Obviously, I'm pointing my finger at Windows, here, but Linux has been adopting the Windows conventions of desktop computing steadily over the last 10 years, to the point where it is now pretty much assumed even by most OSS enthusiasts that the many of the idiotic conventions of Windows are the correct ones to emulate
I don't think that's remotely true. I think every time you see something that could be construed as slavish Microsoft emulation (no Wine jokes, please) from the free desktop community, it is immediately met with massive backlash from the community.
I guess the recent event that would spring to mind (although I know this is a purely cosmetic example) was KDE's early Oxygen theme for 4.0. Even though KDE 4 was out substantially before Windows Vista, Vista came out, everyone retroactively decided that Oxygen was too Vista-ish and it got pulled very early in the 4.x cycle.
But on a larger scale, I think that to decry the modern compositing next-gen spinny-cube semantic connected cloud-enabled multimedia did-I-miss-any-buzzwords free desktop as "Too Windows-like" is disingenuous.
You don't buy a computer because of its culture...
Well of course I don't, and I'd assume you don't. That doesn't change the fact that millions of people do. Unless of course you're seriously going to tell me that you think all those damn hipsters at my coffee shop really sat down and did some comparative analysis and decided that a Mac would "serve their purposes better."
Your post reminds me of the guy who criticized the 2nd generation iPod because he couldn't find the "on" button. Uh..you just touch any button and it turns on. All you have to do is try ANY button.
That's fine. How do you turn the damn thing off?
The iPods (in all their variants) are so intuitive that I can't even give directions to somebody on how to operate one because I don't know how to unless I'm holding it in my hand (if that makes any sense).
It does, but that's not what intuitive means. I had a schleppy part time data entry job where I churned out shit in the most atrociously designed piece of shit database application you've ever seen. I had it down to muscle memory, how many times I hit tab, when to press space and when to press enter, the whole deal. Couldn't explain to it someone to save my ass, but I had that bastard down. That's not "intuitive," that's just "doing something over and over."
Again, being a "very technically inclined person", you probably bring years of technology expectations to how the device should work (i.e. like many of the other poorly designed gadgets you've probably used over the years).
Leaving the sickening taste of elitism in that statement completely aside, no, actually I had pretty much zero experience with any sort of mobile device at the time the iPod began to get popular. I didn't get an mp3 player of my own until 2006, and I finally broke down and got a cell phone this year.
Sorry, but I think any device that can ship with an instruction booklet that only needs a few illustrations (and no text) is a pretty good design feat, especially for all the stuff it can do.
I used to do customer service for a company that sold shitty little $30 DVD players. They came with little four page booklets with like fifty total words and four pictures. It was still a piece of shit. Lots of companies are lazy about documentation of consumer electronic devices. Don't try to paint it as a virtue.
I think iPods/iPhones are good examples of this, since most users are enamored by those products, most likely because they are easy to figure out without having any reference to compare them too (no prior experience).
I think that's crazy. I don't own an iPod, but have messed around with others'. If I want to walk through a list, what do I do? Click back and forth? Spin "the wheel?" If I want to enter into a directory, do I click the middle button? The "play" button? How do I turn the damn thing off? Why does it insist on adjusting the volume when I'm trying to navigate through the screens? (Yes, I know the answers to almost all these questions, but every time I pick one up I have to almost relearn it.) I'm a very technically inclined person generally, but w/r/t the iPod specifically, I am the very model of the "user with little experience" who should be able to "just figure out" the interface, and I find that it stymies me at every turn. I think it's an absolute abomination, and every hardware designer since the advent of the iPod who has blindly parroted that stupid bloody wheel should have their fucking fingers chopped off and fed to feral cats.
(Screw the corporations that got locked into IE. They can use IE as an intranet client, and use a real web browser for... wel browsing.)
It's terrifying, really. I work for a very large American bank (not the one with America in the name, the other one), and we use IE6 for everything. I swear to God. I am scared to log in to my bank account from work. And I work at the bank.
