it's being used and understood. (In other projects you can sort of get this by the number of people asking for features that already exist, but that's not as reliable.)
I intend to process the preferences based on how many were twiddled by a given person, so if you only set one away from the default, it gets your "full vote", while if you twiddle lots, you show as caring about a lot of little features but not as much. (I'm thinking of scaling this logarithmically, so if you twiddle two features, you have like 75% interest in both; I don't care if they add up to 100%, I care if it shows what's going on.) As for commands, I intend to cut off the top X commands (which in this context are likely to be things like "Copy" or "Paste"), and go from there to see what people are actually using. Some commands, like "Open File from Web" may not see much use numerically, but still be very important, whereas "Move Up Paragraph" may be used bajillions of times, but technically, if it were removed it would only be moderately annoying overall.
There's also the point of view of "How many people used this command more then three times (to get over people just "Trying it out")?" which I think would be interesting; if you've got some obscure data format that only 3 out of 2000 people use, you may want to pull it out into an optional plug-in that those three people can install, to get it out of the main menus, but still keep it around (as long as it is passing its unit tests...). It would also be easier for a very, very small group of people to maintain a plug-in, whereas they would have no interest in maintaining it if it were in the core program (and who could blame them?).
Sure, interpretation will be tricky, but I think it will be doable, and without the data you're shooting in the dark.
Note: I'm not trying to flame!
There's a great difference between advocating something--Linux, in this case--and really opening your eyes, seeing both the good points and the warts. Far, far too much Linux advocacy has been of the blind variety. People who use Linux for a handful of geeky uses rant and rave about how its superior and how everyone should use it. When someone asks "But is there a program as good as Blah that runs under Linux?" The response is almost always an enthusiastic "Yes! There are dozens! And they're open source! The best one is XYZ." Then in reality the dozens turn out to be half-baked personal projects unsuitable for general use, and XYZ tends to be better, but nowhere near what the person is wanting in terms of polish and quality. Those endearing advocates who insist that The GIMP is on par with Photoshop come to mind.
The next level of advocacy is realizing that this is true. JWZ, and now ESR, have followed this path, and many, many others who are not so egotistical.
My guess is developers do this to differentiate their product from someone else's.
As an end user, it just irritates me. I have to take time out to learn how to do something I already know how to do in another application.
There is no benefit in this for me as an end user.
I don't care if X's app looks like Y's app.
As an end user I would actually consider this a plus.....not having to learn a new UI to do the same thing.
Steve
As I expected ... the traditional answer of "Try Yet Another Distro" when something that should have worked doesn't. Well, I've tired of TYAD ... I'd have to check my notes to see how many I actually have tried, but it's upwards of a dozen over the past two years.
Some projects still do not get it. There is an unconscious assumption that merely wrapping commands in a menu/GUI is making an app user friendly.
The biggest culprits seem to be projects that port command line tools to a GUI like emacs, x-cdburn, and oracle's sql interface ( not oss ).
One of the ways a GUI makes an app user friendly is if the GUI takes away some of the need for knowing how to do something in the app.
X-CDBURN ( name? ) is a good example of this. It is GUI, but the user still needs to know how to use the command line tool commands in order to burn a CD.
What is the point in wrapping the command-line tools in a GUI then? Those sequence of commands could just as easily be typed into a shell without the overhead of the GUI.
In contrast there is K3b where a user can burn a CD without having to read a HowTo to learn the theory/practice of making CDs.
Not to pick on X-CDROAST, other apps do this as well.
If you are not going to design a GUI that eliminates some of needing to know how to do a task it is not worth porting an app to a GUI.
If I have to know a string of commands and how to use them Xterm tastes great and is less filling.
Steve
"...they may write crappy insecure overpriced shoddy software, but on this one issue their half-assed semi-competent best is an order of magnitude better than we usually manage.'"
Now that's what I call a compliment.
Yes, you TOTALLY missed the point, which was that SuSE distributed a version on DVD, and despite knowing that the users were going to have a DVD player and maybe even a burner, didn't bother to make sure that burner and player software were installed and configured. They took the easy way out and expected EVERY user to track down the necessary information and download other files to install and configure the DVD burner/player.
Implying that I am a software pirate helps Linux improve? How? I have a LEGAL copy of Win2000 and the DVD software that came with the burner is also legal. Looking at the Program files, everything I have on my system is legal: either FOSS or purchased.
What WAS your point, anyway?
