P. Christeas wrote: > Let me rant in a rather non-polite tone: > why does *every* Linux distro have to be for Windows users?? Why does every > product need to be targeted at stupid people? (obvious answer: there is lots > of them) > > I think you have to separate "looking like Windows" from "implementing as does Microsoft". One of the things MS does very well is user interface design. What they *don't* do so well is implementation: everything is done through the GUI, and MS oversimplifies by making choices silently for the user without giving the user the option to override.
We're not exactly innocent in this respect either. MDV tools are excellent, but they need the closure of a full transparent CLI as well as a GUI. Experts and administrators need to be able to provide configuration through batch scripts. This is not the case in many areas. I do a large number of fresh installs intended to create a new system configured as an existing system was, and it's really annoying to boot for the first time and then have to invoke several GUIs to do things like printer configuration, wireless configuration, and font installation. In many areas, we have lost track of the simple fact that a Graphical User Interface should be just that - an *interface* to a modular and independent non-graphical module which provides "business logic". It should never be the only way to access the business logic. Hopefully, free of Mandriva's corporate restrictions, we can achieve that now. Another issue is choice. System tools have to provide a range of choice suitable for both experts and newbies. While it is acceptable to choose defaults that will work for newbies out of the box, it is not acceptable to limit choices for everyone to those defaults. We've done this on more than one occasion, the most memorable one being to radically change and lock down the application menu system and refuse to consider any configuration options that would deviate from this. Finally, there is transparency. MDV tools have in many cases extended the standard Linux way of doing things in imaginative and useful ways. What they don't do is document those ways so that admins and users used to standard Linux ways can manually intervene or provide tool extensions without extensive code reading. Also, there are many portions of the toolset, e.g. disk partitioning, network sharing, setting up VPNs, etc., which involve extremely intrusive and possibly destructive operations. All such tools need to have an option, not necessarily the default, to display to the user a detailed list of changes that the tool proposes to make, and prompt for approval. The problem here is that advanced users and admins get understandably scared when a tool proposes to do something that involves modifying multiple critical configuration files or system resources without providing the details of the changes so that they can be denied if unwanted, or undone later if so desired. An even better approach would be to have each configuration tool produce a program-readable file describing actions it takes, much as RPMs provide, so that the tool, or some general tool running on another bootable system with access to the root partition of the affected system could undo the changes. I understand why these things were never done in the past. Management/marketing (and perhaps even some devs) wanted the windows-like newbie simplification, and didn't have the resources or the desire to provide the closure of these features. I hope that we can move past this.
