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.'"

Comments

Re:grawlix fail

[CopaceticOpus]

I know it's not cool these days to care about profanity. But I really prefer to read the /. homepage without seeing the word "fruck".

I don't think Linux can succeed on the desktop as

[Demetris]

I don't think Linux can succeed on the desktop as we know it today. There are several reasons I think that.

One of the main obstacles, at least to my personal enjoyment of Linux, is X. X has its virtues but seems to me to be problematic for the desktop systems we use today.

Then there is the quality of desktop applications, which is simply a matter of numbers: There are too few people developing and testing on Linux compared to those who develop and test on Windows. This can be seen particularly well in cross-platform applications. Firefox is a telling case: Compare Firefox for Windows with Firefox for Linux. (An exception to this is cross-platform GTK apps, but it would be strange if GTK apps worked better on Windows.)

And then there is sound. I feel that I have to become an ALSA programmer in order to achieve on Linux anything even a little out of the ordinary, like, for example, getting two sound cards to work in parallel: one for my music player and one for everything else. On Windows I simply go to the program options and select a soundcard.

I don't see Shuttleworth mentioning any of the above, but most probably he knows better than me. :-) Or, maybe, he has invested too much and cannot give up so easily.

Re:Kudos to him!

[OrangeTide]

idealists suck up all the media bandwidth with their shouting and rants.