(not like this will ever make it to list. But wth)
Mr. Szulik, I keep seeing Red Hat put out one unusable, confusing and ambiguous interface design after another. Anaconda is a textbook case of what you shouldn't do when designing a user interface for non-geeks.
A Red Hat employee a while back who went to my campus' LUG told me that the reason why Red Hat software had such bad usability was they didn't have the money to fund HCI folks running a usability dept. at Red Hat.
Yet when we look at the financial history of Red Hat, we find that the company spent over $700,000,000 buying out other companies like Cygnus (purchased for $650M).
Mr. Szulik, how would you answer the charge that your company destroyed its chances to gain real home desktop marketshare by not investing a small sum of money that would make your software more accessible to the people you were trying to target, as well as substantially lower the costs you company would have incurred supporting that market?
Don't get me wrong. I do believe that an Open Source alternative desktop is the future. I just believe that unix geeks and anyone who hates GUI's and uses a command-line doesn't have a place on that future linux desktop, and that they should be locked inside their server closets where they can be among their own kind.
People were saying linux was ready for the desktop back when you had to load Slackware from 8 billion floppies and editing configuration files was the only way to set up the system. Those are the same people who are saying it now, and this makes me severely question their judgement
For some reason I am reminded of that one Dilbert episode where the search for some company to merge with was compared to a desperate female's last ditch effort to get picked up a bar.
...because all they understand are 1 and 0, and pretty much everyone understands the concept of 1 and 0.
Anything other than 1 and 0 is a pure human construct. So when we're saying that "computers are hard to understand", we're really not saying that computers themselves are hard to understand. What we're really saying is that the humans who design the computer software are hard to understand and the messed up way they think are hard to understand.
A geek is nothing more than someone who has great trouble speaking both the protocols for humans and those for computers.
...to be on your cellphone, on your computer, in your blender, in your food processor, and any other battery-powered self-pleasure device of your choice.
Red Hat spent $700,000,000 on a compiler company and some questionable dot coms, and then their programmers tell me the reason why their software has such crappy usability is because they can't afford to hire HCI people.
A real desktop software company would have devoted at least a fraction of this fantastic sum towards making their interfaces less confusing.
If you're really worried about pants getting stolen, wear a kilt instead and keep your second mobile most important mobile device next to your first one.
People like me have heard it a million times. And we tolerated it for some extent when Debian only seeked to be a stable server distro and a geek favorite. The second Debian started going after Aunt Tillie or Miss Jenny the Secretary or Juan the Schoolboy, we decided to shut our ears and start boxing yours.
One of debian's leaders, Bruce Perens, claims linux is perfectly ready for the desktop while for the last 7-8 years his distribution hasn't lifted a finger to make the experience more humane for your regular end user. Sounds like arrogance and hubris to me.
Sorry dude, but Debian earned the obligation the instant it started targeting non-geek populations. If they will not fulfill this obligation of usability, then that is their decision to make. But in that case Debian needs to go back to the to server closets and geek workstations where it came from and spain needs to switch back to Windows.
Debian can either be a volunteer OS where geeks have perogatives, or it can be an OS that deserves the end-user desktop and has earned the right to replace Windows. Can't be both.
I agree totally that bitching never solved anything. Creating software that has an unprecedented level of usability, creating public licenses that lock out projects apathetic towards user experience issues (like Debian), and proceeding to beat those projects to a bloody pulp would probably solve far more problems than bitching.
Bruce, you people (debian) have ignored usability issues for years. Debian has literally been the poster boy for Free Software arrogance and indifference towards the end-user's need for usable, consistant software that let's them get stuff done with a minimum of fuss. 7 years later, Debian still doesn't have a graphical installer. Does software created with those kinds of values really need to be forced on schoolchildren in Extrademura?
If Debian followers lobby politicians to replace Windows with their software, then they have earned an obligation to make that software work for the people who will be forced to use it. IMO if Debian proper passes the buck on usability, it doesn't deserve a place on the desktop, derivitive or otherwise.
I believe in the concept of Open Source, but I will not stand idly by while those in the FOSS community deprive end users of the Freedom of Usability. In my opinion, a public license that protects this freedom is long overdue and any restriction it enacts against those who would rob end-users of that freedom to be morally justified.
