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Novell's Releases Linux Usability Testing Videos
sp3298622 writes "Novell is releasing primary desktop research, including over 200 videos and analysis of usability tests, at betterdesktop.openSUSE.org. Vice president of collaboration and desktop engineering for Novell, Nat Friedman: As a programmer, it's sometimes difficult to know how ordinary people with no technical experience are reacting to your software. Linux people tend to know other Linux people. In these usability tests, we selected test subjects who were experienced with Windows, but who had never heard of Linux, and asked them to perform basic tasks using the Linux desktop."
89% sounds like a very good success ratio for the date and time test. However, RTFA and you'll see that only eleven people participated, most of them female.
If you don't have a diverse testing population, you aren't going to produce meaningful results. The idea is fine and all, but the results are mostly useless.
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
Developers, you don't get to check in code until you've watched the video of users struggling with your program. OK?
It's a hard thing is to admit that free software has a usability problem. The natural temptation is to sit and watch these videos whilst screaming "You idiots! You don't click "Send and Receive" if you want to send an email! What's wrong with you?!?!"
It is difficult, but it's vitally important. These people aren't stupid losers- they are fluent in another operating system, where they can achieve whatever it is they want.
The problems on show here are ours, not theirs.
Martin
but another entirely to start working on a solution. The barrier to desktop Linux lies in simplicity, and without conducting a study or showing you a video, I can explain it easily.
Go to the web on a Linux PC (provided you've got a browser pre-installed), and download a tarball of say, Firefox. You are a Windows user but you're 'elite', so you use Firefox, and since it's available for Linux, you want to have the same browser.
You have downloaded the tarball, presumably to your desktop. You double click on the file, and it gets opened by Archive Manager. And from here, you can bet that 99% of the Windows folks that would like an alternative to their PCs will not make the adaptation to Linux.
It has to be EASY. Apple set the benchmark for this -- and if imitation is the greatest form of flattery, then do it. Who cares about inflating Apple's ego? If Linux makes a breakthru on the desktop because it's as easy to use as an Apple, or even as easy as Windows, how does that hurt anybody? The true geek can rely on the the commandline only distros, or drop to terminal to get their tasks done using regular expressions and grep or whatever they want, while the 'idiots' (and I would venture to say, that I'm one of them) can use the nice GUI that's simple to follow and easy to use.
Then folks, when developers see that they can cross develop applications that work in Linux (with little overhead), and that people will be able to easily use and access them -- THEY WILL. The open source community just needs to see that fact and start making solutions happen. With the extremely fast and accurate nature of Open Source, the feats that have come from it are amazing. It's more amazing, that the basis of Open Source -- Linux -- remains fundamentally unchanged to accomodate the eager Windows users (read: ME) to switch fully to Linux. Until the snobbery stops and changes start, Linux on the desktop is going nowhere fast. And that's upsetting for a Windows user tired of his OS, and not wanting to get tied into another corporate entity (Apple).
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
For pity sake. I'm not normally a grammar nazi, but editors, please, could you not at least make sure that ARTICLE HEADLINES are at least written in some semblance of English? Or is that too much to ask? Sheesh...
Hmmmmm .... take people who are experienced with performing a certain function on Windows ....
Then put them in front of a different system (like say a Mac) and see if they have any problems performing that same function.
Of course the "easiest" (and therefore the "best") user interface will be the one that is as close to 100% identical to the only one they've used before.
That's great for Novell because they're trying to get a slice of the Windows market.
But this does not provide ANY information that any person could not get just by spending 10 minutes on a Windows machine and copying down menu locations and order and wording.
Prior to Windows XP, Windows did so well with the average user because it was "good enough." It wasn't technically the best, in fact 9X was technically inferior in many areas to even Linux circa 1995-1997. So here's the problem. If Linux cannot meet or exceed Windows in every area that matters to a user, why switch to Linux instead of staying with Windows or going to MacOS X? I have a Mac Mini, it could end up being a major threat to desktop Linux for the people out there who are less concerned with having all of their options open and more concerned with getting a system that is cheap, small and just works. If you're not going to use all of the resources available on a new system, why spend $800 for a new Dell system when you can pay $500 for Mac Mini? For the average user there is no reason to pay the extra $300 if they get the software they need.
