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Fighting FUD with Humor
Technophiliac writes to tell us MadPenguin in running a review of "Fighting FUD With Humor" Marcel Gagné's 2nd edition of "Moving to Linux". From the article: "The biggest obstacle is fear. Modern Linux distributions are easy to install and easy to use. Unfortunately, we are constantly presented with messages telling us that it's too hard and that the average person couldn't possibly grasp the complexity. That's rubbish. People aren't stupid and people who use computers learn new things all the time."
People don't want to switch because they think they need office. Simple as that.
Wanted: Clever sig, top $ paid, all offers considered.
People are smart... Someone doesn't deal with the public...
People aren't stupid and people who use computers learn new things all the time."
Clearly, this person has never performed basic tech support. I mean, come on. If you have that much faith in humanity, you've never done time as "The I.T. Guy" in a typical office. Turn in your geek card, sir, and report to AOL for further processing.
People aren't stupid
No, but they're easily confused.
and people who use computers learn new things all the time.
Hard to believe, given that most non-technical people (and some of the technical ones) in my building haven't even learned not to double-click URLs. When things don't work, it's attributed to gremlins, and when it does work, it's attributed to a higher diety.
I'm sorry, but the REAL obstacles (hint: fear isn't one of them) to adopting an entirely new operating system don't go away just by putting your fingers in your ears and shouting, "NAH NAH NAH, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!"
I'm smart, most of us here are smart, but I'll admit that sometimes I run into the occasional road block where I can't do something in Linux that I can do in Windows.
I did spend at least an hour getting Quake III to work in Linux properly. It still doesn't quite work as well as in Windows.
I also took some time to get my mouse wheel working in Linux. Granted, I use text-only installs of Slackware or Gentoo where I build my own optimized kernels, but still, I had some difficulty.
Linux isn't easy and it's not a pretty shiny desktop OS. Let's just admit that. I mean heck, would we want it any other way? I enjoy the challenge and I enjoy the OPEN ness of it.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
Not for someone from the Windows world, anyway. If you need to configure anything that isn't out of the box, like latest graphics card support or wireless, you're left out in the cold. You'll have to spend hours Googling for people that have gotten it to work or clues as to how it might work. Then more hours editing configuration files, compiling, rebooting...sometimes all spent in vain.
If there is ONE thing Windows is good at, it is getting stuff configured. It may not be as powerful or flexible, but at least it is easy. Sometimes, you just need to get things done.
I'm a computer geek. There was a period where Linux was too hard for me to install -- I tried and failed a few times. Finally, about four years ago, the installs got easier (and I learned more) so I got a working install. But it's simply not true that Linux is now easy enough for most computer users to install and use. Most computer users are not computer geeks, and in fact, no OS is easy enough for them to install. They'd have trouble installing Windows from scratch too, but they never had to do it because Windows came preinstalled.
Just last week I installed the latest Ubuntu. There were two problems that it took me some time and hassles to work out: (1) The sound software I was trying to use didn't work in GNOME, because GNOME uses ESD. I had to do a "killall esd" before it would work. This took some detective work, because none of the software gave me an error message that told me this was what the problem was. (2) I couldn't install some libraries (such as libc6-dev) because they were in a munged state at the point where I did my apt-get update.
These were time-consuming, frustrating annoyances for me, but for someone who's not a computer geek, they'd be total showstoppers. The average person simply is not going to go looking for help on usenet or IRC (and my experience with posting on the Ubuntu forums has been that I don't get any useful replies, either). The average person will give up.
And BTW, Gagne might want to update the subtitle of his book, "Kiss the blue screen of death goodbye." I have to use Windows a lot at work. I haven't seen a BSOD in years.
Find free books.
How do we fight the FUD of the FUD fighters?
Can we be honest with ourselves for just one second?
Claiming that Linux is "easy" to configure is a prima facia falsehood.
Install is still only about 80-85% not the 99.9% that it needs to be.
Maintenence of a 6+ month old distro, any distro, is a nightmare as about that time updating no longer works because dependancies on updated dependancies reach an unmanageable threshold. And no, ignoring maintenence is not an option.
It doesn't anyone any good to spout platitudes about how "easy" Linux is when there are still huge gaping holes in it's ease of use.
The only way to fight FUD is with truth, not more FUD!
Incidentally, writing introductory books like "Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye!" seems to me to be a dead end. Seething haters of Microsoft (and even they haven't seen a BSOD in five years) don't make up a significant share of Windows users, and pandering to that mentality seems counterproductive.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
If Gagne's so sure the average user is more than willing to learn new things, then he can be the one to walk my mother through downloading ISOs for the latest Mandrake build, helping her pick which items to install, explaining why she needs a "gui" (and what it is) and then helping her pick between KDE, Gnome...
