Quit ranting about shit you don't stop to think about first.
In other words, it's bad for Microsoft to throw everything and the kitchen sink into a file browser, but it's okay for me to have to wait 4 seconds to load my Home directory because you arbritrarily decided, without citing any single examples, that somehow Konquerer is magically superior to Explorer.
Sorry, it's MAGICALLY SUPERIOR, to use your style of RANDOM YELLING CAPS.
Wow, so Konquerer previews files. Explorer does that too. There's even a sidebar on the left giving me full details, a task-based list of commands, and previews. Windows 2000 even let you listen to WAVs and MP3s.
Windows XP isn't snappy. It spends at least half a second doing some stupid "fade in" instead of opening up a damned widget immediately. I guess this is supposed to make it less intimidating or something. That, and the Fisher Price colors. I don't get it, personally.
Solution--uncheck the boxes to turn them off.
KDE fades in as well and also has Fisher Price colors. The solution in that case is also to turn them off.
If you're a programmer working on something which scratches your itch, there a good chance that you already know how your own program works. Having someone come and say "Nonono, this interface is crap!" without actually providing suggestions for how to make it better is annoying at best.
People *are* making suggestions when they tell you your interface sucks. They're suggesting you redesign it.:)
If someone doesn't know what a textbox labelled "Path" does that has "/print/queue1" in it, then you know exactly what you need to work on clarifying.
Would be nice if someone started up a project like that.:) Similar to the Slicker replacement for Kicker in KDE, even just a website with a design document and prototype shots would be great. I even have sketched prototype designs myself...this is an idea that's been bouncing around for a while now. Maybe this weekend I'll put something up for fun, and link to the site in my sig and get feedback from other people. Even if nothing became of it, the ideas would be out there.
P.S. Just so people know, I love Linux (recently switched from Slackware to Gentoo for the first time, my new favorite distro). But I yearn for the idea of the "dream desktop"--a completely free, open source Linux desktop that innovates and blows people away with how easy to use yet powerful it is. Intuitiveness. I don't believe KDE or Gnome are achieving that. I guess because I'm a musician (though I program for fun), I look at computers as a tool for art and usefulness.
Fine, then don't bitch about "M$" being the dominant monoculture when you're to lazy to bother making your software usable for other people. If you only want to scratch YOUR itch, keep your software on your private network and don't let major distros pick it up. Understood, Mr. I'm-the-poor-unpaid-volunteer-developer?
Guess what? Users don't care either. They'll drop your shit like a bad habit and go back to what works.
With step 1, you've lost about 95% of the computing world.
I have co-workers tell me to "slow down" even when all I'm doing is telling them to go to a website to install a driver.
To you and me, "aptitude install foomatic-db hpoj hpijs hotplug" is a line of command consisting of shorthand names representing stuff. To everyone else, it's gibberish and it frightens them.
"man" sucks. I hate man and man pages. They're extremely difficult to read and follow, and they follow this horrible format of "app [opt1,,opt2] [opt3:dev1] opt4 source dest" followed by a long list of technical descriptions. Worst of all, I hate how a lot of people's answers to things are to tell you "man whatever-app-you're-having-trouble-with."
...spending four days to configure your video card while the rest of the computing world moves on into the new century and actually plugs in a card and has it works. We'll "shrug it off" as you edit text files to enable your mouse buttons and then make comments about Microsoft's "lack of support."
The kinds of things he was attempting to do in Linux work flawlessly in Windows. I've never had a "configuration dialog for the printer device hang or crash for no obvious reason."
I can't tell you how many times I've had things hang or crash for no obvious reason in Linux.
Predictable Failure. We hope for a minimal effort, at best. But in the OS world we think sheer brilliance will save us all no matter how obscure. So when it doesn't we experience a level of frustration and disappointment we're not accustomed to.
Or, the simpler conclusion--the interface sucked and needed to be made user-friendly.
Linux dev's should start thinking of their apps in terms of allowing users to achieve whatever they want to achieve, be it writing the next great novel and printing it out to hooking up the camera to see the new pictures of their newborn baby. The whole "empowerment" buzzword.
More of us would listen to you if you stopped insulting people left and right. We might even take heart in your suggestions and join in the fun of making a better UI.
Maybe if you pulled your head out of your ass and stopped acting so sensitive and "insulted" because someone dared be disappointed with the CRAP interface someone put out, more people would join the cause and help design better interfaces for your code.
