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Make Linux "Gorgeous," Says Ubuntu Leader
OSS_ilation writes "They say beauty is only skin deep, but when it comes to Linux and the free software movement, people like Mark Shuttleworth think looks have an important part to play. On his blog and an article on SearchOpenSource.com, Shuttleworth and a slew of open source end users say that the look and feel of open source is also a matter of wider acceptance among enterprise players who are used to Windows, yet crave Mac OS X and the functionality of Linux. 'If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful,' Shuttleworth said. "We have to make it gorgeous. We have to make it easy on the eye. We have to make it take your friend's breath away.' With the early success of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Shuttleworth and company may be onto something."
A person who has never used a computer turns on three which are arranged in front of them... A Windows box, a Mac box and a Linux box... all look identical on the outside. They receive no prompting. Which do they begin to try to learn to use?
Finally, someone who is addressing the root cause of why Linux continues to trail market leaders in desktop share. In addition to making it "beautiful", developers need to continue adding out-of-the-box widgets/features to prevent someone from ever needing to modify a script or enter a terminal window if they didn't want to. If they could address both of these 'issues', Linux would have a fighting chance against Windows desktops.
IMO - Microsoft doesn't dominate because it is better, it dominates because of great marketing and ease of use (even for groups such as the disabled). My grandmother can use XP Home, but if I have Linux up, she completely freezes. Sure, there's some grandmas that know perl scripting, but who wants to jump in and start compiling code just so they can play bridge with their friends over the net?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
and when things don't Just Work (tm), make it Really Easy to Fix (tm). gui eye candy is nice and all, but it does no good if the underlying software is flakey and generally hard to use.
Fortune Magazine: What has always distinguished the products of the
companies you've led is the design aesthetic. Is your obsession with design
an inborn instinct or what?
Steve Jobs: We don't have good language to talk about this kind of thing.
In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating.
It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be
further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a
man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers
of the product or service. The iMac is not just the colour or translucence or
the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible
consumer computer in which each element plays together.
On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is
much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time.
That was not just "Steve's decision" to pull out the fan; it required an
enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do
a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest
thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started.
This is what customers pay us for--to sweat all these details so it's easy
and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good
at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for
them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely
like it.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/2000/01/24/app6.ht
...goes all the way to ring 0.
While Ubuntu is relatively polished and most of the stuff "just works", the default baby-shit-brown color scheme is hideous.
So, while I would agree that Linux needs some beautification, I don't trust anyone at Ubuntu to do it!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Too many people need to give up their egos, use GUI toolkits they don't like, and admit they don't know jack about what looks good and what doesn't.
People don't crave OS X because it's beautiful, but because it Just Works. The beauty of OS X is way beyond skin deep. To achieve it you need things like consistency, subtle cues that inform the user of what's happening, you need to remove clutter etc.
You need to think about every element of the UI not in isolation, but in relation to all the other elements. Mere eye candy just doesn't cut it. Shuttleworth sort of admits this in the blog entry, but bulldozes over it earlier on, when he says I'm not talking about inner beauty, not elegance, not ideological purity... pure, unadulterated, raw, visceral, lustful, shallow, skin deep beauty.
Sorry Mark, but you're starting at the wrong end here. You need inner beauty, in the shape of e.g. a consistent framework, and at the most fundamental level, just plain consideration of how the user interacts with the application, before you can start working on the skin.
And that is why Linux distributions as we know them will never compete with OS X. You'd need to toss X and its bazillion GUI toolkits, and replace them with something new. Then you'd need to organize a Human Interface Police, whose job it is to kick developers who don't follow the guidelines. And I suspect that won't go over well among the Linux developer community with its "free to do whatever the hell I like" mindset.
Instead of making it look "gorgeous", how about focusing on making Linux look "consistent"?
Windows and Mac OS sure didn't achieve their easily identifiable "looks" by promoting dozens of inconsistent GUI toolkits.
I agree that appearance is important. Humans function better when they have pleasant environments. It's also true that Linux distros often really suck when it comes to basics of HCI and even simple artistic elements that would make things a lot more pleasant and usable.
