I disagree that hiding things is a way to make things user friendly. If OSX
had a big stinking xterm icon on the desktop, would that make it any less
user friendly? The real issue is that by hiding things sometimes(which I'm
not in favor of for the record), it can cut back on support calls because
people can sometimes get access to potentially system crippling things like
rm if they don't know that rm * will delete everything in a dir, etc. That
aside, making things user friendly is more a matter of accessability and UI
design, rather than just where things live. Another thing too, say you run
TWM as your window manager, and you've never used any *nix before at all,
would you know what to do? You MIGHT be able to get an xterm, but aside from
that, would you know what to start? Probalby not, because you wouldn't know
how to start any programs. In essence, everything is hidden from you. It's
all about UI design, and accessability. The better UIs are designed, the
more customizeable it is, within a given parameter set, the more useable it
is.
--
Austin Gonyou
Systems Architect, CCNA
Coremetrics, Inc.
Phone: 512-796-9023
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jens Benecke [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 3:47 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [Win4Lin-users] running windows commands from linux
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 03:10:51PM -0400, Dan Swartzendruber wrote:
> > At 08:50 PM 7/24/2001 +0200, Jens Benecke wrote:
> > >On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 01:28:36PM -0400, Joel Hammer wrote:
> > >
> > > > DOCUMENTS IN EMAIL EFFORTLESSLY!!!!! etc....
> > >
> > >You would perhaps get a few more clueless beginners to buy
> your distro,
> > >but you will most certainly scare off *ALL* experienced
> Linux users ...
> >
> > this attitude is one of the prime reasons linux faces such an uphill
> > battle.
>
> What are you proposing? Dumb down Linux to get accepted by the "stupid
> masses" (quote from Futurama, not my own)?
>
> Sorry, been there, done that. I've been using the Web and Usenet since
> 1994, when it was _not_ totally swamped with pr0n, SPAM,
> banner ads, "E-Z
> click-here buy-now" javascript pop-ups, and all the rest.
>
> I don't dislike the idea of making technology accessible to
> 'the masses'.
> What makes me want to cry out loud (some of the time) is that
> people start
> stripping (crippling) useful technology because they assume that "most
> people" are simply too retarded to use it and get confused.
>
>
> Making Linux more 'user-friendly' would probably include
> removing or at
> least hiding xterm, because it is "user-unfriendly". It would perhaps
> include removing the kernel startup-messages because they
> "confuse" users
> (i.e. kill a possibility to find out what goes wrong if
> something does).
> It would most probably include removing all but one desktops
> because having
> choice means clueless people would get confused ("What's a
> Session Type?").
> It would perhaps even mean people actually get encouraged
> logging in as
> root because if they didn't, clueless users would complain they cannot
> access "their computer".
>
> And so on. No thanks.
>
> Keep Linux honest. Not user-friendly. Don't hide or disable
> functionality
> just because you ASSUME that many people would not
> like/use/understand it.
> That's simply arrogant.
>
>
> btw: Do you know why Corel Linux failed? They produced a
> (basically quite
> good) distro that was as functional as a freshly installed Windows. No
> apps. No utilities. Not even a desktop choice, nor a shell
> choice. Just a
> (graphical) text editor, browser, Wordperfect and a modified
> KDE desktop.
>
> When people install Linux, they don't expect Windows, they expect
> functionality.
>
>
> --
> Jens Benecke
> http://www.hitchhikers.de/ - Die kostenlose Mitfahrzentrale
> f�r ganz Europa
>
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