Linux users/developers spend most of their time ranting about Windows, saying how crappy it is and how great the world could be if anyone was using Linux.
I ask you then: why the f*** are you constantly trying to duplicate it?
OpenOffice, KDE, Lindows, Red Hat, Mandrake... and so on and so on...
You keep saying Windows is bad but all those wares listed above are complete knockoffs of Windows with a little amount of "different" widgets, mostly confusing ones, even the icons used in those knockoffs are identical to their Windows version, sometimes with different colors, the paradigms used are the same troughout both systems (with very little exceptions). If Linux is better than make it better, make it above the rest, it is of no use to have an F1 engine in a Lada.
The big real hard fact about Linux is that nobody wants it to be usable, people went to Linux because Windows was getting more friendly, Linux users for the most part are people who need to feel like genius and superior because they can set a printer up and you can't, they need to feel that using a computer is hardcore science. More important they need to keep their job, they set Windows aside much like the computer crowd back in the days dissmissed the Mac, because it's easy enough so that a littled-trained user could use and configure it correctly for very decent performance, security and stability (ok maybe not Windows yet...) and that might lead to a smaller IT team.
Realize this: Windows is a very cheap knockoff of the Mac and Linux (as it is now) is a very cheap knockoff of Windows.
Windows is bad, you know it, I know it, so try to be different, try do do it right. If all you want is a free Windows then don't pretend you are participating in a revolution, be blunt and do it.
Apple and Microsoft have large UA (User Assurance) departments that they can show existing and new UI designs to, and get feedback. This step is expensive, and as it involves non-geeks, is not done often in the FOS world. To make an interface user friendly, you need feedback from people who are not familiar with the system. People who are familiar with the system will say things like "Why would users do something like that", "Oh, to do that it would be easier to use the command line," or "RTFM." Whereas user who are not familiar with the system will have much different expectations, like being able to do what they want from the GUI, and not having to jump through a large number of hoops. Btw, this problem is not limited to FOS projects, but to all development that does not go through rigors UA step. In the book Insanely Great, Steven Levy gives a few anecdotes about how Apple got its first UI right. It involved bringing in computer illiterate people on a regular basis to try out the system while it was still in development. Feedback was given to the designers and programmer immediately about what had to be changed or polished up.
Too many FOS projects just try to make the UI "the same as" Apples or MS's interface. This works if the project does the same thing as what is being copied (plus users can move over to the FOS product without much addition training), but breaks down if there are too many differences. This is what has happened here. I don't know if the CUPS team even designed the GUI or not, however it appears the GUI was not well thought out ER is ranting about.
There is an additional problem here in that rigors UA does not currently fit very well into the FOS development model, and until we figure out a way to include it, then FOS projects will suffer from the "its too hard to use" syndrome. As I mentioned before, proper UA is expensive, and I fear that it will be done only for large and well funded projects. Some designers have a good intuition about what works and doesn't, and a crude form of UA could be done by showing the design to family and friends, but this has its own set of problems (but its still better then none at all)
Microsoft has already moved on and is creating virtual machine run-times and a DirectX hardware-accelerated desktop. Linux is still trying to get a desktop off the ground with "cute" names like KDE and GNOME
Yeah, like "DirectX" isn't a cute name....
the snappy responsiveness OS X and Windows XP have
Windows XP isn't snappy. It spends at least half a second doing some stupid "fade in" instead of opening up a damned widget immediately. I guess this is supposed to make it less intimidating or something. That, and the Fisher Price colors. I don't get it, personally.
(because to Linux users, registries magically = bad because Windows happens to have something called the "registry")
No, registries are bad because they're opaque and complex. They fail, and when they fail, it's catastrophic. (AIX has a registry, too. It's called the ODM (Object Database M-something). I've been a professional AIX sysadmin, beginning with 3.1. I've seen ODM failures. They're not pretty.)
I don't want one on my real computer. I'll let Windows have one, because you need one for Windows, and you need Windows for gaming. But my real computer should work the way I want it to, and for me that's ~/.xsession, fvwm, rxvt, mutt and vim. I know most of you don't share my view, and that's fine. You can have your CORBAs and your "Let's save the state of every application so we can bring them all back up when the user logs in, and they'll never have to edit a file to customize their desktop!", and I hope you enjoy it. But when it breaks, I'll just sit there and look at you. I won't have to say "I told you so". But you'll know that I'm thinking it.
