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Linux, to be (Like Microsoft) or Not to be?
David writes "Stephen Shipman delivers a very articulate and concise view of how Linux fits in server and end user environments. He expresses his view in response to Nicolas Petreley's 'rant' in Linux Journal. He points out the subtle implications of efficiency versus consistency." From the article: "[...] efficiency (as measured by keystrokes) isn't the only metric for ease of use. Consistency must also be taken into account. Microsoft has made a lot of hay (and green) by flogging consistency".
Microsoft doesn't get it. There are things in Windows XP which are still as idiotic as ever. This isn't evidence of a superiour product, but the result of understanding. The Registry is once again a completely backwards way of contending with things, and worse, you sometimes have to get into the Registry to change things which should be straight-forward options in personalising your computer.
Then there's the Single User aspect, all over again. No matter how they pass XP off as a multi-user environment, it carriest considerable baggage of being single user - case in point: the pop-up key-stealer, when apps suddenly thrust themselves forward and steal a keystroke for the [ignore] [retry] [cancel] [OK] whatever prompt and vanish if it meets the input expectation.
What I repeatedly hear from Mac enthusiasts is how quickly a new user can sit down and get right to business, without thinking half as hard where things are or how settings work. Microsoft made a big deal out of bringing a tonne of people on board to advise them and examine their user interfaces, but I grow increasingly skeptical that these were actually people flown to a nice resort, given fine amenities and still shown what Microsoft thought they should see, rather than simply gaining some real inside, i.e. "so what's the thing you most dislike about Windows/Office/Etc.?" Rather like a homeless guy will be your best friend if you give him a few bucks.
Consistency must also be taken into account. Microsoft has made a lot of hay (and green) by flogging consistency".
They also have become extremely overconfident because success came too easily. Note many of their recent failures. And may I be among the first of many to recognise Origami as an utter flop. Looks neat, but it's a niche player, same as Tablet Computers. It's too big and too small at the same time. Once again a complete misunderstanding of the market.
Linux should strive to be efficient and easy to use, not mugging one of the most inexplicably frustrating environments ever.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's not Microsoft's continual flogging of consistency that bothers me. It's that they consistently flog the dolphin.
Seriously, Microsoft. You'll eventually go blind.
There's a conference this Thursday, March 16th in Belfast called FOSS Means Business where Stallman and Perens are both doing business-orientated lectures, plus presentations by Google, Open Source Academy, and Oracle.
People trying to encourage IT decision makers to transition to free software have to learn to explain it. Bruce Perens is good at this, but as well as telling people about the value of free software, we have to tell them how to hang on to it - how to not let it slip through their fingers. That's Stallman's angle, as can be read in this transcript of his lecture on GPLv3.
Microsoft isn't top because of their software quality, and free software won't displace them purely based on quality either. We'll win for other reasons.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Considering that there's really not been any real consistency throughout MS' product offerings or
anything else about Windows' operating environment:
- Printing that doesn't work the same from Windows 95/98/Me to NT/2000/XP because of different
driver rules at the GDI layer.
- API's that change from one ruleset to the next without warning (the move from 16-bit to 32-bit
generated at least several API calls that produced nasty results because they used zero as the
default but in the 32-bit version they used a string for that parameter and they didn't account
for this in the API...)
- Consumer WinCE devices being allowed out the door with missing functionalities (i.e. The Uniden
UniPro 100 PDA was missing the Finder and a few other things- for no good reasons other than they
were short on firmware memory because of the added recording functionalities- and instead of
increasing the BOM costs slightly for more ROM capacity, they opted to omit some of the functionalities
that make it consistent with the other WinCE devices.)
- Apps don't have any consistent install/uninstall interface. (While Linux IS better in this regard,
it's got many of the same problems...).
- Apps often install their own DLLs to prevent being hosed by other apps and Microsoft when they do
updates.
There's tons more. "Windows" only seems consistent because the end-user community sees something that
"works like Windows" and is therefore familiar- since it's familiar, they whitewash over all the
issues about consistency and it "being easier to use". Issues that plague them day in, day out.
Microsoft may talk the talk, but when the rubber meets the pavement, they're not walking the walk- not even close.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
No matter how they pass XP off as a multi-user environment, it carriest considerable baggage of being single user - case in point: the pop-up key-stealer, when apps suddenly thrust themselves forward and steal a keystroke for the [ignore] [retry] [cancel] [OK] whatever prompt and vanish if it meets the input expectation.
Of all the things you could propose as a reason for considering it "single user", that's the oddest. It's hateful and frustrating, and more prevalent in MS WIndows than X11 or Mac OS, but it's more prevalent in X11 than Mac OS, and more prevalent in Mac OS than 8 1/2.
You could have pointed to the single-application-instance shared with Mac OS (which Firefox has imported to X11). Whether it's services, desktop applications, or just logged in users, it takes a huge effort to have two instances of ANYTHING running in Windows.
Their virtual terminal and user switching required years of development work from Citrix, Xerox, Metaframe, and other companies to figure out what parts of the user environment should be shared, what should be duplicated, and what should be switched from instance to instance... and you still can't have two login sessions under the same user id.
For applications that run as services there's been even less work done to get around the problems... so it's actually more cost effective to build "blade" servers or run multiple copies of the OS in virtual machines than to run multiple webservers or other applications in the same instance of Windows.
I mean, I had a 486/50... this is a machine that wasn't powerful enough to run one instance of even NT 3.51... and I was running multiple webservers on different addresses under the same kernel. This kind of thing is routine and easy in UNIX, because it was designed for multiple users (and thus multiple instances of every possible resource) from the very start.