Desktop Linux needs to grow up in a hurry. That means it needs to be as easy for the average user to use as Windows XP is by the time Vista comes out. I've used a beta of Vista and was incredibly impressed... and I'm a Mac fan first and foremost. Vista is a major threat to Linux and will solidify Microsoft's control, not end it, if things don't change.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Burn Karma!...
;)
:) btw I am getting linux instead of Windows in my department computer this week, so nope I am not a n anti-linux freak]
Sure...
I have seen the page and the different case studies, they seem ok but I think there were 2 or 3 cases that are a lot more common:
1. Scan a picture, create a new document and write something about the picture.
2. Move the pictures of your camera to the place where you save your pictures in the computer.
3. Engage in a multimedia chat with some friend (micrphone+webcam+text)
Of course every linux user knows [although some of they deny it] those are non trivial tasks in a linux distribution
[I can hear the shout of a thousand Linux zealot moderators
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The mark of a good user interface is that it is either intuitive (i.e., the function of particular widgets is obvious), or where this is not possible, that it is easy to learn.
Of course the user has to start with a basic amount of computing experience. But you would expect people with windows experience to do well when switching to macs, because the mac interface is well designed, even though it is not the same as windows. So the question of whether the average windows user can figure out the linux interface is a good one.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Might this only result in the Linux desktop becoming more like Windows?
Maybe... but...
There was a brief comment in an article in, I think, last month's Linux Format (UK magazine) (I'm at work, so can't get at the article, sorry). Usability testing had been done on Evolution, and it was observed that one volunteer repeatedly used the "send/receive email" when they wanted to create a new email. The testers realised that the traditional "send/receive" button was not particularly intuitive. To my mind, that's the kind of useful information we might well get from this kind of testing - not assistance in turning Linux into Windows 2.
I mention this only because I believe there's still hope ;-)
This is where the serious fun begins.
I have users who were quite skilled with Win2K who are lost with WinXP (until I show them how to make it look like Win2K).
So, which interface should Linux emulate then? Win2K or WinXP? Or Mac? Or something else?It is difficult and it is important
This approach will give you completely different answers depending upon whether the group you select is familiar with:
a. Win2K
or
b. WinXP
or
c. MacsYep. And so the "best" interface for Linux would be
Novell could have saved all that time and money and just spent 10 minutes with a Windows machine, copying down menu locations, order and wording.
There is NO "usability testing" being performed here. No one will learn whether a specific Windows implementation of a menu is less optimal than a different one.
All that will be "learned" is whether those users can find the Linux equivalent and that will always be easiest for them when the Linux menues are 100% identical to the Windows menues that those users are familiar with.
In some ways yes, in the areas where the Windows interface makes sense.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
So the entire point of GNU/Linux is to convert you from Windows to it? Sounds more than a little bit arrogant.
I'm sorry I was under the impression that manufacturers of a product wanted people to use their product. If you feel like Linux is "your thing" and aren't interested in it catching on then fine, but there are many linux users who are waiting for it to gain more overall desktop acceptance, and its attitudes like yours that hinder their quest.
I was quoted out of context in my autobiography...
The problem is not the contributions. The problem is getting those contributions accepted by the maintainers.
/opt/kde3 and later on you can move this entire directory to /usr/local/kde3 without the need to recompile anything. On GNOME we sill have the issue that every path is hardcoded inside the binaries so you can't move the entire location if necessary. One of the bad concepts of GNOME.
Over the years I realized that the request of contributions is just a poor excuse to avoid conversations with the developers or users who want something to get changed.
Some stuff in gnome-vfs for example was so utterly broken that it wasn't touched for a really long time. There wasn't even a maintainer for it (only a guy who kept putting some stuff in there whenever it was needed). Now some other people seem to have taken over the maintainance of it and the process continues.
But within the GNOME development team I found out (due to own experience) that it's quite difficult if not highly impossible to get some ideas through or to convince a developer that a different approach would have been wiser or better. Not to say save a lot of time. But people kept using the broken components for years.