It's not another distro, it's "run the newest version of your software". You don't *have* to change distros just to upgrade the software, but that seemed the easiest suggestion given that the question was asked by an appearent newbie ('cause you're running whatever was bundled with the distribution which happens to be about a year old).
The k3b site is http://www.k3b.org/ and there's a binary package up there for SuSE 8.2, so you don't have to do that really hard thing known as "compliling" or "figuring out how to read the INSTALL doc". Heck, you don't even have to go to google and click on the first link returned by a search for k3b - the homepage is linked right in the "about k3b" box in the application on your computer right now.
I can barely express how much I loathe [Lotus Notes]. As an email system, it sucks. As a document database it sucks. The web interface sucks. Yet for some unknown and ill-conceived reason, the IT people at work picked it to run our internal intranet. I can only assume that someone either got a hell of an all-expenses-paid, 6 month vacation to a tropical destination out of it, got a large infusion of free cash, or were terminally brain-damaged when they picked this software.
:)
You hit the nail on the head right there. Currently I work at one of the Kroger offices, but used to work at the Kroger helpdesk, doing computer and POS tech support. If you didn't know, Kroger is a huge grocery chain that has bought out many other chains throughout the country, currently operating a total of close to 3000 stores nationwide. There are many, many offices throughout the country for all of these stores, and they all had their own email systems, as they were all originaly seperate companies.
So Kroger decides that everyone should be moved over to the same system, for consistency's sake. I can understand that. That makes sense. Then it was announced that they had decided on Lotus Notes....
Ok, so tech support sucks. Lotus notes really sucks. Now combine the two together. I had to do tech support for Lotus Notes R5. Can you imagine??? Just put yourself in my shoes. I think at some point, everyone there considered suicide.
What makes me crack up is the reasons you listed for your company choosing Lotus Notes. Those are the exact same reasons we used to joke about at the helpdesk! Well we had one other one also... someone must have gotten one hell of a blow job...
Lotus Notes is, without a doubt, the absolute worst program I have ever used. EVER . It cannot do anything right. The interface is horrible. Everything is ugly and poorly designed. It's slower than molasses uphill in January. It eats up nearly all of my paultry 128MB RAM on this crappy computer I have to use, so everything else pages out (Fun!). There is not one good thing about it. I always hear people bitching about it. It's always giving errors when trying to send email. Luckily I used to support it so I know how to fix most of them... EG, "Invalid Document" when trying to send an email. Gee, thanks Lotus, that error message is really descriptive of what's wrong. (If you get this message, you have to delete Cache.DSK and mdircat.nsf in C:\Data\LotusNotes, assuming a default installation. Then re-open Lotus and it will rebuild these files).
Now I know lots of people despise Microsoft, but Kroger has MS Office deployed throughout their business. MS Office comes with Outlook. Outlook may not be the best solution ever, but at least the damn thing works. Throw up an exchange server is each office, and we're all set. No, instead they probably spent tens of millions of dollars to deploy Lotus on all of our workstations, and not one single person likes it. Since lots of people probably use Outlook or Outlook Express at home, this would have made sense, beacuse nearly everyone is familiar with it.
Anyways this rant has gone on long enough... And just in case you didn't realize it yet, I fucking hate Lotus Notes
Joseph?
As I see it, there are three possible explanations:
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
While this topic has generated mountains of discussion, I found only one mention of usability testing. In the case of setting up printers, a few user tests would have done wonders for revealing the barriers to success. The developer could probably fix such problems without trouble or if necessary document the critical impasses. While style guides and best practices are useful to someone building something, actual testing is invaluable for revealing critical, show stopping problems. Given how easy it is to test, it's a shame that more people don't use it to reveal weaknesses and improve their software.
As I've already explained my position on KDE usability, I won't bother posting it here.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
The lack of recognition of the primacy of "ease-of-use" is a huge problem for open sourcers. This will be a difficult skill gap to bridge, because Microsoft is driven by profit (customers), and therefore will be incentivized to actually produce things that people, other than propeller-heads, want. The world really, really, really, doesn't give a rats a$$ about how elegant your design is, but because your reward system is based on peer approval, rather than "customer" (a concept that doesn't event exist in open source) approval, you'll never understand this.
To summarize: making something complex is easy, making something simple (and useful) is very hard.
