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Shuttleworth Suggests 1-Way Valve For User Experience Testing
darthcamaro writes "No surprise but Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has come out swinging in favor of the Linux desktop. Speaking at Linuxcon yesterday he detailed the things that he thinks Linux requires in order to win the desktop wars. Those include: co-ordinated software releases, better quality and design, some user experience testing and oh yeah, a dose of 'shut the f*** up' too. During his keynote, he extended an invitation to any open source application to submit their software for testing by user-experience experts. The sessions would be recorded for posterity, and the developer would not be able to interact with the user. "'If the developer is in the room, they have to say nothing. It's the shut the f*** up protocol,' Shuttleworth said. 'You sit and watch someone struggle with the software that you've so lovingly produced.'"
You may not want it but others do, including me. Linux (currently Debian stable on the desktop and Arch on the laptop) has been my sole desktop OS for years, and the same is true for millions of others. Who are you to say that Windows and Mac are fine?
Lack of Shockwave is a big problem with kids.. A lot of childrens' websites feature games that use Shockwave. This was essentially the deal-breaker in setting up an Ubuntu box for a niece of mine recently. Maybe someday these websites will stop relying on it.
Windows has no touch screen support out of the box either.
Vista does. You're either full of shit, or talking about an ancient Windows version. Given, Vista doesn't have *multi-touch* screen support, but neither does Linux or OS X. And Windows 7 will. So... yah.
Please do the world a favor and stop spouting bullshit. If you don't know for sure, don't write the fucking post.
Comment of the year
Amen to that. Fortunately, there is a godsend for Ubuntu users: Amarok 1.4 series PPA. You just add it to your package sources and install "amarok14". Thank you Bogdan Butnaru.
Well Linux has "support" as well. In both cases additional drivers may or may not be needed. Since the parent was not in any way specific as to the type of touchscreen I was being as general as possible. Most Linux distributions provide support for a variety of touchscreens and drawing tablets out of the box. I know for a fact that Vista on one of the tablets I use needs a driver installed manually for the Wacom tablet. Ubuntu does not. It really depends on the hardware.
My comment was aimed at the people who rip on Linux because they have to install drivers (it really doesn't matter what type.) I was pointing out that you need to do that in other OS's as well.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Ok, that's true. NM's better than the awful GUI network config programs that came before it, and the alternative remains the same as before it existed (i.e. fire up a terminal and fix the shit by hand) but there's a lot of room for improvement. I'm with you--NM could use more custom-configuration options. It's fairly new, though, so hopefully someone will come along and fix it. If not, I fully expect it to be forked, sooner or later.
Huh? The only thing I can find about this via Google is that some people want right-click to mark end-of-selection rather than opening a menu. Is that what you're talking about?
For corporate networks, the network administrator can make programs available for download from the network. That interface is what one would use to install them. In Vista, now there is a seperate icon to "Install programs from the network."
No. That's a new problem. The parent poster's assertion used to be true, but recently it's become much less so. The users are rebelling, and refusing to upgrade to Vista and Office 2007, because the old versions are "good enough" and the new ones just introduce a lot of problems. This is causing severe problems at MSFT, because they're used to the old way, where they shovel out shit that's a little better than the previous version and everyone buys it, and now with not enough people "upgrading", their revenue stream is in big trouble.
Well, last time I did it, it went like this.
One of the grad students in the lab decided he needed to use Linux, but he only had experience with Windows. No problem, a good first step is to install Linux at home so he gets lots of exposure to it.
Okay, install Ubuntu. Not bad (the install process has come a LONG way - proof that UI improvements can be made). Okay, everything is going fine, but how come the second monitor doesn't work? Now there's a good question: Windows and OS X both would have autodetected the monitor and just made it work. Strike 1.
But sure, let's just open up the System->Preference->Display. Oops. Second monitor isn't there. Hm. Strike 2.
All right, Google it. Here's a utility that's supposed to do the job. Install, run. Wants to install a driver. No problem, do it. Which one? The latest one. Fine. Uh oh, X won't even start. Strike 3.
Okay, fine, it's been a while since I've edited an Xorg.conf file, but let's dive into it.... That's the point where the guy decided to wipe Linux and reinstall Windows, and I can't really blame him. It turns out later that after two strikes we almost had it, except you had to pick the next to latest driver because the most recent one dies a horrible death when used with more than one monitor.
By the way, I'm not at all sure you know what you're talking about. If you type "multiple monitors" into the Ubuntu help webpage you don't get "just go to System>Preference->Display. You get this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/XineramaHowTo
So either you're wrong, or the Ubuntu help web site is crap. Either way, strike 4.
