[Nottingham] [Talk] Thursday 19/06/2008 - What is there on Linux? What can it do?

[Camilo Mesias]

2008/6/17 Michael Erskine <msemtd at googlemail.com>:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Camilo Mesias <camilo at mesias.co.uk> wrote:
>> I sometimes think it's very bad at doing anything other than imitating
>> the best features of Mac and Windows (don't get me wrong, I still love
>> it).
>
> I don't get you there: I'm afraid you're obliged to qualify that
> statement with some examples of these things it's very bad at!

I'll try...

>> But how good would it be if it was really usable, and was a bit better
>> at self promotion from the point of first logging in...?
>
> No problems with the usability here. Self-promotion maketh not greatness.

Say you install an OS, and want some feature that's not supported out
of the box, whether it's 3D modelling or cellphone integration, GPS, a
fancy screensaver, drawing packages, maths packages, UML modelling,
etc.

With commercial OSs you have to go to a shop and buy some new
software. There's a whole industry based around selling you the
packages. So you pay money for them and in return it's fairly easy to
be able to do new stuff. To a lesser extent you can search online for
things which may or may not cost money and may or may not do what you
want.

With free software, no-one has to make money from selling it, and that
means no-one has bothered to make a decent tool for getting new
software. We're stuck with searching for package names, probably from
the command line, and with the presumption that we know what we are
looking for. How is a newbie supposed to find a package like 'R' from
a description of what they want to do? And how can the differentiate
between that and GnuPlot or GraphViz (say).

 http://www.r-project.org/

I think there's a lot of usability in the free software world, but the
last 5% is the hardest. There's great software out there without
adequate or consistent help. Many potential users are denied the
opportunity.

And that's just one of the ways that the free software world imitates
the best of Mac and Windows but fails to go further, IMHO.

-Cam