Would be nice if someone started up a project like that. :) Similar to the Slicker replacement for Kicker in KDE, even just a website with a design document and prototype shots would be great. I even have sketched prototype designs myself...this is an idea that's been bouncing around for a while now. Maybe this weekend I'll put something up for fun, and link to the site in my sig and get feedback from other people. Even if nothing became of it, the ideas would be out there.
P.S. Just so people know, I love Linux (recently switched from Slackware to Gentoo for the first time, my new favorite distro). But I yearn for the idea of the "dream desktop"--a completely free, open source Linux desktop that innovates and blows people away with how easy to use yet powerful it is. Intuitiveness. I don't believe KDE or Gnome are achieving that. I guess because I'm a musician (though I program for fun), I look at computers as a tool for art and usefulness.
TechnoElitism
The firm belief, that because and individual has the cognitive capacity to figure out a solution, that that solution is superior to all others.
Has it really taken this long to identify this problem among the Open Source Community?
OSS is most often developed as a response to a need or a desire by a technically adept individual or group of individuals.
I think of it as the "There's-more-than-one-way-to-skin-a-yak-but-this
I have a problem, and I can solve this problem. I don't want to solve it over and over again, and I don't want to pay someone else to do it. I think solving this problem would be cool. Sometimes, and I do mean sometimes , I have an idea to solve a problem that no one else has even thought of yet.
I write some code. The code is good; it does what I want it to do. I don't need to document the arcane way it does what I want it to do, because I wrote it. I know what all the variables do. I know the string manipulation algorithms. I understand the connection sequences, and where all the configuration files go.
All is good in my world.
I have proven, once again, that carbon is smarter than silicon, and my carbon is smarter than most other people's carbon.
This may make it cryptic and cumbersome to others. So be it. To some extent, deep down inside, I am proud of this.
It's equal or better than any work Microsoft, or Symantec, or Cisco, or.. or.. or.. whoever could have done.
It's better because "I" made it, and "I" understand it.
Fast Forward
"Hey, look at my code, isn't it cool? It runs faster and smarter than other code like it, and it never crashes. Well, yeah, it's kind of a bitch to install, but it will solve that pesky problem you have with X. And it's FREE! Yeah, check it out, lets install it on your machine. You got a couple hours?"
"Well, yeah, you could just install Windows... Yeah, that is easier to do, but that costs MONEY! And it doesn't do all the cool things that mine does! Yeah, well, they do have support, but don't you understand that this is FREE! Didn't I tell you it's better too? I included a FAQ and a Readme file, what else do you want? Oh. Simplicity, well, that's fine and dandy, but wouldn't you feel better, knowing that you're running better software than the rest of the cattle? No, you wouldn't eh?"
"Feh! Who needs you... Go suck up to some corporate greed-mongering capitalist innovation wrecker. It's people like you that keep people like me from writing the GOOD software."
Can you taste the irony?
It seems to me quite obvious.
We need an OSS InstallShield. Not a package manager, not "tar -xvzf", and certainly not "make menuconfig\make dep\make clean\make zlilo\make install\reboot".
We need a tool that your AFR (Average F*ing Retard) can run and install software. Sure, that takes the elitism out of being able to run our OSS, but we will kick the piss out of the "pay me for crap" crowd.
At least I know, as an elitist, that people are stupid, and they're just never gonna get it.
Jim
> The trick to getting dvdrecord to work is to know that it only supports "-dao" on most drives."
Why doesn't the software help file clearly state that?
I so agree with you, but I'd go even further: Why does the software not set this flag automatically if it's the only one that works?
The luxury of ignorance. If only one flag works, and/or is required for correct operation, then I should not need to know about it at all.
Unfortunately, writing such software is difficult and, most importantly, boring. It's not C00L to have written software which is trivial to use, and the FLOSS community is unfortunately still driven by the wish to become famous for having written something C00L.
So what we should ask ourselves is: how do we make it 1337 to write software that grandma could use?
The second the Free Software community started trying to push their stuff on schools, governments, and corporations, every Free Software developer earned a moral obligation to improve the usability of their stuff and they lost the right to say "Quit whining about what you're getting for free". The instant you put your software in areas where people don't have a choice in the software they use, you are no longer "just a volunteer".
Free Software Developers either need to make their usable or they need to stop their lobbying and go back to the server closet they came from.
We talk about world domination, but we'll neither have it nor deserve it until we learn to do better than this. A lot better.--ESR
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
What if there was a project whose sole job is to look for this kind of problems. There are projects for documention , drivers, devices, hardware for linux.