I hope Shuttleworth's emphasis on usability pays off. There's no reason why Linux CAN'T deal with the myriad little problems like this one, and Ubuntu has not only fixed a bunch of them in the distro but also spurred other distros into fixing long standing, stupid issues.
For the benefit of those not familiar with this... the old behaviour of displaying updates was to display an icon next to the clock. The new behaviour is:
Friends' Ubuntu installations were rarely updated due to the limited attention received by the little icon. With the new [minimised] update window, the machines updated weekly.
It all comes down to visibility.
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
This was a new product, in a new (for Microsoft) market. We were starting from zero marketshare against firmly entrenched competitors. It took that product about five years to even start breaking even and now it brings in a healthy profit.
People at MSFT by and large try really hard to put out the best product they can. Unfortunately, in a company the size of Microsoft it's not as straightforward as it perhaps should be. If you work on a product that's already shipped a few versions, you end up having to convince too many people to get anything changed, so unless something is truly horribly broken people tend to pick their fights and argue for the cases where have a greater probability of success.
Fortunately, this is not an issue with new, v1 products, since you're building from the ground up. Hence, in our case, we've made fairly dramatic changes as we went along.
A good friend of mine recently switched to Linux wholesale after sitting on the fence for a while.
He's a smart guy, but not a technical whiz by any stretch -- usage pattern is about 50% HTML/CSS editing, 30% graphic design and 20% gaming. He knew all of the keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop, was pretty handy with Dreamweaver, and knew enough MS Office to get done what needed to get done. Unfortunately he was also re-formatting his machine every 6 months due to the usual Windows bit-rot, and he'd pretty much had enough of that. I'd been using Linux for about 7 years myself, so I suggested that he get himself a copy of Ubuntu. He had installed it on his own a few days later (one of many non-technical people that I've seen get through the install unassisted).
It's been about 18 months now. There were the typical "where is everything" questions at the start, and it took some time for him to cozy up to the idea of using a command prompt once in a while, but it would be impossible to say that he's not better off now. Inkscape replaced Photoshop, vim (!) replaced Dreamweaver, and Google Apps replaced MS Office. But more than simply replacing what he already had, using Linux somehow enabled him to quickly develop a whole new skillset. After doing nothing but HTML/CSS for 12-15 years, he's writing PHP now, and he's pretty damn good considering where he was a year and a half ago with no coding experience. He's every bit as good with vi as he was with Photoshop. And he's even installed Ubuntu on his wife's laptop, and she's rapidly developing higher technical abilities as well.
One thing that has struck me watching new users is how quickly people seem to "get it". If they have preconcieved notions about Linux, they're gone after using Ubuntu for a day. After that happens, a sense of awe and wonder seems to set in and they gradually become genuinely curious about computing. My friend's wife was a hunt-and-peck typer who knew "how to do email". I've since heard her telling others how to use apt-get and she knows how to remotely access GNU Cash on their home server (X11 forwarding over SSH) to do accounting. She even knows what that means, and it's only been several weeks.
To the parent poster, I'd say if you tried to do your job in Linux at all, you didn't try very hard. Or you started with a distro that is ridiculously overwhelming for a beginner. If you want a real reason to use Linux, delete every program from your Windows machine that you don't hold a valid license for and see how much "work" you can get done. Or imagine what else you could have spent the money for your Windows/MS Office license on next time you're forced to re-format because your system just isn't as snappy as it used to be.
Windows became so ubiquitous because it was (is) so easy to pirate, and now we have a whole generation of computer users that think anything other than Windows is "wrong". I have yet to see a single Ubuntu user who gave it an honest try go crawling back to Windows.
For cut/paste? That would be incredibly stupid because ctrl-c means send SIGINT to the program running on the terminal. It has been this way long before someone decided to use ctrl-c for copy.
Well, speaking as someone who has actually watched usability testing at Microsoft and as someone who has actually seen significant changes made to a product because of it, I can tell you that you're full of crap.
Bitching that the clipboard preserves formatting is a little silly. It's normal, expected behavior, and you can use the 'smart tag' (since Office XP) if you don't want to preserve formatting. The fact that you don't like the default behavior doesn't make it wrong.
I rarely notice auto-bulleting in Word because I don't start my lines with dashes. If I wanted to type plain text, I would use a text editor.
If your point in all of this is that MS products have usability flaws, well, I'd agree. But then so do Apple's. I learned that the first time I wiped my iPod by clicking on the wrong button when I connected it to another PC.
The usability studies do matter, and they do improve the product. Perhaps not as much as we might want, but to say that they are a show is simply silly.