On Thursday 04 September 2003 20:43, Jesper Fruergaard Andersen wrote: > On Thursday 04 September 2003 00:06, gabriel wrote: > > 1. the current interface is scary for people who want it to "just > > work"(TM). a reasonable gui skinning of the command line stuff would do > > great things for a distro. imagine, just double click "upgrade system" > > on your desktop, have it popup a window with all the command line stuff > > scrolling by and nice pretty watermark... then when it's all done, a > > nice gui "done". my grandmother would actually be ok with using linux > > then. linux needs "finishers". people who write the code that installs > > the mysql db and auto-configures the config files in /etc/ for people > > who don't know how and don't want to know. > > I would really hate that. Then I would have to look for an other disto > again. For some reason distos always seem to become more and more > "userfriendly", that is harder and harder to use if you don't want to use > the shiny gui interface they always seems to come up with.
You are wrong. 'userfriendly' does not imply harder to use (for power users). Just because all those that have tried so far have failed, there's no logical step to say that it's impossible. Compare MS Exchange's method of configuration with Sendmail's - yes, we have postfix now but sendmail fits what I'm talking about better. Exchange's interface is easy to use and will set everything you want correctly - if the program doesn't work the way you want it to it's due to a bug in the server, not the interface. Sendmail will do everything you want it to but you have are much more likely to make a configuration error. Most people will say to this, "but Sendmail is more powerful!" What's that got to do with the price of fish? Exchange's real configuration lies partially in the registry and partially in configuration files (in a non-text format), either in it's application directory or active directory. From a programming perspective, isn't attaching a user interface on to the configuration files just as hard for either? With postfix, parsing and configuring it from a gui would be much easier than either. The point of userfriendlyness is not to limit users in what they can do so that they don't trip over themselves. The point is to make all options available (and easily understandable) and prevent configurations that meaningless in the domain of the application. Jason -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
