[dundee] Linux on the desktop

[Mark Harrigan]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 09:48:39PM +0000, Andrew Clayton wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-01-10 at 15:19, alex mole wrote:
> > I must confess that I, by and large, agree with his attack on too much 
> > choice.
> > 
> 
> I don't understand this fear of choice thing...
> 
Choice is probably the wrong term to use, how about ignorance? People
are scared to relearn things, at the moment in Windows they are
king/queen of their realm, now introduce them to Linux... oh dear,
they are dumb again. Do you like to feel dumb? Didn't think so. It's
made even worse because there's a often someone like us hanging over
their shoulder doing crazy things and grabbing the mouse.

With linux it's also quite hard to guarantee things. You may develop
something for kde but some of the intended users don't have kde, are
they prepared to download the mass of software required to get the app
working? Do you want this pain for your potential user base?! I
realise this may sound a bit corporate but I would prefer to think of
it as user centric in the sense of simpilicity and compatibility.

People don't care about choice, they just want the computer to do what
it says it will, they don't want a sea change everytime they install
an application. For months after Windows XP was launched you would
hear people complaining about not being able to find icons etc. People
who start to use Linux often have problems with the changes they
see. Different GUI, different applications, different file system,
different names for things (eg emacs... I'm using emacs but it annoys
me how they have an entirely different name for everything, work wrap
= fill etc. as a basic example)

Without some sort of consistency Linux is going to have problems for a
while to come... that's not to say we can't "educate" the user base
that variety is good and not to be scared off but it'd take some time.
<*snip*>
> 
> 
> Andrew

PS typing a ton of stuff into a command prompt is not the way to
educate unless you like people disappearing in clouds of dust.

-- 
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. 
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, 
by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan