Slashdot Mirror
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."
I knew someone who hand-coded HTML to make web pages around 1997, before HTML-authoring tools were common. And these were pages with graphics and menus. But she was absolutely convinced that she should use Microsoft products because you'd have to be "a computer genius" to use anything else. I couldn't convince her that writing a file in LaTeX was structurally very similar to hand-editing HTML. She had a complete psychological block, and would even get mad at me for daring to use anything else.
They assume a certain level of knowledge in their readers. And in this case, its a damn reasonable one. Is this your first time on slashdot or something?
Now compound that with the notion that Linux is something geeks use, and thats why people aren't switching in great numbers.
I work at an employment center in a small-ish (10-15,000) logging and fishing community and I can state, as an absolute fact, that people are indeed stupid.
However, just last week a man who's on disabilities for a brain injury (He has little to no short term memory) came in and asked me if I could get him a free operating system. (He wanted Windows XP. He had bought a refurb p3-500 that came with XP, the hard drive bought the farm, and when the guy who sold it to him fixed it he wiped the OS. He said it was only a "trial version until you got your own system". Full of shit, I know.)
Anyways, on a whim I did a quick google for linux distros, caught a wikipedia page that seemed to make Ubuntu out to be what I was looking for.
Now, I've never touched linux, except for playing counter-strike and quake on linux servers. I downloaded an install image, installed it, and voila.
It was beyond easy and it came with everything I needed. I sent the man with the brain injury home with a disk and he came back the next day with a huge smile on his face.
It worked. First time, totally out of the box. Recognized all his hardware, and came with everything he could possibly want. He was acting rather cheeky about the presentation he put together with OpenOffice and was pleased as punch.
So yeah, if the unemployed and brain injured can install and configure and use with great ease a linux distro, I'd say they've finally made that first big step towards main-stream acceptance.
(And now my other Ubuntu box has become my baby. Too bad it won't run half-life 2. Oh well, worry about an install base first, the developers will follow.)
I disagree, to put it simply. I see the following problems with Linux.
1. It has a need for package management. To me, this is a fundamental flaw with the design of the operating system. There are other techniques and ideas to handle how software is installed.
2. It requires user input for installing a simple desktop system. It should as simple as boot from CD, click install, walk away cause it will reboot and ask you to create an account when done. This operation should, by default both install and overwrite a previous install without losing/breaking a single application install. This install should also automagically install applications a user would normally expect his/her computer to come with.
3. The formal seperation of System and applications is not very good, see OS X for an example of how to do this properly.
4. It emulates Windows UI design and does it poorly. Configuration requires more knowledge than a traditional user has.
5. For "simple things, like Windows, it treats the User like a moron and does a poor job at it. It shouldn't be "easy" if and only if you find the proper wizard to do it and click the buttons in the right order, it should just work.
6. Any and all error codes should be written colloquial english. They should only notify the user if the User has a good reson to know the error happened.
7. Developing tools for Linux need more work and should encourage developers not use package management as a way to install applications.
8. Linux developers should focus on creating tools, not emulating tools already created. The cooperation of professional graphics artists and UI designers would be extremely helpful. Make whitepapers of the UI before designing the application. You'd be surprised how much it will improve the outcome.
8. Most people don't use Office at home, stop using that as an excuse. On top of this, the ability to read and write office documents, especially ones that newer version of Office can't even read has already been solved.
Burn Hollywood Burn
There is just a different mindset between geeks and non-geeks for many things. Take GREP for example. What you have is a geek's idea of the ideal search tool. You specify queries in a powerful grammar so you get just what you want. You can do very complex searches with it to get refined results.
Wonderful, however if you write a regular expression for a non-geek, they will look at you as if you are speaking a foriegn language, which youa re in a manner of speaking. It is toally incomprehensable to them and NOT something they want to learn. To them the ideal search engine is one where you type out, in English (or whatever their native language is) what they want and the computer disambiguates it and finds things.
In other words, geeks have learned to think like computers, and so want tools that are like htat for maximum control. Normal users want computers to learn to think like them, so they have the lowest learning curve possible.
1. Windows tries to manage programs that you install, but does a really terrible job at it, expecting the program to know how to uninstall itself, instead of keeping track of what the program installed so it can actually get rid of it when you want to, and tell you about anything else that depends on this program to work.
2. Installing windows XP asks you some questions too. Stuff like timezone is very important to set right, otherwise the time server will set your computer to the wrong time. Most people don't know what time zone they are in. Also, once installed, windows does very little, doesn't even have drivers for most of my hardware, and can't connect to the internet to download them, because my NIC doesn't have drivers either.
3. I'd much better go with the windows model, of lump everything together and let programs put stuff where ever they wish. Also, let the users put their files whereever they want to. Also, ensure that all the settings for both the operating system and the programs are in one big, easily corruptable file, so that if some program wants to wipe out the registry, then it can.
4. Nobody knows how to configure a windows computer either. The fact that you have to use a GUI for it means that all the useful settings are hidden in the registry, and the stuff that's in the GUI is just the minimal that it thinks people can understand, 80% of which they can't.
5. I don't ever recall my linux box treating me like a moron. It always asks lots of questions to make sure its doing what its supposed to be doing. Presenting the user with no options, and just doing a bunch of stuff you assume they want to do is a bad thing.
6. The user should always know when something goes wrong. To a certain point at least. Assuming the user has no idea what the error means, and therefore not tell them about it is just a bad idea. Sometimes computer errors require the use of computer terms to explain what went wrong. Also, I thought #5 just said linux treats people like morons. Now we are saying it is too complicated, and doesn't use plain english that everyone can understand?
7. Package management tools are the best way to install applications that require dependancies on other applications. If you want to code your own application, and include all the libraries that the application needs with the application, then you can go ahead and do that. Firefox, OpenOffice and Netbeans all use this method for installing, and they work pretty well. But it shouldn't be the only option available to all application developers, nor should it be pushed on them.
8. Pretty much all tools 99% of people need have been created. When it looks exactly like the windows counterpart we get bashed for not being innovative enough. When we do something like GIMP, we get bashed because it is too different. GIMP is a great interface. If you start out using it, all the other graphics packages seem weird and confusing to you.
8. I'm not sure what comes after 8 either. Anyway, reading and writing office documents is still a big problem, even with Openoffice. They are usually legible, but tables usually stick outside the margins, and many other formatting problems exist as well. Everyone I know has office at home, simply because that's what people expect you to use. Most of them don't pay for it, and frankly, I don't think Microsoft cares.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
After searching the internet for a while, I came across a post that was posted on some OpenBSD focussed site, and I was in luck. Someone had posted almost the exact question I was looking for. The exchange went something like this:
And it pretty much ended there. Now, maybe there is some security theory that I'm ignorant of here, but the whole thing just seemed... absurd. The site seemed to be set up for the sake of discussions on OpenBSD and such, the guy asking the questions was polite, and the guy answering was supposed to be an expert. I'm not an uber-geek, but I'm not exactly computer-illiterate either, and it seemed like, even if it's a dumb question, it's not so dumb that it doesn't warrant addressing.Ok, so I guess I'm not adding anything to the discussion, except to say that I know what you mean. There are lots of good, helpful folk out there. Gentoo forums come to mind as a place where I've looked for problems, even on a non-Gentoo machine, and just thought, "god, this is a lifesaver". But sometimes, it's just hard to find answers, even when you know the answers are out there. I've secure shelled into servers that've jailed me before, and yet I've never gotten an answer to this question that actually made sense and worked.