Because the linux community, in all it's approaches to the desktop, has been focused on the systems administrator experience, not the end user experience, as the example above excellently illustrates.
The real value of a comptuer is in how easy and efficiently the end user (not the support person) can get work done minus the cost of work that (mostly the UI) prevents the user from doing. When you get down to it, Windows support and licenses cost nothing compared to the monetary value of the work done with it.
And no, I'm not cheering on Microsoft, I'm lamenting that the Linux community can't advance and think outside of the server box.
You also run into the problem that Sharp's hardware is half-assed in it's design. Powerful, I'll give it that, but incredibly half-assed. My 5500, which I purchased back in my "I'll give linux a second chance even after I was dumb enough to buy an agenda" phase, has the power button on the outside of the PDA, unprotected by anything. More than once I've pulled my zaurus out of my pocket only to find it's already turned on. You would have thought that at least one engineer at Sharp would have momentarily considered the idea that putting a power button unprotected on an area where it could easily get hit in your pocket was a bad idea. Would it have really been that much work for sharp to have recessed the power button and extended the flip-shield so any accidental pocket presses would be eliminated?
It's ironic that the Zaurus has a hundred times the CPU and memory of the original Palm, yet for all that technological advancement, the Palm is still a far better designed machine.
When a post like the parent gets modded down, it really tells you something about the whole Linux on The Desktop movement.
If Open Source/Free Software is unwilling to tolerate people making legitimate complaints about things that sap their productivity and destroy their user experience, then perhaps Linux really isn't as ready for the desktop as we thought it was.
You said it, brother. Then again, you usually do have pretty good posts about PDA-related stuff.
The linux zealots constantly inflate the miserable usability that most linux things currently have, and it just gets ridiculous when you see something like PDA's that require ten times the user interaction saavy needed for a desktop.
Trolltech in no way did any of their homework regarding PDA UI design, and it shows in the Qtopia widget borders that gobble up vast amounts of valuble screen real-estate, and in the fact that I have to do twice as many taps to accomplish the same task I was doing on a Palm.
If we could just hunt down the folks who moderated down the parent post and permanently ban them from contributing to Open Source, Linux On The Desktop would grow by leaps and bounds.
One of the biggest reasons why floppies are still so widely used is that you can easily put several (inside a carrying case, of course) in your pocket and not feel too encumbered when you walk around or sit down.
I can only surmise that the standardization on CD/DVD rewritables was a secret plot by the cargo pants industry to increase sales.
Considering how hostile the linux community tends to be towards interface designers, it's really not surprising that most of the Linux desktop applications that are turned out are unusable crap.
UI design has always been extremely devalued in the Linux community. It is seen as nowhere near as important as something technical like kernel hacking, and this can be clearly seen in the amount of resources spent both in manpower in the developer communities (e.g. Debian) and in money by Linux distribution companies, like Red Hat. Red Hat spent $650,000,000 buying out a technical company like Cygnus, and then their programmers tell me their software is so unusable because they don't have the money for a usability department. And to think this company actually thinks it deserves a piece of the desktop pie. Until Red Hat spends $50,000,000 to buy out the Nielsen Norman Group, their software shouldn't be used on anything that runs outside of a server closet.
Even if an interface designer manages to get his foot into the door of an Linux project, the crap he or she is put through by Linux coders makes them so ineffective at changing the course of the interface development that it's pointless to join the project in the first place.
To begin with, in order to make a really good, consistent, integrated user interface, you have to design the UI before any major coding is done. Technical decisions influence the UI, and you can never totally abstract it away. Too often, a technical decision is made before the UI is designed, and then when the UI is 'grafted' on in the form of a front-end on top of the technical stuff, it's just too out of sync and there's no really integrated feel like some of the Apple apps have.
Linux desktop software would be so much better if the folks designing it would just figure out the user interaction first and then write the code. But this conflicts with the traditionalist unix ideology on software development, so it's not done. In fact, pretty much any tenet of UI design that clashes in any way the The Unix Philosophy gets thrown out, no matter how much it might improve the UI. And there's damn nothing the interface designer can do about it because he or she doesn't have the ability to code and change it back.