But it really bugs me when people talk about aesthetics while the internal structure isn't sound. I'm happily using Dapper Drake, but it wasn't trivial to setup correctly with some of the hardware I wanted to use. But there's the recent slashdot article that mentions the upgrade nightmare when going from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft. And there are even more fundamental problems with Linux. The graphics system in Linux is held together with duct tape. It's just WAY too easy to break, and there is no kind of structure to it. There should be APIs and standard mechanisms for handling graphics devices in a general, but they just don't exist (and don't tell me about DRI -- it's only one step in the right direction). I'm told that there are many other facilities, like networking, that aren't a whole lot better.
Look at it this way: If Microsoft had gotten their shit together in the beginning and written a decent operating system, rather than cobbling DOS and some other crap together and sticking a GUI on top, then more of us would be using Windows. Instead, they shipped us crap, we figured that out, and we moved on to other systems. For a very long time, Mac OS (9 and before) was all surface, with an embarrassing OS under the hood. One of the few operating systems that was actually ENGINEERED well from the ground up was BeOS, but that didn't fair well against Microsoft's marketing.
The fact is, "Linux" lacks coherency. It's not "Linux." It's a Linux kernel, some GNU tools over there, X11 bolded on over here, GTK or Qt slapped on over yonder... No two groups actually get together and decide to come up with an elegant system. Instead, they compete with each other, end up working around each other's mistakes, and then leave it up to the distros to try to make it all work together. Ha.
I'll just tell you a dirty little secret from my experience with writing device drivers: The NT kernel's interfaces for handling devices like graphics cards, network devices, printers, and pretty much anything else you want to use, they put Linux to shame. NT may not perform as well, be as stable, or be as secure as Linux, but it's engineered with vastly more coherent internal structure. Linux is good code with poorly-designed interfaces, while Windows is lousy code with well-designed interfaces (actually, POSIX rocks, but I'm talking about kernel structure and device management).
Here's one problem indemic to the open source paradigm: Things like "beauty" or "ease of use" or "how you ought to do things" varies widely from one group to another. Getting everyone that develops an app for Linux to agree on one set of interface standards makes for a pretty steep uphill battle. Take a look at Gnome versus KDE: Where does an "Okay" button belong on a dialog box, left or right?
The opportunity that the open source community has is to leverage the capacity for development that has made FOSS a viable contender for hard drive space to develop something entirely new in computing. Projects like Open Office and the GIMP are great, offering alternatives to commercial software where options weren't available before. And development of those products should continue, but to what end? Sure, there's value in being able to provide a drop in, no training required replacement for the Microsoft software stack if it can be done with open standards and security. But if all you're doing is following the development of major software vendors, you're relying on them to set the pace of innovation. Even the venerated Linus Torvalds made Linux because he wanted to have a Unix-like system running on his commodity hardware (yeah, yeah, let the hatemail come).
So, tell me, where is the group that comes along and says, "Here's a new way of using a computer. Everyone come help us build it, it's gonna be great" ?? Why, after all these years, am I still forced to use the paradigm of paper-based documents (PDF, RTF, e-mail, web) to communicate most information, even if it never hits paper? Why do I have to gather information by reading text, line by line, down a page? Where's the visual depth to our digital world? Where's the alternative information delivery?
And I'm not calling for a bunch of new input or output devices that will change the way we work with a computer, though those are needed as well. Given what we have (mouse, keyboard, monitor), we ought to be able to come up with something better.
Take, for instance, the Civilization IV interface as a model for systems administration. Replace cities with servers, continents become networks, nations become domains, etc. Pan and zoom around your network, click on users to see what they're up to, double click on servers to look at their configuration and make edits to it, adjust automation, etc. etc. User apps have other opportunities for data navigation, communication, resource location, etc. But we've got to get ourselves off of the paper paradigm first. How do we do that?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Unless you're planning on creating a new ideomatic language and teaching it to the rest of the world, we're kind of stuck with that whole letter-word-sentence-paragraph thing. Which gives rise to the idea of a page or document or file or folder that encapsulates a bunch of them.
Most sites or interfaces that try to overlay reality with other metaphors fail, usually because the metaphor doesn't communicate (why is the home page the "Town Hall"?) and because most graphical systems aren't as dense as text. To take your example, do I want to navigate a virtual building trying to find Fred's desk, or is it faster to find Fred in an alphabetic list and click on it.
I actually expect search and metadata (aka Spotlight) to take us further than 3D spinning virtual worlds...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.