Why __not__ for this. This would requred mostly non-technical people and an efficient feedback system to the project maintainers. And the Linus's "enough eyeball's" Law which applies to the Software bugs would work extremly well in this case, since the core project developers can't do this alone. And at the same token, depending on non-technical end-users to look for these & report would be a wait for ever.
My two cents.
Apple Mac OS X printing uses Rendezvous AND CUPS to make sure that, in the absence of a user's choice, SOME printer is selected. It can't do this all the time, but normally, if you've got a printer connected somewhere on your network, you can print from another Mac without ever having to configure anything. Sure, Apple's configuration dialogs and printer management GUI is decent, but the real value is not having to see them at all.
The CUPS copyright is owned by Easy Software Products. A company that wants to sell you ESP Print Pro, their commercial counterpart to CUPS, for you to do your printing on Linux.
In an ideal world, where all applications talk the same language, and where GUIs are perfect, you wouldn't need Help installing that printer over the network.
;)
It shouldn't be rocket science. You have 2 or more computers networked, a printer connected to one of them. It should be as simple as showing you a list of available printers, and you click on the printer to connect to it. Microsoft almost got it right.
But sometimes you do get stuck, and need that Help button. Provided you're online, the Help button should not open offline documentation, but open an online discussion about that screen.
When Googling for technical problems, I find 90% of the answers in forums. So skip Google, and bring the forum link to the dialog box!
Not only will everyone get their answers from fellow users, but the developers will have much valuable feedback to help improving the interface.
The problem with having the "worker nerds" do their thing first is that the very architecture of their system may preclude (or make difficult) some necessary newbie functionality. To paraphrase Alan Cooper, code is to design like concrete is to architecture: once the concrete is poured, it's REALLY hard to change it, no matter what changes you make on the pretty blue paper.
Ideally, you let the design nerds do some user research before you start coding at all. Who is the target audience? What design metaphors are the already used to using? How much (usually, how little) experience can we assume?
Then you prototype. Prototyping isn't much different from coding: prototype your designs (on paper for starters), find out where they crash (i.e. where people get "hung"), debug, rinse, repeat. You won't work all the bugs out with a paper prototype, but you can nail an awful lot of them.
THEN you start coding. And you test and refine as you go, since some things (scrolling, for example) can be hard to simulate with paper. But you can get so much information if you just take a couple of weeks at the beginning and put some thought into your design, and then find some people who are representative of your target audience, and say "You have a printer attached to a different computer on your home network. You want to be able to print from this computer to the printer on the other machine. Here is the first screen..."
(Spoken, by the way, as someone with a foot in both worlds -- a design nerd who has also co-written a C compiler).
The real problem is: Cool programmers who are writing new cool software for Unix don't usually give a [censored for the kiddies] about how user-friendly their software is, because the people who do get it working are smart and l33t (ie, their peers) and go "Hey, that's really cool".
And Grandma's not one of our peers. She's an old lady we don't see very often who uses her brand-new $6,000 10-GHz Pentium VI with it's 1337 platinum-, gold-, and diamond-plated ThermoNuclearDevastationToOurCompetitors core to shuffle cards for 8 hours a day. And in the geek community she rates no sympathy for having lived through WWII, instead, she's berated for not having kept up.
But when Grandma or Grandpa pays... well, it doesn't take a management systems degree to see the past trend.
I am impressed it only took him one night. I lost three days trying to get cups to work. I now have my own vodoo ritual for getting a printer on another machine to print. I sort of understand his complaint but, If you want something clean, packaged, and perfect buy a completly integrated network and peripherals from someone like IBM. I still do not understand why any individual feels like this stuff has to conform to their standards. It is what it is, no more...no less. I get frustrated daily, I am constantly hosing boxes sometimes I can recover sometimes I can't. So what do I do? I reinstall a lot. If you don't like it abandon it. Life is too short. I for one am grateful that all of this capability with it guts hanging out is available. To me this is an adventure not a task. If you demand professional go and pay for it, don't scream and holler at those who were brave enough to stick their work out there for all to see. If you can't afford it then shut up and take what you can get.My first computer had one floppy disk and 64 kilobytes of memory and displayed 32x16 graphics on a green television screen. It costed thousands and was useless. I'd say the present state of affairs is pretty good. If you want to be critical and demanding then open your wallet not your mouth.For the record I don't care who uses it, I only care that I do.