I'm sick of people being shitheads with the whole "show code or shut up" deal, and then acting so hurt when someone gives it right back!
The last decade was a focus on Linux developers. This decade's focus needs to be users. To the doubters, yes, you CAN have a beautiful, accessible system that also happens to be insanely powerful and flexible. They're not contradictions. Witness OS X, the best damn UNIX/GUI consolidation ever seen...
Artsy-folks and other designers are turned off by the crappy anti-social developers who bash you if you point out flaws in their software. Witness the "show me the code or shut up" comment posted elsewhere here.
To let someone come in and redesign your crap interface would require your ego to be lowered a bit--and generally, to anti-social nerds who grew up socially inept and so ended up turning to computers in the first place, that's a huge blow. So, the anti-socialness.
Just think--if that were a Windows experience, everyone would nod in agreement and go back to their Fedora boxes. It would become one of those anecdotal "if you think Windows is easy to use, think again" stories.
But look at all the people trying to justify it in these threads because it's a Linux problem (a big one). A huge double-standard.
He was obsessed with the Macintosh being a work of art. He was so picky about the look of the damn calculator app, the designer got tired of revising it and made a calculator interface designer for him. The final design Steve made stayed with MacOS up into the 90s. He even had the Mac designers sign their names on the inside of the mold for the casing. That's a mentality I like--the connection between emotion and computing. The creation of a computer that blendds into someone's life as a useful tool and portal to computing.
What happened to that melding of art and computing? OS X still has it, but without support for x86, it's not exploding like it should. That leaves Linux--and Linux is completely missing the ball here because it's been written by developers for developers, and still is. It's massively technical and powerful for dev-heads, but the other front--the one that Windows lacks--is the intuitive, artistic side.
But, I fully expect everyone to stick with crappy XFree86 for another 10 years and espouse how great their poorly designed "KDE" and "GNOME" interfaces are. Five years after Longhorn comes out, KDE will finally get around to attempting hardware acceleration and also speeding up the horribly shit-slow app-loading.
Nobody's artistic about computing anymore, except Apple. We should be too. Obviously, that means rethinking the way people are writing their apps/environments, which ain't gonna happen.
We still have crap like Kroupware, Kallery, Xouvert, and a GUI system that still requires you to configure mouse buttons and specs through an awful text file (as someone else succinctly put it, it's like answering essay questions).
Microsoft has already moved on and is creating virtual machine run-times and a DirectX hardware-accelerated desktop. Linux is still trying to get a desktop off the ground with "cute" names like KDE and GNOME, each with their own sound servers, their own configuration formats, neither with a proper method of installation/uninstallation (because to Linux users, registries magically = bad because Windows happens to have something called the "registry"), neither with a proper interface (though Gnome is the closest), and neither having the snappy responsiveness OS X and Windows XP have.
I finished compiling KDE 3.2 today on Gentoo, using Pentium 4 optimizations. It still took 4 seconds when I first loaded up my Home directory. Loading My Computer in Windows takes less than a third of a second.
These are all the endless things that need to be fixed, but won't be. Instead, things will be forked, people will obsess over something "M$" did, and meanwhile KDE and GNOME will continue living in their own little worlds making pretty desktops that make for good screenshots on the back of the distro packaging, until you actually grab the mouse and try to use them.
Linux users don't like "Joe Sixpack" for a reason--he's usually the jock who picked on them in high school.
A generalization, but it applies to most of the community--we're a bunch of generally shy and anti-social tech nerds who spend all day configuring an OS to use our mouse buttons correctly or play sound and think that means it's "powerful" and "flexible."
We don't want it easy, because the true reason people love Linux so much is the satisfaction they feel from getting it working. That's why they feel so euphoric about it. It's the subconscious, unspoken truth. Make it easy to do things in Linux, and suddenly you make it a tool to get work done instead of a tool to tinker, and you take away its hipness.
Which is why the Linux community is what holds Linux back.
Slashdot Mirror
as Linux desktop adoption has surpassed Apple's
Ahahaha...you're referring to that debunked Slashdot article, aren't you?
Even if Linux DID surpass OS X, it's doing extremely poorly considering OS X kicks Linux's ass in the apps department.
http://gdesklets.gnomedesktop.org/
But what is a problem is that this mindless bashing discourages any improvement.
I love it. Any criticism is always "mindless bashing."
Quit ranting about shit you don't stop to think about first.