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Why don't you explain to her that she may not have to use Outlook, even if they say that she does? Don't get technical. Maybe even set up Seamonkey or Thunderbird for her, just to show her that it can be done and how much better off it will make her.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
how many times on IRC did you get responses along the lines of "sort it out for yourself, n00b, the rest of us googled our way through..."
Personally, I offer a lot of tech support on message boards. When someone comes to the board once in a blue moon with a really difficult tech issue, I'm more than happy to help. But there's a certain class of user who will continually post questions that can be answered with 30 seconds of googling. Questions like "Can I use this 1MB SIMM in my P4 box?".
It's rather akin to someone walking in to the emergency room with a paper cut... 4 times a day. The "experts'" time is better spent on those who have more severe problems. Learn to apply your own bandages, dammit!
There's a difference between needing help with a truly obscure problem after conducting your own exhaustive research, and being completely unwilling to learn at all. Believe it or not, if you're willing to take the time to research, and learn on your own, you can do just about anything. If you decide that you don't understand computers, never will, and shouldn't even bother trying... Well, that's a self fulfilling prophesy, and a waste of my time.
Yes there is FUD, but some of this FUD is true...
There are severe exaggerations in Linux usability for example; but we can't be morons and miss the 'truth' in this.
On the computers at my Grandmother's house - True story(200mhz P, to a new 3.4ghz system now.) - My Grandparents have been able to drop an XP install CD in all their computers, type in the code and their computer works faster and better than when they first purchased it. No install problems, driver problems.
And that is a solid arument, sure most of US are smart enough to wrestle any distribution to install and run well on any piece of hardware, but for the people that surf the web, write email, write letters and video conference with their grandkids - Linux and FreeBSD is NOT YET THAT MATURE on the desktop.
We can argue it is, and it truly isn't. We know this inside somewhere, but hate to admit it.
There is NO distribution yet that has the driver support, or hardward support, or 99% success rate of install that WindowsXP does...
That is where we are failing, and until we admit things like this to ourselves, this will NEVER get better.
Ignoring the fact that IQ is far from a necessarily accurate indicator of intelligence, what's your point? Half the people are smarter, too.
People can talk about the "chaos that reigns the world" and attribute it to stupidity all day. Stick those people in a sociology class for a week and hopefully they'll realize that the world is not a damned simple as they think. To attribute a presidential reelection to something like national stupidity is just plain ignorant. Mostly because matters of politics don't correlate well to intelligence at all (and if someone quotes one of thoe hoax IQ maps of the US I'll punch him in the face. Through my monitor).
Yeah, the average person may or may not be dumber than you. Yeah, there are people even dumber than him. There are also people you'd like like a damn fool next to. I'll say it again: What the hell is your point?
no, you are absolutely correct... it's true... but, the one really unhelpful person is the one you remember... there are a lot of *really* helpful people kicking it on IRC waiting for questions from people doing their first install, but they don't stick in one's memory quite the same way
Have you considered why he might recommend they use Outlook? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that it's already installed on many desktop PCs. So that saves him time from having to install it on basically every teacher's home system. Then there's the fact that he can give everyone one set of instructions on how to configure it. That also probably saves him time.
You paint him as some awful villain, as if he is trying to intentionally destroy all those teachers' systems by using Outlook Express. Perhaps he's being the opposite of a "moron," and rather just doing what makes his job easiest. That's not stupid. That's a smart thing to do, from his perspective.
If you truly want people to get away from using Microsoft products, then you'll have to make some sacrifice. Yes, you may have to help those particular teachers install and configure Thunderbird. It'd be even better if you could create and print up a single page that'll tell them exactly how it can be done. Give them pictorial instructions about what exact server address, etc., to enter, and where to enter them.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'll do you one better: I'm an embedded systems engineer. I work with Linux all the time. I write Linux drivers, as well as applications (for embedded products). I work in a Linux environment every day.
/dev/dsp is released. My soundcard has a hardware mixer with two separate sound sources (in fact, there's a /dev/sound/adsp that I can use another OSS app with at the same time). And yet I can't hear an mp3 and the ding from my WM at the same time. Is it the driver's fault that ALSA and OSS can't operate at the same time? I don't know. I don't care. It's broken. Half of you reading probably just thought to advise me to set up some sort of other mixer daemon, something about adjusting realtime priorities, something about device files. No, bad user. This is not the right answer. The right answer is that it's 2005, and that Microsoft has had sound figured out for 10 years and Apple for 15 and it does not involve the user mapping device files to driver interfaces. Don't even get me started on timidity and MIDI, that whole process is obscene.
/lib directory one day, won't you?
A couple of years ago, I talked myself into using Linux as my one and only desktop at home. I was sick of Windows, I still am. After 2 years, I am utterly disgusted by it and am planning to switch to Windows at the next convenient time or maybe a Mac. Why? Because things don't just work.