People seem to consistently miss the point of open source software. As an OSS user, you ARE the Beta tester, developer, end user and marketing department. Software is developed to scratch an itch, sent to the general public who then complain that it doesn't scratch their particular itch, the software is tweaked, made better, and before you know it we all have fleas!
No wait, that's wrong. But you get the idea. It drives me nuts to see people harp on how poor an OSS piece of software is when they haven't done a single thing to contribute to that code. This is OSS folks, you dont just yell at a vendor that you paid money to (you did pay money right?) until they change their app. You have the source, resources are online everywhere to help you learn how to code. Use that energy towards fixing what you see as a flaw instead of complaining about it.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
One of the (many) reasons that the various *ix's are better than the Massive Microsoft Monolith is that most programs are designed to do one thing (and only one thing). That means that most *ix programs come with a simple (read: stupid) user interface, usually from the command line or from STDIN/STDOUT. (Frequently, they have both.) Therefore, some digigeek can write the program that does the bit manipulation and only speaks geekish, but someone interested in User Interfaces can write an application that provides a clear and functional interface. The connection between the two may be a System call or a Pipe. What a simple and powerful idea: the developers that understand bits and hardware write the part that interests them and those that understand users can write the parts that interest them! The connection between the two is a standard interface. In Gates' world, everything is part of a single entity - Microsoft. If someone wants to add a new feature or improve an interface, that person must understand the entire monolith. User interfaces are completely controlled by M$. Although this guarantees a minimum acceptable interface, it leaves no room for growth. I have always thought the simple interface idea was one of the most powerful features of *ix. This is the reason there are multiple shells in *ix. It allows the possibility that programs with poor user interfaces can be easily improved, with encapsulation (wow, just like OOA/D).
Sometimes complaining about it *is* a valid contribution towards fixing the flaw.
As an OSS user, you ARE the Beta tester, developer, end user and marketing department.
You're right. And guess what? Part of being a beta tester is complaining when things don't work right. Sometimes that is via formal bug reports, and sometimes it's by informally discussing the flaws you can't live with.
Whether it's Open Source or proprietary software, beta testers are valuable. And not just to tell you where your code breaks, also to tell you where it doesn't work the way they expect it to.
If it's a one-off that somebody whipped up to perform some task and then released to the public, then maybe it's unrealistic to expect the developer to listen to or care about feedback. If it's a full blown project, with UI, etc., it's reasonable to assume that the developers *want* people to use it. This means that they *should* want feedback. Sometimes they don't, and sometimes they don't listen even if they get it.
But as long as the feedback is offered in a reasonable manner, this feedback may be the most valuable contribution most of the FOSS community can make. And usability/UI feedback is in many cases exactly what is needed.
Sometimes it works too. Note that ESR's PPS indicates that the CUPS team has taken some of his advice to heart.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Interesting that this story comes up so soon after I read Cory Doctorow's latest book, Eastern Standard Tribe. (Go to boingboing for the free ebook link.) The protagonist in that book is a user interface designer, because, as he explains in a conversation during the book, engineers know how to make stuff, but they don't tend to have a good understanding of how people actually use it.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
If you restrict your user base to those who can be all of the things you mention, including expert coders, you will never make it out of the geek ghetto. I'm the user. I do report bugs in the software I use frequently, so I guess I'm the QC persons too. I do not write code, not do I plan to learn how. When QC staff tells programmers they have a problem, it's the programmer's problem to fix it.
And I think you're missing the point of software. Software exists to make your lump of hardware useful for something other than a doorstop. In order to do that, it has to be useable by the people who want to use it. And unless you're writing a compiler, it's completely unreasonable to expect the majority, or even a significant minority, of your users to have software development skills.
When those users complain about the crappy interface to your software, they are giving you feedback about your software. That's an important part of the development process. It may not be as l33t as writing C, but it's still part of software development. These people do not have the skills to fix the problems themselves. Nor is it in any way reasonable to expect them to aquire them in order to use your software.
Furthermore, even if they do have the skills, it's still pretty unrealistic to expect them to fix the problem. Even the most prolific developer cannot possibly fix single-handed every bug or annoyance they encounter in every piece of software they ever use. The ramp up times on new codebases are just too high.
Linux can have phantom instability too. Just install the closed-source NVidia drivers (to play those 3d games), and you too can enter the world of semi-predictable voodoo crashes.
Oh, and on Linux they call it "libc/gtk/gcc version hell" instead.