In other words, it's bad for Microsoft to throw everything and the kitchen sink into a file browser, but it's okay for me to have to wait 4 seconds to load my Home directory because you arbritrarily decided, without citing any single examples, that somehow Konquerer is magically superior to Explorer.
Sorry, it's MAGICALLY SUPERIOR, to use your style of RANDOM YELLING CAPS.
Wow, so Konquerer previews files. Explorer does that too. There's even a sidebar on the left giving me full details, a task-based list of commands, and previews. Windows 2000 even let you listen to WAVs and MP3s.
Your argument falls "FLAT ON ITS FACE."
The first thing that pops up when you install Windows Media Player 9 is the privacy dialog with a bunch of checkboxes to turn off.
XP, too, gives you the option to turn them off.
Windows XP isn't snappy. It spends at least half a second doing some stupid "fade in" instead of opening up a damned widget immediately. I guess this is supposed to make it less intimidating or something. That, and the Fisher Price colors. I don't get it, personally.
Solution--uncheck the boxes to turn them off.
KDE fades in as well and also has Fisher Price colors. The solution in that case is also to turn them off.
If you're a programmer working on something which scratches your itch, there a good chance that you already know how your own program works. Having someone come and say "Nonono, this interface is crap!" without actually providing suggestions for how to make it better is annoying at best.
:)
People *are* making suggestions when they tell you your interface sucks. They're suggesting you redesign it.
If someone doesn't know what a textbox labelled "Path" does that has "/print/queue1" in it, then you know exactly what you need to work on clarifying.
Would be nice if someone started up a project like that. :) Similar to the Slicker replacement for Kicker in KDE, even just a website with a design document and prototype shots would be great. I even have sketched prototype designs myself...this is an idea that's been bouncing around for a while now. Maybe this weekend I'll put something up for fun, and link to the site in my sig and get feedback from other people. Even if nothing became of it, the ideas would be out there.
P.S. Just so people know, I love Linux (recently switched from Slackware to Gentoo for the first time, my new favorite distro). But I yearn for the idea of the "dream desktop"--a completely free, open source Linux desktop that innovates and blows people away with how easy to use yet powerful it is. Intuitiveness. I don't believe KDE or Gnome are achieving that. I guess because I'm a musician (though I program for fun), I look at computers as a tool for art and usefulness.
Geez, just try getting a pure udev system up and running sometime. Sheer hell.
Then obviously the autodetect would find nothing and allow you to then manually enter the information. Next.
Fine, then don't bitch about "M$" being the dominant monoculture when you're to lazy to bother making your software usable for other people. If you only want to scratch YOUR itch, keep your software on your private network and don't let major distros pick it up. Understood, Mr. I'm-the-poor-unpaid-volunteer-developer?
Guess what? Users don't care either. They'll drop your shit like a bad habit and go back to what works.
Where's your patch? Or are you one of those lazy "show code or shut up" developers? Good riddance whenyour apps remain in the 0.05% percentile of use.
With step 1, you've lost about 95% of the computing world.
I have co-workers tell me to "slow down" even when all I'm doing is telling them to go to a website to install a driver.
To you and me, "aptitude install foomatic-db hpoj hpijs hotplug" is a line of command consisting of shorthand names representing stuff. To everyone else, it's gibberish and it frightens them.
"man" sucks. I hate man and man pages. They're extremely difficult to read and follow, and they follow this horrible format of "app [opt1,,opt2] [opt3:dev1] opt4 source dest" followed by a long list of technical descriptions. Worst of all, I hate how a lot of people's answers to things are to tell you "man whatever-app-you're-having-trouble-with."
...spending four days to configure your video card while the rest of the computing world moves on into the new century and actually plugs in a card and has it works. We'll "shrug it off" as you edit text files to enable your mouse buttons and then make comments about Microsoft's "lack of support."
What a crock of shit.
The kinds of things he was attempting to do in Linux work flawlessly in Windows. I've never had a "configuration dialog for the printer device hang or crash for no obvious reason."
I can't tell you how many times I've had things hang or crash for no obvious reason in Linux.
Predictable Failure. We hope for a minimal effort, at best. But in the OS world we think sheer brilliance will save us all no matter how obscure. So when it doesn't we experience a level of frustration and disappointment we're not accustomed to.
Or, the simpler conclusion--the interface sucked and needed to be made user-friendly.
Linux dev's should start thinking of their apps in terms of allowing users to achieve whatever they want to achieve, be it writing the next great novel and printing it out to hooking up the camera to see the new pictures of their newborn baby. The whole "empowerment" buzzword.
