Op dinsdag 26-02-2008 om 00:49 uur [tijdzone +0100], schreef Stijn Verslycken: > A shell-centric approach has some negative aspects too, though: > - Many people who're not really familiar with unix-like systems get > lost: sh (and derivatives) is not DOS, it has a lot of powerful > commands but it's cluttered at the same time, especially for those who > don't know anything about it (yet),...
"Not yet" is why I gave some sort of demo about basic shell commands & tools at the recent "linuxbabbel", and apparently many people liked it (some even asked for more of this). > - Learning to use all these command line tools isn't that easy: many > people, in fact most "ordinary people", won't be interested to learn > them at all. That's true. > - GUIs were not invented to be thrown away: many applications require > a decent GUI. And that's also true... :-) > ==> We don't want to turn our watches back for over 20 years, I think you mean over 30 years? ;-) This was the UI of the Xerox Alto, anno 1973-75: <http://www.britannica.com/eb/art-19724/The-first-graphical-user-interface-The-Xerox-Alto-was-the> <http://boxinasuitcase.com/media/blogs/box/xerox_alto_screenshot.jpg> <http://boxinasuitcase.com/media/blogs/box/xerox_parc_rainbow.jpg> <http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog-images/alto.jpg> And yes, this thing did have a 3-button mouse, ethernet, etc. :) > Personally I don't really like a too minimalistic approach on this, so > I prefer environments like KDE or Gnome (or XFCE). But other people > prefer snappier (but uglier?) desktops. I think they all have their > qualities and down sides: once again, you have the freedom to choose! Right. > As a commercial example you could take a look at Apple: they've even > eliminated the command line more or less and provide a very good > looking user interface on top of a unix-like system without truly > showing the latter (unless you start digging). This should be the goal > of one noob-friendly Linux desktop, to make Linux even more appealing > to novice users. One of the first things I did on the Mac OS X system I got (thanks Mark!) is to install a decent terminal emulator, because some important things are lacking from their GUI... :-p And software installation management on Mac OS X is actually much worse than on Windows, which means Ubuntu is like a lightyear ahead. > Ordinary computer users should be able to do anything they desire > intuitively, without the use of a terminal. Even system/server > management! For that reason I'm quite a fan of tools like Suse's YaST. Unfortunately, SuSE & YaST have other issues... ;-) But a graphical (even if remote) admin for an Ubuntu server would be useful, especially to compete with Windows SBS... -- Jan Claeys -- ubuntu-be mailing list / mailto:[email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-be