Even now not everything inside GNOME is sane or reliable and a lot of stuff seem to be reinvented over and over again. See DBUS for example or basic things like "specifications" as found on freedesktop.org. GNOME makes freedesktop.org sound like it's a place for developers from GNOME and KDE to met and declare specifications but this is not always true since KDE had solved most of the necessary things that GNOME still urgently needs years before and their specifications and solutions are often by far better thought through and much more mature - and over the years proven that it also works practically and not just as concept.
For example you can compile KDE with a static prefix in say
Another bad thing about GNOME is that the developers do have nice ideas at time but they lack the power or durability to make the changes or visions they have complete. GStreamer for example is indeed a nice technology and it somehow made it's path inside GNOME but still it doesn't feel like it's truly part of GNOME since some apps use it, others avoid using it and stick to xine. Now if these apps stick to xine then chances that GStreamer gets fixed and a whole part of GNOME is low.
Another thing is that plenty of the developers seem to have rotating focus on stuff. Today they work on this one, then tomorrow they focus on hacking on Mozilla or hack on 'dead ideas' they have that no one really takes serious so all the resources of working and fixing GNOME get's lost with playground stuff.
We all know that GNOME was meant to be a corporate desktop. But then a corporate desktop needs different resources and a different approach. Serious project leading is required, strict guidelines are required, and people with brains to enable them.
It can not be (now that the HIG as guideline exists for some years) that applications developer still ignore it. I don't care for third party stuff. But I do care for the important and key elements of GNOME software that should be a good example and follow these guidelines.
GIMP, DIA, Evolution, Abiword, Gnumeric only to name a few are in no way HIG conform. Some are, but others not. I filled in a bug for Gnumeric not long ago pointing the developer to the HIG v2.0 where it says that the Toolbar should obey the rules of Toolbar & Menus capplet (which is a core part of GNOME) unfortunately the bug was closed as not a bug and no further comments have been given to it.
Also printing is a necessary importand thing in GNOME imo and it can't be that I load up GThumb to print a *.gif file and it ends up in printing a totally black picture on a white sheet of paper, wasting nearly 1/3 of my black ink cartridge.
It's also inacceptable for a corporate desktop to have a document reader and viewer like Evince that prints a whol
Since 90+% of computer-users use Windows, I think it's only natural to look at the problems from their point of view.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Personally I think the hardest task for an average user to perform on linux at the moment is driver installation, and lets face it for most people getting all their hardware working is the first step towards adopting a new system. I recently tried installing drivers for my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro a pretty mainstream card from a well known manufacturer, needless to say it's not straight forward by any stretch of the imagination. You simply can't expect joe public to ever learn how to compile his kernel and even messing around with kernel modules is probably asking too much.
Linux is certainly making progress synaptic does a great job of alleviating dependency hell and almost entirely masking it from the end user. I'd like to see the linux community not necessarily looking to emulate the functionality in Windows or Mac OS X but instead looking for what would be the most elegant solution. Perhaps something like an online database of drivers that manufacturers could update, which could be automatically 'pushed' onto your computer overnight and silently rebooted (with your permission in a preferences box) so that you don't even have to worry about having the latest drivers it all becomes automatic would be neat, in the event it failed to reboot it could roll back to the previous driver and notify you in the morning of its attempt.
You could allow users to rate drivers and add the ratings to the database, this way you could specify you only want to automatically update to new drivers that are rated 3/5 or higher for example. This could be like linux's answer to Windows update only better.
Why use people who have experience with windos? It doesn't take a study to realize that they will be trying things - surprise - the way the are used to doing them, i.e. the windos way. As a result, everywhere the choosen Linux UI differs from windos will show up as a "usability issue" when in fact it's not.
Putting people with no computer experience there would be much more enlightening, especially when it comes to finding what things are intuitive and which aren't.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You are correct, in theory. You are incorrect in this specific instance because their testing procedure will not yield the information necessary to find a "better" interface.
That is because they are only testing prior Windows users.