More of us would listen to you if you stopped insulting people left and right. We might even take heart in your suggestions and join in the fun of making a better UI.
Maybe if you pulled your head out of your ass and stopped acting so sensitive and "insulted" because someone dared be disappointed with the CRAP interface someone put out, more people would join the cause and help design better interfaces for your code.
I'm sick of people being shitheads with the whole "show code or shut up" deal, and then acting so hurt when someone gives it right back!
The last decade was a focus on Linux developers. This decade's focus needs to be users. To the doubters, yes, you CAN have a beautiful, accessible system that also happens to be insanely powerful and flexible. They're not contradictions. Witness OS X, the best damn UNIX/GUI consolidation ever seen...
Artsy-folks and other designers are turned off by the crappy anti-social developers who bash you if you point out flaws in their software. Witness the "show me the code or shut up" comment posted elsewhere here.
To let someone come in and redesign your crap interface would require your ego to be lowered a bit--and generally, to anti-social nerds who grew up socially inept and so ended up turning to computers in the first place, that's a huge blow. So, the anti-socialness.
Just think--if that were a Windows experience, everyone would nod in agreement and go back to their Fedora boxes. It would become one of those anecdotal "if you think Windows is easy to use, think again" stories.
But look at all the people trying to justify it in these threads because it's a Linux problem (a big one). A huge double-standard.
Coders are the ones holding back Linux. Sorry. Think about it.
He was obsessed with the Macintosh being a work of art. He was so picky about the look of the damn calculator app, the designer got tired of revising it and made a calculator interface designer for him. The final design Steve made stayed with MacOS up into the 90s. He even had the Mac designers sign their names on the inside of the mold for the casing. That's a mentality I like--the connection between emotion and computing. The creation of a computer that blendds into someone's life as a useful tool and portal to computing.
What happened to that melding of art and computing? OS X still has it, but without support for x86, it's not exploding like it should. That leaves Linux--and Linux is completely missing the ball here because it's been written by developers for developers, and still is. It's massively technical and powerful for dev-heads, but the other front--the one that Windows lacks--is the intuitive, artistic side.
But, I fully expect everyone to stick with crappy XFree86 for another 10 years and espouse how great their poorly designed "KDE" and "GNOME" interfaces are. Five years after Longhorn comes out, KDE will finally get around to attempting hardware acceleration and also speeding up the horribly shit-slow app-loading.
Nobody's artistic about computing anymore, except Apple. We should be too. Obviously, that means rethinking the way people are writing their apps/environments, which ain't gonna happen.
We still have crap like Kroupware, Kallery, Xouvert, and a GUI system that still requires you to configure mouse buttons and specs through an awful text file (as someone else succinctly put it, it's like answering essay questions).
Microsoft has already moved on and is creating virtual machine run-times and a DirectX hardware-accelerated desktop. Linux is still trying to get a desktop off the ground with "cute" names like KDE and GNOME, each with their own sound servers, their own configuration formats, neither with a proper method of installation/uninstallation (because to Linux users, registries magically = bad because Windows happens to have something called the "registry"), neither with a proper interface (though Gnome is the closest), and neither having the snappy responsiveness OS X and Windows XP have.
I finished compiling KDE 3.2 today on Gentoo, using Pentium 4 optimizations. It still took 4 seconds when I first loaded up my Home directory. Loading My Computer in Windows takes less than a third of a second.
These are all the endless things that need to be fixed, but won't be. Instead, things will be forked, people will obsess over something "M$" did, and meanwhile KDE and GNOME will continue living in their own little worlds making pretty desktops that make for good screenshots on the back of the distro packaging, until you actually grab the mouse and try to use them.
Linux users don't like "Joe Sixpack" for a reason--he's usually the jock who picked on them in high school.
A generalization, but it applies to most of the community--we're a bunch of generally shy and anti-social tech nerds who spend all day configuring an OS to use our mouse buttons correctly or play sound and think that means it's "powerful" and "flexible."
We don't want it easy, because the true reason people love Linux so much is the satisfaction they feel from getting it working. That's why they feel so euphoric about it. It's the subconscious, unspoken truth. Make it easy to do things in Linux, and suddenly you make it a tool to get work done instead of a tool to tinker, and you take away its hipness.
Which is why the Linux community is what holds Linux back.
What you're doing is called "anonymous usage statistics."
When MS does it, it's "spyware." When you do it, it's modded up "Insightful."