And then there's the issue of the coders' geeky preferences outweighing the user interface designer's knowledge and experience. If there's a button that's just not working out in some location and the coder feels its perfectly okay there, guess what happens? The button stays there. Or maybe it's just that the coder doesn't want to put in the 2 seconds of work to change it, and tells the interface designer that if he wants to change it, he can damn well write the code for it himself. And again, if the user interface designer can't code, then the unusable design is just gonna stay that way. If anyone reads the GPL, they will see that they are permitted to modify the software and make it better. If they read the fine print, they will find this freedom only pertains to programmers.
Especially in light of all this stupidity, I think it's perfectly fair to expect Linux coders to consistantly produce interfaces on par with professional user interface designs, as they keep trying to convince CIO's and IT managers to force desktop Linux as a replacement for Windows in corporations and schools. If Linux coders want to declare themselves "only hobbyists" and refuse to take blame for their bad designs, then they need to go back to the server closet they came from. The desktop needs developers serious about providing excellent usability to end users. It doesn't need volunteers.
Just so no one accuses me of having an anti-programmer bent, I should also add that part of the reason why Apple succeeds where Linux fails is because the mac users have a culture of criticizing unusable software. They will not take an ounce of crap from developers and will vocally express their opinions about the software they use. Contrast this
If they put research on cracker psychology to good use, we'd probably wind up with dedicated corporate servers with a bottomless vault of porn, nethack maps, and Star Trek divx's that will keep a 15 year-old so distracted he'll never think of trying to break into the rest of the network.
When the less technically-inclined students unfamiliar with geek lingo start getting e-mails informing them they have trojans, I can only imagine what kind of responses the IT department will get.
Slashdot Mirror
(not like this will ever make it to list. But wth)
Mr. Szulik, I keep seeing Red Hat put out one unusable, confusing and ambiguous interface design after another. Anaconda is a textbook case of what you shouldn't do when designing a user interface for non-geeks.
A Red Hat employee a while back who went to my campus' LUG told me that the reason why Red Hat software had such bad usability was they didn't have the money to fund HCI folks running a usability dept. at Red Hat.
Yet when we look at the financial history of Red Hat, we find that the company spent over $700,000,000 buying out other companies like Cygnus (purchased for $650M).
Mr. Szulik, how would you answer the charge that your company destroyed its chances to gain real home desktop marketshare by not investing a small sum of money that would make your software more accessible to the people you were trying to target, as well as substantially lower the costs you company would have incurred supporting that market?
--
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Don't get me wrong. I do believe that an Open Source alternative desktop is the future. I just believe that unix geeks and anyone who hates GUI's and uses a command-line doesn't have a place on that future linux desktop, and that they should be locked inside their server closets where they can be among their own kind.
Well put.
People were saying linux was ready for the desktop back when you had to load Slackware from 8 billion floppies and editing configuration files was the only way to set up the system. Those are the same people who are saying it now, and this makes me severely question their judgement
For some reason I am reminded of that one Dilbert episode where the search for some company to merge with was compared to a desperate female's last ditch effort to get picked up a bar.
...because all they understand are 1 and 0, and pretty much everyone understands the concept of 1 and 0.
Anything other than 1 and 0 is a pure human construct. So when we're saying that "computers are hard to understand", we're really not saying that computers themselves are hard to understand. What we're really saying is that the humans who design the computer software are hard to understand and the messed up way they think are hard to understand.
A geek is nothing more than someone who has great trouble speaking both the protocols for humans and those for computers.
...to be on your cellphone, on your computer, in your blender, in your food processor, and any other battery-powered self-pleasure device of your choice.
Go BlueTooth!
Red Hat spent $700,000,000 on a compiler company and some questionable dot coms, and then their programmers tell me the reason why their software has such crappy usability is because they can't afford to hire HCI people.
A real desktop software company would have devoted at least a fraction of this fantastic sum towards making their interfaces less confusing.
If you're really worried about pants getting stolen, wear a kilt instead and keep your second mobile most important mobile device next to your first one.