Those Windows users have been trained to seek certain items in certain places.
Even if you added a button that said "Complete this test with one click", the users would NOT find it unless they could not FIRST find the Windows button/menu that they were trained to look for of if that button was in that location.Again, I agree with that, but that will not be achievable through these tests.
Microsoft Word used to have an option to use the WordPerfect keystrokes. This was because the people with the most experience found it very difficult to maintain their productivity while learning a new system. Even if that system was "better" for other people. Back then, the most experienced and productive people had spent years learning WordPerfect for DOS.
Novell has learned nothing in these past years. To make it easy to migrate users, you make it an option to have an interface that is 100% identical to what they are familiar with.
Real "usability testing" requires more people with more experience levels on different systems, including people with little or no computer experience at all.
If you REALLY want to make the system easy to use, you have MULTIPLE options:
# 1. Basic level. Almost no menus and lots of "I want to" included in the icon's name ("I want to send an email to someone" or "I want to look at web sites").
# 2. Emulation level. 100% Win2K look-alike.
# 3. Whatever other interface you design.
The key is to build the interface to the user and what the user expects/knows.
1 - I don't know about Linux, but it was pretty difficult for me in mswindows, especially because the default settings didn't work, and the damn scanner button did something other than what I expected.
2 - Ok: Step 1 : ask for the name of the software needed. Step 2 : run gtkam, and get the pictures.
For lucky people who have USB-mass-storage cameras, and know how to use mount, it's even easier.
As a matter of fact, I don't know how easy it is on win, because I didn't even try to do it with my own cam, it just worked with GNU/Linux, why bother installing Sony software when I can do it with what I ahve already installed? (I dismiss the cost of double-booting, because I need to boot win in order to play some EA games, one a month)
(for step 1, I searched google for: linux download camera pictures )
3 - Again. Step 1 : ask for the name of the software. Step 2 : run aMSN .
google for: "msn linux" or "msn linux webcam"
I'm not saying it's _THAT_ easy, but in my experience, those tasks have required less trouble than with mswindows, partly because I don't have the need to install freaking drivers, vendor supplied software, and juggle CD's.
You know, you get accustomed to those little annoyances, but they do actually make the experience much more difficult than it should be. On GNU/Linux, you have some things that work better, and some things that don't, but it's not a black and white situation, at all.
And, by the same token, if the Windows developer did not spend the time to PACKAGE his app in a Windows INSTALLER you'd have the same problem.
Why do you assume that Windows developers will package their apps correctly but that Linux developers will not?
Well, possibly because 99% (conservatively) of all Windows programs are packaged correctly - and this holds true on everything from, say, MyMinesweeper to DB2. At best I'd say that 90% of the software I install from source works first time (sure, all the really major apps do, but beyond that). Probably 50% of the apps I go for offer an RPM for my distro (RHEL4) and, of those, only 75% work without needing some manual futzing.
Windows development makes it easy to create correctly formed install packages. Linux development does not. Heck, its surprisingly difficult (from the perspective of someone who's been doing s/w development since '84, on UNIX since '92) to even get a "correct" autoconf going. And yes, a lot of autoconf'd software is pretty broken (and by that I mean that for the most part it will work on Linux because a lot of people crib from existing Linux autoconfs and a lot of Linux systems have the same general setup, but it falls over annoyingly elsewhere or often has random dependencies on things that aren't actually necessary).
But for Joe Schmo developer - what's the path for him to get his app into the distributions trees again? How is this simple? And why is it his problem to do a separate build every time a new distro comes out with a slightly changed packaging procedure?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Because I'd like to start using Linux in the GUI form first and figure out the intricacies later thru use of the terminal and command line.
:)
The GUI form however, is still difficult to use for the average Windows user (me). Fix that, and you have another convert to preach the word
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Getting the desktop to look like anything except blurry ass requires an hour of reading about how to install your video drivers. Why? Because after installing your package using the really nice script, it still doesn't work. So you google again and figure out you need to edit that ghastly xorg.conf file. And then Google to figure out why the resolution is stuck. And then Googling again to figure out why the refresh is stuck at 54 Hz and giving you a massive headache. Dual monitors? TV out? You may as well just go cry yourself to sleep unless you're an uber-leet nerd, because that stuff takes hours to set up. That shit is a matter of one click in Windows; my mother can do it.