I have a kernel with all the drivers compiled into an initrd. I have hotplug and coldplug loading drivers to all the hardware. That's half way. The userland doesn't match. Let's use sound as an example. If I play something with mpg123, Arts (KDE sound) can't play audio and buffers it until
The same argument can be made for dozens of others. XFree/XOrg (although it is getting a little better). Desktop managers: why are KDE and Gnome slower on my 2.4GHz P4 than Win2k on a 300MHz Celeron? Don't say "bloated, try XFCE", that's the wrong answer. I could run FVWM and it would be fast as hell, but I would not have all of the features I need. Why is dynamic linking on Linux so damn slow? Firefox takes maybe two seconds to launch on my slower Windows box at work (when not loaded in memory). It can take upwards of 30 on my faster Linux machine with no load. Those who complain about Windows DLL hell, take a look in your
Linux is not user friendly. Linux is not ready for the desktop. If anyone tells you otherwise, you have my permission to stab him (or her, but let's not kid ourselves) in the neck.
posted anonymously to stay out of my Google permanent record.
Linux could be easy. My mother, who had expressed pride in never having used a computer, recently discovered, quite by accident, just how much stuff was available on eBay. I had a surplus IBM 300GL sitting about, so I loaded it up with Mandriva 2005. There were the little problems: hiding toolbars accidently, moving the mouse while clicking (accidental drags), not recognizing interface modality. The vanilla hardware on the P3 based desktop installed easily for me, and after setting auto-login for her, setting up her email accounts and bookmarks, Gnome was easy for her. She found a few challenges, so I tried giving her a Macintosh. We went back to the Linux machine quickly.
That having been said, I've used linux before, I've used Windows. If you want to install something not included in the distro, you're in for some work. I tried installing FreeNX on Mandriva over a SSH terminal. I never did get it working. Apropos hadn't been set up by default, and install was failing on a file whose package I couldn't find.
So, here's what I want in Linux:
Be better than Windows. Where windows wants to tell you every five minutes that your wireless connection is down even though you're working on a wired connection and your laptop's wifi switch is off, be smarter. Tell the user once, if you must, then leave them alone.
Install all the docs by default. Never assume that your user doesn't need man pages.
Label each program with a name that describes what it does. Look at Windows accessories. Most of the program names are much less abstract. Backup, Address Book, Notepad, Command Prompt, Backup, Security Center, Disk Defragmenter, Disk Cleanup. So, what's easier, drakxconf or Control Panel? Let's also map some commands to likely alternatives. man is good, but what if help worked too? Maybe if help pointed to an overview of man, apropos, lynx and some docs?
Usabilty testing by non programmers. I like vi about as much as the average person. That is, not very. compared to the MS-DOS edit.exe, vi is pretty weak. Or rather, it's very strong, but it makes what should be a 100% intuitive task for anyone familiar with a computer into a series of random button-pushing and man-reading sessions.
Build a roadmap.So, this distro wants the config file here, and that distro wants it there. Super! Fine! But if you want to put this sort of thing all over, how about building a map? I'd love to be able to download a single installer, run it (in the gui!) let it figure out where everything is, what needs to be downloaded, what dependencies need satisfying. Fix it all, and exit. I hate installing software that didn't come with the distro currently. Windows does this well, Mac does this well, why is this so hard for Linux?
Welcome your users. Sure, you may never click through the overly-animated Welcome to Windows intro. Some people will. Just a quick tour of the nifty little features of your OS, some quick pointers to the help, the configuration, the browser, the email, and most people will be fine. Add a world-class tutorial. Back in the days of the classic Mac OS, there were tutorials that included clicking, double clicking, dragging, hovering, typing, text entry fields, dialog boxes (modal and non-modal) menus, powering off. The basics that most of us nerds don't remember learning have to be taught to some people! Linux should teach them, by default.
Most people don't know what they are doing in windows, even kids with good marks at school and college continually do and say really really stupid things. people are stupid.
Still the USA re-elected GWB ! Now that we are shadow boxing bombs for years to come, it doesn't look so easy. The fixed attitude problem of culture is greater than raw intelligence of the individual. As they stack up bodies in the desert, year after year, it will sink in. People are stupid and then they do a good job of hiding behind arrogance. Viva la France.. Europe is so civilized. Living here in Alabama is really a drag.. Someday peace will come, about 50 years after I am dead!
Fortunately Microsoft has been associated with the USA, and as our country goes down in debt, Linux will rise up!
I love Linux and have run it for years. Official Slashdot disclaimer over.
... But the average user doesn't give a shit. All they know is it doesn't work, and the learning curve is so steep it's more a learning cliff.
