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Miguel de Icaza On Usability and Openness
doperative points out comments from Miguel de Icaza on the struggle for usability in many software products:
"De Icaza uses OpenSUSE as his main desktop (with the GNOME interface, of course), says he likes Linux better than Windows, and says the Linux kernel is also 'superior' to the MacOS kernel. 'Having the source code for the system is fabulous. Being able to extend the system is fabulous,' he says. But he notes that proprietary systems have advantages — such as video and audio systems that rarely break. 'I spent so many years battling with Linux and something new is broken every time,' he says. 'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'"
Understanding the needs of desktop users is perpetually hampered by a large component of Linux culture. The "by nerds for nerds" attitude. Historically this was a great asset when targeting the server and unix workstation markets, users in these areas were typically nerds. However going after the public in general (the mythical year of the Linux desktop) requires a different attitude. To be specific one Linux distribution would need a different attitude, not all of the Linux distributions. Having different distributions focus on radically different communities would seem to be the way to go.
Windows 'works' largely because it comes pre-installed. Try taking any random PC, wiping the disk and installing Windows on it from an official Microsoft install CD and you'll find it at least as hard to get working as Linux.
Though personally the last few times I've installed Linux I just stuck the CD in the drive, selected a few install options and half an hour later I had a working system sitting at the logon prompt. Finding, downloading and installing all the correct updated drivers for a fresh Windows install would probably take longer than that.
You know Miguel works for the GNOME project, right?!
Joking aside, it's perfectly possible thanks to open source's inherently modular structure. Someone makes an idiot-proof GUI, distro X bundles it as the default and only option. Someone makes a uberhacker GUI, distro Y bundles it as the default and only option. Distro Z prides itself on being able to switch from newbie to expert and back again in less than three seconds.
IMHO, GNOME tries too hard to lower itself to the lowest common denominator jack of all trades - look at the recent decision to remove the "minimise" button from the taskbar because it's apparently not useful and not optimised for touchscreens. But neither is the rest of GNOME, or all the apps it's going to run. Sorry, if it's touchscreen users you're after then I'm sure GTK is perfectly capable of having a new UI constructed from the same frameworks.
Similarly, KDE often gets flak for having too many confusing options. It's personally the UI I prefer (after I've spent forever configuring it) in *nix but it's not without its own share of problems either, and much like GNOME they seem to have some project heads who are entirely convinced that theirs is the One True Way of doing it. KDE remains more usable to me because of its configuration flexibility though, but it can be baffling if you don't already know your way around, and they make fewer stupid choices than GNOME.
The problem with both KDE and GNOME's approaches (and windows as well for that matter) is people who are convinced that one tool can be everything to everybody (this goes for almost every DE I've seen in the PC world), and that the inherent differences between, say, a 5" touchscreen and a 60" TV warrant completely different approaches. So to answer your question: yes, Linux can (and does) cater to computer novices (I'm not aware of anyone needing to use the CLI in ubuntu for example, but I could be wrong) and still leave all the juicy stuff available to geeks like me. I'm no fan of apple, but when they released a phone they were smart enough to realise it would need a brand new interface, not a badly screwed fork of their desktop OS as MS did with WinCE. This supposedly revolutionary idea has netted them billions because it's the only approach that makes sense. Tightly coupled with the need to have differentiated UI's for different purposes is the attitude some people take is that theirs is the only way to do something, anyone not doing it their way must be stupid. This is tragically false - everyone has a different way of working, and what works for one person doesn't work for another. For instance, I can't live without focus-follows-mouse, despite the fact it took a lot of effort to get working in windows 7, but almost everyone else hates it. Some people just don't want the options to be there because they don't think they're important, and this stops people from finding tricks and tweaks that may help them work better; some bury the config panels with boxes and the user often doesn't have a clue what options to start with.
Off my high horse now. All YMMV, IANAL, IMHO, etc. I just think all these "there is one best way" arguments are detrimental to the computer experience as a whole.
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In order to get the microphone working on my Ubuntu Lucid, I had to recompile ALSA from source, and go through about 30 steps to get it installed. This was fine for me, or probably anyone else here as we are pretty technical, but how can we expect normal users to be able to do this?
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