Well then, you're stupid and wrong. People like him and people like you are the reason we're in this fucking mess. You've driven this country off a goddamn cliff and we're not going to sit here and watch anymore.
We've tried debating you. We've tried presenting alternative ideas. We've tried to be reasonable. For our trouble, we got Newt Gingrich, Free Speech Zones, runaway deregulation, 9/11, the drowning of New Orleans, the PATRIOT Act, two losing wars, and an economic meltdown like nothing most of us have seen in our lifetimes.
You've had your say. You're obviously incompetent. Now we're done arguing with you. So sit down, shut up, and let the grownups work.
Actually (and I know I'm an outlier) you just nailed my reason for continuing to dual-boot even though I know there are other, and in many ways better options. If I don't have the option of jumping over to Civ IV at a moment's notice I get a hell of a lot more work done:)
That stuff fades. It's ephemeral. I used to "gotta have" WordPerfect 6.
No, seriously. Listen. We're give-or-take 25 years into the "PC era." In that eyeblink of time, the applications we've run, the capabilities they've had, and the platforms that they've run on have changed more times than I can name in one paragraph. No one over the age of 25 was "born using Windows."
The software monoculture that we are living in now is an historical anomaly.
What is a valid objection is that Linux distributions tend in general to be incredibly poor from a usability perspective compared to commercial offerings.
That's ridiculous. What's Microsoft's presence in the netbook space? Is it Vista? Is it Win7, the much-ballyhooed "Linux netbook killer?" Fuck no. You get Windows XP, sucker, the same stale crap they've been shoving down your throat for nearly a decade. If you're seriously trying to compare that to, for instance, Ubuntu Netbook Remix or KDE's Plasma netbook interface, you're off your meds.
Only the college student uses GMail. The rest of them use Outlook or Thunderbird and their ISP's email system, so they didn't see any benefit there.
Wow, that is so contrary to my experience (and I support home users for a living). I can't think of a single client I have, of any age, that uses Outlook (or what have you) for their personal email. Not one. Everyone who has to use something like that at work hates it with a bloody mouth-frothing passion. Everyone uses Gmail or Yahoo or God help us, Hotmail. I don't even bother asking anymore.
Tell me, what code has Stallman or anybody else at the FSF actually written in the last five years that I actually care about?
Oh, you know. Nothing, really. A few little things. You may have heard of some of them.
What's that I hear? Is it further whinging about "what have you done for me lately?" Go fuck yourself. If you use any version of Linux, you use half the stuff on that list every day of the week. Hell, without gcc there'd be nothing. That's what they've done for you lately, you ungrateful shit.
Furthermore, if GNOME's heading in any direction on the desktop, it's towards enabling 3D, networking, web and presence technologies through the stack.
it looks to me like he's losing touch both with the economics and the technology of free software
As another poster noted above, Stallman and the GNU project are about neither economics nor technology. They're about politics. They're about freedom. If the Gnome development team doesn't like that, then yes, they should go their own way.
Stallman should perhaps rather worry about the future of GNU itself; I haven't seen much innovation coming out of the GNU project itself recently, and GNU is getting rather long in the tooth.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The GNU tools changed the world and continue to change the world every day. They don't need to "innovate." They just need to exist.
Slashdot Mirror
The exact same thing can be said for Linux fans, Windows fans, or any other clique.
Windows does not have fans.
You know the GP referred to "some Mac users?" He was talking about you, douchebag.
Obviously, I'm pointing my finger at Windows, here, but Linux has been adopting the Windows conventions of desktop computing steadily over the last 10 years, to the point where it is now pretty much assumed even by most OSS enthusiasts that the many of the idiotic conventions of Windows are the correct ones to emulate
I don't think that's remotely true. I think every time you see something that could be construed as slavish Microsoft emulation (no Wine jokes, please) from the free desktop community, it is immediately met with massive backlash from the community.
