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Making Things Easy Is Hard

Posted by simoniker on from the esr-and-the-printer-cable-of-secrets dept.

paul.dunne writes "John Gruber of Daring Fireball has written a long and considered riposte to Eric Raymond's recent lament concerning the poor quality of user interfaces in free software. The core of his argument is that 'developing software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work.' One point that particularly struck me: according to Gruber, 'Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves'!"

3 of 980 comments (clear)

  1. Arrghh... by SubTexel · · Score: 0, Troll

    Oh when will april fools be over... How about when SCO thanks Redhat.. Hey, what do you know

  2. Foolish conclusion. by dameron · · Score: 2, Troll

    Ok, so we're talking about a group of people who are:

    1) Unix Geeks

    that

    2) decided to roll back their "Discordian" t-shirt long enough to find their (gratis) copy of PC magazine wot mentions the unix workalike underpinnings of OS X. (we're talking -UNIX- geek here people)

    3) don't like the available Linux gui options.

    4) are willing to pay twice as much (at least) than they would for an x86 Unix workalike

    5) have trouble with gui usability...

    This person doesn't exist. Unix geek = someone who enlists in the vi/emacs Blood War. People who bitch about GUI usability = people who bitch about "right clicking".

    I'm almost serious. Who are these people...?

    -dameron

  3. Re:Disagreement by Psiren · · Score: 0, Troll

    Linux hasn't just failed to produce a system that Aunt Tillie can use - it has failed to produce a system that ERIC S. RAYMOND can use! That is a pretty spectacular failure.

    I'm sorry, but who gives a fuck? I'm not trying to troll here, but if he can't use it that's tough. There are plenty of people using Linux for their day to day work. I'm one of them.

    A the end of the day, most people are writing open source programs to solve a problem that they have. It just so happens that quite often this problem is common, and others can make use of it. If they don't, it's no big loss.