It has, as the logical postivists say, "no cognitive content", or at least very little. By talking about "Linux" and indeed "Windows" so broadly, you can make the figures for consistency come out to whatever you want. In either case the largest source of inconsistency is the choice of optional software you choose to put on the system; as it is much more convenient and you have a much wider variety of software you can install on a distro like Ubuntu, naturally you can easily make your system wildly inconsistent. It's because there's so much software, from different sources, that are available at a touch of a button under Linux. A lot of that software is of course really bad from a UI perspective, but even if you restricted yourself to reasonably good software, it's still easy to end up with a LOT of software installed on a Linux box.
None of which of course applies in the server domains, where you're better off with less UI. Wildly divergent configuration files are bad, but not as bad as wildly divergent GUIs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
For example, plenty of Windows users will be quite happy by going to "file" to print or close an application. "Find" is under edit, not view. That's fine for people who think that way and for them it SHOULD be that way. The rest of the userbase shouldn't have to suffer for it, though.
Myself, I like visuals. The idea of dragging an application window to a printer, OR dragging the printer to the application windows, appeals to me. (To me, drag&drop needs to work by object, not by destination.)
"But writing all those interfaces would be massively overwhelming!" I'm not suggesting anyone does. Just provide a rational, consistant, standard skin that the majority can use, then provide a powerful enough engine that can handle application look&feel and drag&drop events not otherwise handled. Then write a simple UI editing engine. If people want their own UI, give them the tools to provide it.
"Most people wouldn't bother." Probably true, but the Open Source dictum is that some will, and that evolution will lead to superior interfaces.
"How does that benefit company X that sells products?" Easy enough. Every time you're about to release a next major version, look and see whether other skins are doing better than your default. If they are, switch. If that's how everyone sees your program anyway, it won't hurt anyone's ability to use it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Average users won't know the difference.
Of course, they wouldn't know the difference even if you didn't skin it.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
/etc is for configuration files, NOT rants. Rants go in /usr/share.
.program directories (sometimes they were more well-behaved and left .program.d) and .program files. Theoretically, they read configuration information from /etc/program, then .program, the the command line, each location overriding the previous one's directives. Theoretically. Some programs did it that way, some didn't, and you had to read the manual to figure it all out.
GConf is not nearly as much of a mess as this guy makes it out to be. Remember what programs did before GConf? they littered your home directory with
Remember X Resources? X Resources are another kludge that GConf seeks to replace. foo.bar.* String, or Program.foo String, all in one big file. At least what overrides what is clearly specified.
Each program has to provide parsing code for its command line and its configure files, stat() those files manually to determine if they exist, do overriding correctly...
But the GConf puts these configuration directives in an XML format in clearly-defined places and lets the individual application developers not have to write buggy, poorly-documented configuration management, and suddenly people cry 'registry'?
What was wrong with the Windows registry was its corruptible, unrecoverably binary format and the random distribution of keys between the system and user registries. GConf does not have executable keys. GConf does not let one user change system preferences unless that user is root. If a GConf configuration gets corrupt, that corruption is localized to the specific corrupt file, and the user can try to repair that file because it's XML and not some undocumented binary format.
Linux is not hard for beginners to use.
.. then I am of the feeling Linux is actually easier and less intrusive.
.. some USB broadband modem, then you may find the prospect of installing Linux and trying to get everything as functional - as enjoyable as cutting your own eye-lids.
.. is that they actually miss it once it's gone.
:)
I've installed Linux Desktop on laptops belonging to people that doesn't even know what an operating system is - and they got on well.
Now if you wanted to say Linux is hard to administer.
They yes, you are completely right.
If we get pre-built desktop system with Linux installed with all the compatible peripherals
When you get a machine optimized for Windows, non-compliant BIOS, Linux-unfriendly video-card, broadcom wireless chipset, some Lexmark printer, some Canon Scanner
Not being a propagandist at all -- but one thing I find curious about non-tech users after they been exposed to Linux (for a while)
The Linux system obviously would have to be set in a very friendly way for that to happen - which is what I do to other people's dying PC when I am bored
Linux: An operating system kernel.
Microsoft: A multinational corporation.
Unless the laws of reality turn in on themselves, I do not think Linux is going to become anything even remotely like Microsoft.
Linux got to where it is today by being both better and different from Windows, not by trying to be a cut-rate knock-off.
To play devil's advocate - Linux did get to where it is today by being a cut-rate knock-off. But it was a cut-rate Free knock-off, and it was a knock-off of UNIX, not Windows.
Linux has since surpassed many competitors in many ways, and has killer features that no longer relegate it to being a "cut-rate knock-off", but that's what it grew into when it became more than a hobby, and that's what enabled it to become as popular as it did in the mid-to-late 90s.
Ok, I'm neither an expert using MS (take your pick) or Linux (take your pick). In an attempt to diversify my understanding of Linux, I started using RedHat 7.2, many years ago.
/etc/blah/blah, port(ed), API, drivers.
It was a slow, long, widing road, but I've learned, using a certain amount of perseverance.
It is the perseverance that the "average" user is lacking. Tell me how many of the following terms/words the shopper going to Best Buy or Circuit City are willing to learn: Source, Binary, Compile, RPM, apt-get, x86, X11,
There are more, but I can't think of anything right now that would add to user/consumer confusion when all people want to know are things like "Can I use the internet with this", "I need some word processing", or the more experienced user that know that a hard drive size is measured in bytes, and the processor speed in herz.
Microsoft makes many things automated. Want OS updates? Go to windowsupdate.com, or click on the "Windows Update" icon. Want driver updates? Go to manufacturer, get drivers for 2000/xp OR 98/ME. No pointing to mirrors, no compilation, no source, no RPM, no Yum, just "Do It Now!", wait for the icon to appear, double click, make a sandwich, reboot.
That's what Linux is lacking. Does anyone realize this?