Then there's networking. Support for your wireless adapter may or may not even exist. If it does, it's probably in one of the generic Prism2 drivers or something like that. Great, but it doesn't help me a whole damn lot - mine says Netgear on the front. Back to Google again. It's also intresting to note that Linux's DHCP client and the server in my Linksys didn't get along real well, even on a wired connection. There's no way someone who doesn't know how that crap works would be able to troubleshoot that.
Of course, there's always multimedia playback, right? The install I liked best so far, Unbuntu, couldn't play anything out of the box. I know it should have been able to, but for whatever reason my install was futzed no matter how many times I reinstalled it. I never could figure out how to make it play videos. There were several settings for decoding and such (as well as about 10 different players to choose from), but nothing seemed to change no matter how I tinkered with those settings. Oh, and Unbuntu comes with several options for audio input and output including ALSA and ESD. WTF is the difference? I've heard of ALSA before so I'll use that one. Oh wait, that one doesn't work, but the ESD one does. Well, as long as I hear sound I don't really care. At this point, I don't even want to Google it.
This is why there aren't more Linux desktops: there are severe usability issues. I find it easier to get a webserver complete with PHP and MySQL up and running on Linux than a desktop. Why? Because I don't need video drivers, audio, or wireless networking. I also don't change my server hardware every month or two. Linux makes a great server, for sure. But as great a server as it is, it's a shitty desktop. And you'll please excuse my anger, I just got finished configuring my Linux install and promptly broke it...again.
Here's what desktop distros should be working on:
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
The parent post was written to be funny, but it is actually very insightful. This biggest problem for Linux isn't where the menus are located, or how the icons look, or the confusion over the meaning of the "Send/Receive" button. Those things happen on all operating systems and all software. The users eventually figure it out. But Linux isn't even ready for that stage yet.
Linux needs to work on getting software and hardware to work together reliably. That means without having to edit configuration files and without going to a command prompt. Simple basic things are missing. We need to work on drivers, resolving dependencies properly, and making packages that just work (including installing icons and adding documentation).
After we get that stuff resolved, then tweaking the UI will become more relevant.
If we mimic Windows XP people will be lost when they are used to Windows Vista etc. I sure agree that care needs to be taken to make things simple but it dont think cloning Windows is the answer. Making a copy of somthing that hard to use is wasted. I am a network admin and i see the difficulties people have with Windows everyday. Windows XP totally blows their world apart since they are used to Windows 98. Same thing will happen with Windows Vista.
The solution would be to think long and hard about whats the best way to do things and then stick to it since change seems to be the biggest problem. Just dont change to much and try to KISS.
There arent that many parts i feel must be changed in Linux. For mass adoption a common third party package format for Linux applications would probably do the trick. Make it easy to install applications and drivers that arent managed by the dists repos. Other than that i really cant think of something thats hard to do on Linux.
HTTP/1.1 400
Some of this post is good, some of it is silly. The monitor is pretty legitimate, although its been a while since i've had problems of that nature. Then again, I've been using linux since 94, so by now, I sort of solve little problems like that on autopilot and just remember it magically working.
;)
Hardware support is always going to be a problem with linux, and its not linux's fault. You n00bs keep saying that "Linux is never gonna get anywhere until everything works like it does in windows, blah blah blah" well, here is the problem with that...
People make the hardware so that it does work in windows, not the other way around.
Now read that again and understand it, when a manufacturer makes a camera, they make the camera and software so that it will work in windows. Microsoft DOES NOT make Windows so it works with Canons cameras. So we are just plain fucked when it comes to that stuff and nothing -we can do- will ever fix it because we are not the root of the problem. Canon and to a lesser extent microsoft is the problem. If that prevents you from using linux -- I actually understand and sympathize with you -- but the answer is 'too bad' because although we would love to have manufacturers make their devices work with linux, or at least give us specs (actually, give us the specs -- better!), its essentially impossible.