People like me have heard it a million times. And we tolerated it for some extent when Debian only seeked to be a stable server distro and a geek favorite. The second Debian started going after Aunt Tillie or Miss Jenny the Secretary or Juan the Schoolboy, we decided to shut our ears and start boxing yours.
One of debian's leaders, Bruce Perens, claims linux is perfectly ready for the desktop while for the last 7-8 years his distribution hasn't lifted a finger to make the experience more humane for your regular end user. Sounds like arrogance and hubris to me.
Sorry dude, but Debian earned the obligation the instant it started targeting non-geek populations. If they will not fulfill this obligation of usability, then that is their decision to make. But in that case Debian needs to go back to the to server closets and geek workstations where it came from and spain needs to switch back to Windows.
Debian can either be a volunteer OS where geeks have perogatives, or it can be an OS that deserves the end-user desktop and has earned the right to replace Windows. Can't be both.
I agree totally that bitching never solved anything. Creating software that has an unprecedented level of usability, creating public licenses that lock out projects apathetic towards user experience issues (like Debian), and proceeding to beat those projects to a bloody pulp would probably solve far more problems than bitching.
Cheers.
Bruce, you people (debian) have ignored usability issues for years. Debian has literally been the poster boy for Free Software arrogance and indifference towards the end-user's need for usable, consistant software that let's them get stuff done with a minimum of fuss. 7 years later, Debian still doesn't have a graphical installer. Does software created with those kinds of values really need to be forced on schoolchildren in Extrademura?
If Debian followers lobby politicians to replace Windows with their software, then they have earned an obligation to make that software work for the people who will be forced to use it. IMO if Debian proper passes the buck on usability, it doesn't deserve a place on the desktop, derivitive or otherwise.
I believe in the concept of Open Source, but I will not stand idly by while those in the FOSS community deprive end users of the Freedom of Usability. In my opinion, a public license that protects this freedom is long overdue and any restriction it enacts against those who would rob end-users of that freedom to be morally justified.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico
Because the linux community, in all it's approaches to the desktop, has been focused on the systems administrator experience, not the end user experience, as the example above excellently illustrates.
The real value of a comptuer is in how easy and efficiently the end user (not the support person) can get work done minus the cost of work that (mostly the UI) prevents the user from doing. When you get down to it, Windows support and licenses cost nothing compared to the monetary value of the work done with it.
And no, I'm not cheering on Microsoft, I'm lamenting that the Linux community can't advance and think outside of the server box.
You also run into the problem that Sharp's hardware is half-assed in it's design. Powerful, I'll give it that, but incredibly half-assed. My 5500, which I purchased back in my "I'll give linux a second chance even after I was dumb enough to buy an agenda" phase, has the power button on the outside of the PDA, unprotected by anything. More than once I've pulled my zaurus out of my pocket only to find it's already turned on. You would have thought that at least one engineer at Sharp would have momentarily considered the idea that putting a power button unprotected on an area where it could easily get hit in your pocket was a bad idea. Would it have really been that much work for sharp to have recessed the power button and extended the flip-shield so any accidental pocket presses would be eliminated?
It's ironic that the Zaurus has a hundred times the CPU and memory of the original Palm, yet for all that technological advancement, the Palm is still a far better designed machine.
When a post like the parent gets modded down, it really tells you something about the whole Linux on The Desktop movement.
If Open Source/Free Software is unwilling to tolerate people making legitimate complaints about things that sap their productivity and destroy their user experience, then perhaps Linux really isn't as ready for the desktop as we thought it was.
You said it, brother. Then again, you usually do have pretty good posts about PDA-related stuff.
The linux zealots constantly inflate the miserable usability that most linux things currently have, and it just gets ridiculous when you see something like PDA's that require ten times the user interaction saavy needed for a desktop.
Trolltech in no way did any of their homework regarding PDA UI design, and it shows in the Qtopia widget borders that gobble up vast amounts of valuble screen real-estate, and in the fact that I have to do twice as many taps to accomplish the same task I was doing on a Palm.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico
With enough augmentations, you too can be a space cadet.
--insert brittany spears/pam anderson joke here--
You can use the software to make a thermometer GUI, but it will probably come out looking like ass.