I guess the recent event that would spring to mind (although I know this is a purely cosmetic example) was KDE's early Oxygen theme for 4.0. Even though KDE 4 was out substantially before Windows Vista, Vista came out, everyone retroactively decided that Oxygen was too Vista-ish and it got pulled very early in the 4.x cycle.
But on a larger scale, I think that to decry the modern compositing next-gen spinny-cube semantic connected cloud-enabled multimedia did-I-miss-any-buzzwords free desktop as "Too Windows-like" is disingenuous.
You don't buy a computer because of its culture...
Well of course I don't, and I'd assume you don't. That doesn't change the fact that millions of people do. Unless of course you're seriously going to tell me that you think all those damn hipsters at my coffee shop really sat down and did some comparative analysis and decided that a Mac would "serve their purposes better."
Sounds like an awful lot of bullshit and hassle for the same stuff I get with Linux for free and out of the box. How's that working out for you?
Your post reminds me of the guy who criticized the 2nd generation iPod because he couldn't find the "on" button. Uh..you just touch any button and it turns on. All you have to do is try ANY button.
That's fine. How do you turn the damn thing off?
The iPods (in all their variants) are so intuitive that I can't even give directions to somebody on how to operate one because I don't know how to unless I'm holding it in my hand (if that makes any sense).
It does, but that's not what intuitive means. I had a schleppy part time data entry job where I churned out shit in the most atrociously designed piece of shit database application you've ever seen. I had it down to muscle memory, how many times I hit tab, when to press space and when to press enter, the whole deal. Couldn't explain to it someone to save my ass, but I had that bastard down. That's not "intuitive," that's just "doing something over and over."
Again, being a "very technically inclined person", you probably bring years of technology expectations to how the device should work (i.e. like many of the other poorly designed gadgets you've probably used over the years).
Leaving the sickening taste of elitism in that statement completely aside, no, actually I had pretty much zero experience with any sort of mobile device at the time the iPod began to get popular. I didn't get an mp3 player of my own until 2006, and I finally broke down and got a cell phone this year.
Sorry, but I think any device that can ship with an instruction booklet that only needs a few illustrations (and no text) is a pretty good design feat, especially for all the stuff it can do.
I used to do customer service for a company that sold shitty little $30 DVD players. They came with little four page booklets with like fifty total words and four pictures. It was still a piece of shit. Lots of companies are lazy about documentation of consumer electronic devices. Don't try to paint it as a virtue.
I think iPods/iPhones are good examples of this, since most users are enamored by those products, most likely because they are easy to figure out without having any reference to compare them too (no prior experience).
I think that's crazy. I don't own an iPod, but have messed around with others'. If I want to walk through a list, what do I do? Click back and forth? Spin "the wheel?" If I want to enter into a directory, do I click the middle button? The "play" button? How do I turn the damn thing off? Why does it insist on adjusting the volume when I'm trying to navigate through the screens? (Yes, I know the answers to almost all these questions, but every time I pick one up I have to almost relearn it.) I'm a very technically inclined person generally, but w/r/t the iPod specifically, I am the very model of the "user with little experience" who should be able to "just figure out" the interface, and I find that it stymies me at every turn. I think it's an absolute abomination, and every hardware designer since the advent of the iPod who has blindly parroted that stupid bloody wheel should have their fucking fingers chopped off and fed to feral cats.
I think it's bad that FireFox, lies in Googles hands
It's Firefox. There is only one capital letter. It's in the front.
Imagine if Google censored search engine results according to the whim of some bad government.
Gee, yeah, imagine that. Hey, wait...
the last browser to successfully sell copies
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
(Screw the corporations that got locked into IE. They can use IE as an intranet client, and use a real web browser for ... wel browsing.)
It's terrifying, really. I work for a very large American bank (not the one with America in the name, the other one), and we use IE6 for everything. I swear to God. I am scared to log in to my bank account from work. And I work at the bank.
Well then, you're stupid and wrong. People like him and people like you are the reason we're in this fucking mess. You've driven this country off a goddamn cliff and we're not going to sit here and watch anymore.