Its sad, because we out number, In My Opinion, Mac users by heaps and heaps. But Apple can pull strings to get hardware support. Who does it for Linux? Just a guy who wants to write a driver. As legitimate as that coder may be, for some reason he doesn't pull the same weight as Apple. Its unfair, but thats life.
Lastly. How does the user know that GAIM is a MSN client? Beats me. But I know we can't call it "MSN ICQ AIM JABBER YAHOO client". See, it used to be gAIM, right? For like gtk-AIM when it was just an AIM messenger. It made sense then, but honestly, its not like you can just change the name. The solution here is really to have the distro re-label it "Instant messenger" in the menu.
Anyway,
back to work
"Computers will never truly be free until the last windows user is strangled with the entrails of the last mac user."
Funny story. My experience was a little different. I went to Comp USA, and for $299 I took home a PC with 17 inch monitor, speakers, and Windows pre-installed ... and they threw in a printer. I gave them another $40 and brought home my favorite game. I plugged the machine in, inserted the mouse and keyboard and speaker connectors (all color-coded), hooked up the monitor and turned it on. I had to click away a welcome message. Then I inserted my game CD, the installer started automatically. Five minutes later I was in gaming heaven. No compilers. No internet connection. No messing with drivers - the installer did have to install the latest directX version, but that was all automatic. I guess I just got lucky. It can't possibly be this easy, can it?
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
You can not design something without the average user being part of the process.
Where I use to work the software development people sometimes were not engaged in what was happening on a manufacturing side. They "developers" thought they new how to do the manufacturing technician job but it was of those, "I think I understand what I thought you said".
They would start a job trying to get a specification together and so the people they would talk to were the managers of the manufacturing technician. Well guess what - they did not really know the job ether and what was ended up being developed would drive the technician up the wall with how things in there words was "screwed up".
What happened on latest projects was before getting to far into the project spec, they also included the technician in the interviews. Then once a somewhat rough spec was put together and some idea of the direction it was going. The next step was to videotape the technician doing the job as it was currently being down. One month was spent on just taping various people doing various aspects of the job. Each taping session went through a post-mortem review with all parties involved, the spec writer, the software developers, the managers, the technician, and anyone else they could drag into the meeting. The tape would be gone through and question like "Why did you do that? That's not written down anywhere" would be said every five minutes. Even the managers were asking what was going on.
What was brought out in all of this is that unless you are actually doing the day-to-day job in manufacturing, you do not understand the process no matter how many design meetings you have with them. This became the standard method on following projects.
Emmmm....may I ask you, in what time you got hacked by worms? :)
Ok, no offence and no, it was no joke. I suupose you got some of XPSP2 boxes. If you not, well, then you got very well protected with OEM default installed firewall or something else.
In fact, for at least two hours you should spend of downloading security patches alone, if you don't have one of these things by default.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I knew that's what somebody would come back with. Countless computers still have floppies and floppies are still being used. Otherwise, how would I know that the floppy doesn't automount?
You are either a troll or arrogant.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Well, except for the fact that your $299 PC didn't have a good enough video card to play the game in question. It looked really bad. You went back to the store to buy a better video card and came home with a nice one for $200. It wasn't top of the line, but it met the specs on your game box.
You followed the intallation instructions to a "T" but the card didn't fit any of your expansion slots. You went back to the store to get a different one, but no one was knowledgable enough to help you out. Finally some kid in the aisle overheard you and explained about AGP and PCI-Express. He steered you to the right card.
After following all the instructions you finally get your game set up, but the graphics look crappy. You complain that your $200.00 card isn't even as good as your PS2. You enjoy bad graphics until Xmas a half a year later when your nephew explains the concept of "Native Resolution." You love your gaming PC now and just think, it only took you half a year to get it right!
TW
P.S. I'm a frequent Windows PC gamer, but I don't have any illusions it's as easy as you make it. Newbies have a steep learning curve.