Linux will be easy for the average user when I don't have to download a source package, compile it and install it, extract Windows drivers for ndiswrapper using another tool I had to compile from source, and then fiddle around with rc files to make sure my SSID got set on boot all so I could get on the local network.
Yeah, sing me the song of vendors not releasing drivers. I hear and understand, brother
Give a user a pre-configured Linux box with everything working, fine - for most uses people will get along fine. Anyone trying to tell me that an average user can install Linux on their home box and walk away happy most of the time is living in a dream world.
"people aren't stupid", well, what about the people who scream, "I REFUSE TO LEARN ANYTHING!!!!!" ? You *can* be stupid if you absolutely devote every fibre of your being to completely attaining that state.
I'm amazed at the number of non-Windows people that seem to think BSODs are still a normal occurance. They honestly believe Windows boxes crash all the time and that's just how it is, nothing you can do. I attribute it to 3 main things:
1) The last time they used Windows was a long time ago, when they converted. They haven't touched it since 95 and thus haven't seen any of the improvements.
2) They dislike Windows and so remember bad experiences more than good ones. No matter what the OS, you will inevatibly run across someone who screws it up and it's never stable for. These people usually complain loudly about this. Being as there's lots of Windows users, and many are the "L33t ovacloka' gamer" types that push their hardware too much, it's not hard to find. They remember those whines, and forget the hundreds of people who just use it and don't complain because it doesn't crash.
3) They badly want Windows to be unstable, since that's been such a cornerstone argument for so long. Sometimes I'll challenge people to try and convince me why I should convert and I'd say at least half the time stability is one of the first things they try.
All sides of the OS wars engage in FUD and the Linux users are just as bad as any others. They are quick to scream foul when people bash Linux, but come right back with equally unsubstantiated things.
"How the fuck am I supposed to support 500 different pieces of software?"
Insightful? What are you people on? What does MS specifically have to do with making sure that the client who needs support uses (tada, drum shot) supported software?
Obviously, sane people who offer technical support (and want to remain sane) will make sure first thing that the clients will be using only stuff they (the support) know about! What exactly that thing is (MS products or a KDE suite) is irrelevant, as long as both the client and the support person know what it is.
So there's no inherent advantage to using MS products, unless you're already locked in because your support contractor only supports MS products.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I began using humor in my work many years ago. I worked for a high-tech company doing software tools, which requires (on my part) some level of user support in the form of documentation, web pages, and email - the end-user in this case being the other engineers employed there. Technical documentation is such a droll, dry medium, and I wanted to make it more interesting, and help hold the reader's attention. There is nothing funny about the X3T9 or 1394 specs. I also felt the need to extend my personal creativity beyond the realm of interesting code comments.
Things went ok, even fine, for a few years. I received lots of positive feedback from users, indicating how they always looked forward to my next group broadcast email, or how funny a web site was. But such feedback encouraged me to "push the envelope" in terms of content. Our company is multi-culture, multi-ethnic, and multi-national. What might be funny or innocuous in American English can be mis-interpreted by people in Thailand or Singapore. Eventually I crossed an invisible line, and the Political Correction department, sometimes ironically referred to as "Human Resources", came down on me like a ton of diarhea. With my future at stake, I retracted my email and publically apologized. My job had been saved, but my manager's reputation had been compromised. He was in trouble for not "keeping the reins tight enough", as if any manager can effectively herd cats. Of course, while my actions caused problems for my boss, they caused greater problems for me. My future with that company had suddenly grown much more circumscribed, a fact I was not to learn for some time, when raises and promotions sailed past me like leaves in a nor-easter.
After several years, that incident was forgotten. I glided under the radar during subsequent management shake-ups and re-orgs, and ended up working for another manager. Our company policy forbids managers and HR personel from officially discussing individual employee records, so I felt that my past was behind me - safely locked away in the depths of HR. I could relax and drop my guard, which I did but, as you can probably guess, this led to another lapse in judgement, which resulted in the "final warning" from HR. My manager at that time issued an edict demanding "no more humor, no more creativity" in all my work. At the time, it felt like a knife through the heart, but it actually inspired me to redirect my energies and intellect for my own gain, not the company's. The company would survive.
Or course, I accept responsibility for what I said. I could have kept my keyboard locked, toed the company line, and been a happy drone. That company is ancient history, so all I can do now is reflect, and use my talents elsewhere.
Bottom line? The HR department is no longer the "personel" department. It's geared toward protecting the company, not representing the individual worker unit. HR's primary task is protecting the company from harrasement and defamation lawsuits brought by current and former employees. This is extremely difficult in America, with it's current "Politically Correct" atmosphere - an attitude that people are not responsible for their own feelings, thoughts, and interpretations, combined with a "get rich quick" lotto mentality.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.