If we could just hunt down the folks who moderated down the parent post and permanently ban them from contributing to Open Source, Linux On The Desktop would grow by leaps and bounds.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico
You can comfortably put one in your pocket.
One of the biggest reasons why floppies are still so widely used is that you can easily put several (inside a carrying case, of course) in your pocket and not feel too encumbered when you walk around or sit down.
I can only surmise that the standardization on CD/DVD rewritables was a secret plot by the cargo pants industry to increase sales.
When will I finally have a good user interface to play music under linux?
When the linux developers start caring about interface design as much as they care about kernels.
why would a simple network file retrieving application (let's face it, that's all this is with a little security thrown in) need that much memory?
A really long Phish jam.
Considering how hostile the linux community tends to be towards interface designers, it's really not surprising that most of the Linux desktop applications that are turned out are unusable crap.
UI design has always been extremely devalued in the Linux community. It is seen as nowhere near as important as something technical like kernel hacking, and this can be clearly seen in the amount of resources spent both in manpower in the developer communities (e.g. Debian) and in money by Linux distribution companies, like Red Hat. Red Hat spent $650,000,000 buying out a technical company like Cygnus, and then their programmers tell me their software is so unusable because they don't have the money for a usability department. And to think this company actually thinks it deserves a piece of the desktop pie. Until Red Hat spends $50,000,000 to buy out the Nielsen Norman Group, their software shouldn't be used on anything that runs outside of a server closet.
Even if an interface designer manages to get his foot into the door of an Linux project, the crap he or she is put through by Linux coders makes them so ineffective at changing the course of the interface development that it's pointless to join the project in the first place.
To begin with, in order to make a really good, consistent, integrated user interface, you have to design the UI before any major coding is done. Technical decisions influence the UI, and you can never totally abstract it away. Too often, a technical decision is made before the UI is designed, and then when the UI is 'grafted' on in the form of a front-end on top of the technical stuff, it's just too out of sync and there's no really integrated feel like some of the Apple apps have.
Linux desktop software would be so much better if the folks designing it would just figure out the user interaction first and then write the code. But this conflicts with the traditionalist unix
ideology on software development, so it's not done. In fact, pretty much any tenet of UI design that clashes in any way the The Unix Philosophy gets thrown out, no matter how much it might improve the UI. And there's damn nothing the interface designer can do about it because he or she doesn't have the ability to code and change it back.
And then there's the issue of the coders' geeky preferences outweighing the user interface designer's knowledge and experience. If there's a button that's just not working out in some location and the coder feels its perfectly okay there, guess what happens? The button stays there. Or maybe it's just that the coder doesn't want to put in the 2 seconds of work to change it, and tells the interface designer that if he wants to change it, he can damn well write the code for it himself. And again, if the user interface designer can't code, then the unusable design is just gonna stay that way. If anyone reads the GPL, they will see that they are permitted to modify the software and make it better. If they read the fine print, they will find this freedom only pertains to programmers.
Especially in light of all this stupidity, I think it's perfectly fair to expect Linux coders to consistantly produce interfaces on par with professional user interface designs, as they keep trying to convince CIO's and IT managers to force desktop Linux as a replacement for Windows in corporations and schools. If Linux coders want to declare themselves "only hobbyists" and refuse to take blame for their bad designs, then they need to go back to the server closet they came from. The desktop needs developers serious about providing excellent usability to end users. It doesn't need volunteers.
Just so no one accuses me of having an anti-programmer bent, I should also add that part of the reason why Apple succeeds where Linux fails is because the mac users have a culture of criticizing unusable software. They will not take an ounce of crap from developers and will vocally express their opinions about the software they use. Contrast this
But on systems running Steve Jobs' Panther upgrade, the monkeys were able to type it in 2.3 seconds and use the extra time to write Hamlet.
If they put research on cracker psychology to good use, we'd probably wind up with dedicated corporate servers with a bottomless vault of porn, nethack maps, and Star Trek divx's that will keep a 15 year-old so distracted he'll never think of trying to break into the rest of the network.
When the less technically-inclined students unfamiliar with geek lingo start getting e-mails informing them they have trojans, I can only imagine what kind of responses the IT department will get.
If it were known that geeks had such hides, all the muggers of Middle-earth would be riding to comdex.