Hiya Guran,
Guran, I can understand your frustration. I'm one of the developer that
contributes to Mandrake (I'm from cyest.org). The thing that UNIX
developers (including me, sometimes) *often* overlook: we develop a
program that interacts "Human" with "Computer". Sometimes we forget
about the human part. For example: "ls","mv","cp","tr","vi","yes" ->
these are pretty confusing for me in the beginning when I switched to
Linux.
Designing a user interface that really meets the necessity of 100% user
level from every area - beginner to expert, is not easy. If you take a
look, for example, my program, gnome-telnet. It was designed to be very
very easy with a complete and easy documentation. Still, the users ask
me 'funny' questions about what is already clearly documented there. You
wouldn't believe it if you were me.
At first, I thought it was the user's fault. Then, after thinking for a
while, I realized that one of the part is that my design might not have
met the level of familiarity required by certain people. Each human has
different perceptions of what is called "easy to use", "user friendly".
We still need to work a lot on the "Human" with "Computer" interface and
interaction in Linux. Linux is considerably user friendly because it's
_very_ fast (if you know how to speed up), and it's very stable (no
frustrating blue screen, GPL, etc), and the documentation in
/usr/share/doc/HOWTO/HTML/en/index.html is pretty much complete
(although yes, it *is* still hard for new users to find out how to do
this, how to do that). Based on my experience, I need more time to learn
programming under Linux than under Windows.
The only solution is that we develop a better and friendlier
documentation. This will be improved in the future. Many people
(including my friends) have given me a very constructive criticism about
this. I am committed to bringing Linux to a much friendlier state. There
is _always_ a place for improvement :-)
I'm still working on Drakupdatetxt, gnome-telnet, SubNetwork explorer
(to explore someone's network topology etc). I'm very glad that your
post give me a very good insight about how important a documentation is.
I'm still 19, however, I hope when I'm a little older (probably 21 or
22), I will be able to develop a program that meets the majority of
people's demand in terms of user friendliness.
Thanks,
Prana
http://www.cyest.org
Tom wrote:
>
> On Friday 02 February 2001 02:08 am, guran wrote:
> As an old teacher I showed her were the documentation
> > was situated.
>
> OK, now you're qualified (??)
> >
> > She asked me why not all documentation was to be reached more nicely
> > through the icon titled documentation.
>
> It is, and it's also on the menu under 'Documentation'
>
> > I could not find a good answer.
>
> maybe ya need to go back to sckool ??
>
> one thing Mandrake doesn't lack is docs, readily available info
> --
> Tom Brinkman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Galveston Bay
--
Prana <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.cyest.org
My GnuPG Key ID: 0x33343FD3 (2000-07-21)
Key fingerprint = F1FB 1F76 8866 0F40 A801 D9DA 6BED 6641 3334 3FD3
http://blackhole.pca.dfn.de:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x33343FD3