Grandparent: every linux user knows [although some of they deny it] those are non trivial tasks in a linux distribution
Parent: No, these are non-trivial tasks in a *ms-windows* distribution
Oh, come off it. These tasks - ripping CDs, installing printers, etc - are things that millions of Windows users, despite the ill-wishes of a lot of Linux folk, manage to do every single fscking day. And yet even some fairly technical users still get confused as to things like which sound daemon to run on which distribution of Linux just to play a CD. Linux is a lot better than it was, that's for damn sure. But Windows, for the most part, works well for even fairly ignorant people. If it didn't, it'd have Linux's market share and we'd all be using something else right now.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I really have to disagree with you. You see, I've had to scrub my system after uninstalling programs because these correctly written installers couldn't clean up after themselves. I've also found any number of programs which require me to have a company name on my home machine. I'm sorry, but it's home. I don't have a business. But, without that having something in it, I can't finish installing the program.
Yeah, some uninstallers aren't very nice. But at least there WAS an installer. It's a fundamental difference in mindset between developers for Linux and Windows, probably due mostly to too much variance between distributions.
Sorry you had to type in a fake company name for some program.
Would you really like to compare the different packaging methods on Linux with the different packaging methods on Windows? MSI, Installshield (and about 4 different subtypes), NSIS, InnoSetup, Wise, a few other big ones, and let's not forget those who say that all of those are broken and so therefore roll their own. And with each succeeding version of Windows, the "official" procedure changes slightly. Why is it Joe Schmo's problem to deal with the ever changing Windows target?
It's Joe Schmo's problem because he is the developer!!!!! The choice of packaging is pretty much transparent to the user. The USER is the most important person, not the developer. And the fact that the developer has so many *free* tools for packaging his software for Windows he shouldn't be left with much to complain about either. BTW, the Windows target can change all it wants and the same old system variables will still point to it.
If there was just a tiny bit of standardization amongst linux distributions, software installation could be pretty easy. As it is, I don't blame developers for not wanting to create packages for every flavor.
It's a good thing that we get usability studies on commonly used desktop environments used in Linux, but I think the people who evalute them need to know a little more about Unix/Linux before giving recommendations on how to solve the problems the users encounter.
One example: In one of the tests the users have problem setting the time. The recommendation is that this should not require root login. And sure that would make the task of setting the time much easier, but it would also possibly break things like kerberos or NFS file sharing. There is also other users to take into account. Letting ordinary users change the time also have security implications as it makes the track record of various loggs useless.
The proper question to ask, would be why should an ordinary user need to change the time in the first place? Why not make it simpler to hook up to a time server. That way the user wouldn't need to worry.
What the ordinary user should be allowed to change would be what timezone used in his clock.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
The problems discovered were pretty much valid stuff for either desktop - and we tested both desktops. Once the first wave of geeks has lost interest in the site and it passes the frontpage of slashdot, you might want to go back and discover that there are KDE videos up too, if that is really important.
Both desktops suffer from similar problems anyway. Test one and it very likely applies to the other as well.
Also, more importantly, whatever was tested was a mix. It was a distro with both "KDE" and "Gnome" applications - whether it was "gnome panel" or "kde kicker" that displayed the main menu is pretty much irrelevant when the user doesnt find the right menu entry. The labels are the same anyway since they come from the software packages.
It's about time we started to look at the real world: people use a diverse mix of software - whatever does the job, whatever their sysadmins or distro packages for them. We should care about the whole "free desktop", not just one single project really.
I saw another comment posted that was exactly on-target. If something is a clone of something else, you expect it to act the same. I used KDE, which pretty much is the cloned windows interface. I'd get pissed off when particular things didn't work. Without me even realizing it, I was getting frustrated because I expect it to be windows because it looks and acts like windows. I've been using Linux for a decade now. However, because of this simple fact, I got pissed doing things in Linux. Then, I moved to WindowMaker: I simply like its look. Funny thing--is it's nothing at all like windows. I now notice I don't have any usability problems and find it simpler and easier to do things than I have in a long time.
Ultimately, a completely different interface will be a boon to users. Users will catch on quicker and find things easier because they will not expect anything and learn what is given to them.