We've tried debating you. We've tried presenting alternative ideas. We've tried to be reasonable. For our trouble, we got Newt Gingrich, Free Speech Zones, runaway deregulation, 9/11, the drowning of New Orleans, the PATRIOT Act, two losing wars, and an economic meltdown like nothing most of us have seen in our lifetimes.
You've had your say. You're obviously incompetent. Now we're done arguing with you. So sit down, shut up, and let the grownups work.
I'm sorry, did you just say that Gnome was "a desktop environment that has been designed for use solely by developers?"
Is there some alternate definition of the word "developers" that I am unaware of? I always thought Gnome was designed by tools for idiots.
Having used Krusader more-or-less exclusively for five years now, I have to ask what you're doing to crash it. I can't recall ever seeing it happen.
Also, having never used Total Commander myself, I'd be interested to hear what features you're missing that Krusader does not provide.
I hope that doesn't sound snide, because that's not how I meant it, I'm really just curious about your experiences.
Actually (and I know I'm an outlier) you just nailed my reason for continuing to dual-boot even though I know there are other, and in many ways better options. If I don't have the option of jumping over to Civ IV at a moment's notice I get a hell of a lot more work done :)
it is the little programs I call the "gottas".
That stuff fades. It's ephemeral. I used to "gotta have" WordPerfect 6.
No, seriously. Listen. We're give-or-take 25 years into the "PC era." In that eyeblink of time, the applications we've run, the capabilities they've had, and the platforms that they've run on have changed more times than I can name in one paragraph. No one over the age of 25 was "born using Windows."
The software monoculture that we are living in now is an historical anomaly.
Windows doesn't run on ARM.
What is a valid objection is that Linux distributions tend in general to be incredibly poor from a usability perspective compared to commercial offerings.
That's ridiculous. What's Microsoft's presence in the netbook space? Is it Vista? Is it Win7, the much-ballyhooed "Linux netbook killer?" Fuck no. You get Windows XP, sucker, the same stale crap they've been shoving down your throat for nearly a decade. If you're seriously trying to compare that to, for instance, Ubuntu Netbook Remix or KDE's Plasma netbook interface, you're off your meds.
Needless to say, Apple offers nothing. As usual.
Only the college student uses GMail. The rest of them use Outlook or Thunderbird and their ISP's email system, so they didn't see any benefit there.
Wow, that is so contrary to my experience (and I support home users for a living). I can't think of a single client I have, of any age, that uses Outlook (or what have you) for their personal email. Not one. Everyone who has to use something like that at work hates it with a bloody mouth-frothing passion. Everyone uses Gmail or Yahoo or God help us, Hotmail. I don't even bother asking anymore.
Tell me, what code has Stallman or anybody else at the FSF actually written in the last five years that I actually care about?
Oh, you know. Nothing, really. A few little things. You may have heard of some of them.
What's that I hear? Is it further whinging about "what have you done for me lately?" Go fuck yourself. If you use any version of Linux, you use half the stuff on that list every day of the week. Hell, without gcc there'd be nothing. That's what they've done for you lately, you ungrateful shit.
Furthermore, if GNOME's heading in any direction on the desktop, it's towards enabling 3D, networking, web and presence technologies through the stack.
Someone should tell them to try KDE.
it looks to me like he's losing touch both with the economics and the technology of free software
As another poster noted above, Stallman and the GNU project are about neither economics nor technology. They're about politics. They're about freedom. If the Gnome development team doesn't like that, then yes, they should go their own way.
Stallman should perhaps rather worry about the future of GNU itself; I haven't seen much innovation coming out of the GNU project itself recently, and GNU is getting rather long in the tooth.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The GNU tools changed the world and continue to change the world every day. They don't need to "innovate." They just need to exist.
Yeah, because that's exactly what happened with the GNU tools, right? Oh, wait.
That already happened, dude. Like six years ago. Get with the program here.
Are you aware that we're talking about netbooks here? I mean, this is /. and whatnot, but the article aside, did you even read the title?