lug_: Long article on Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X usability

[Kiggundu Mukasa]

Just as we were jumping in the fray, a nice and long article came out.

http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability

Eric S. Raymond — the renowned Linux/Open Source evangelist/essayist — couldn’t figure out how to connect to a shared printer. So he wrote an essay describing the problem (the UI for printer configuration on his Linux system is horrible) and proposing a solution (open source developers should do a better job with UI design). Raymond wrote:

The configuration problem is simple. I have a desktop machine named ‘snark’. It is connected, via the house Ethernet, to my wife Cathy’s machine, which is named ‘minx’. Minx has a LaserJet 6MP attached to it via parallel port. Both machines are running Fedora Core 1, and Cathy can print locally from minx. I can ssh minx from snark, so the network is known good.

This should be easy, right? *hollow laughter* Famous last words…

(Side note: parallel port? What year is it in the Raymond household?)

Raymond’s description and criticism of the usability problems he encountered trying to achieve this are accurate and apt. The gist of it is that what seemed like the obvious way to go about the task was in fact completely wrong, and worse, there was no indication from the system that he wasn’t on the right track.........................




..............................................   Raymond is quite complimentary to Mac software in these articles — he holds it up as an example for Linux developers to emulate. But he fails to acknowledge that most Mac software — such as the System Prefs panel you use to connect to a shared printer — is closed source, and produced by full-time professional engineers.

He also fails to acknowledge another uncomfortable truth: Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves. In fact, most of them have already switched. This trend isn’t necessarily a market share bonanza for Apple — all the “Unix nerds who care about usability” in the world amount to only a fraction of a percent of the general population. But it’s a trend that bodes poorly for usable desktop Linux software. Most of the talented developers still using desktop Linux are either cheapskates or free-software political zealots.

This isn’t to say desktop Linux isn’t growing in use. It is, and will continue to. But it’s growing at the bottom end of the market — cheap $400 computers from Wal-Mart. That’s a market where software usability is not a key feature.

Raymond’s stance toward Windows, however, is childish. E.g., he writes:

If the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows programers [sic]) they’d probe the local network neighborhood and omit the impossible entries. If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they’d leave the impossible choices in but gray them out, signifying that if your system were configured a bit differently you really could print on a Windows machine, assuming you were unfortunate enough to own one.

I question how “unfortunate” one would be, at least in this situation, given that it’s easy to configure a shared printer with Windows XP. In fact, even dear old A.T. might actually have a chance to make this work, if she were given the head start Raymond himself had at the beginning of his adventure (i.e., with the network already set up, and the printer already connected to and shared from the other PC).


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