Quote:
Originally Posted by bellaire  Well that stirred up the hornets nest. You obviously do not tolerate criticism of your religion by a non believer, read on! Most of you who replied have illustrated my point better than any words I could write. "Four word yeah that is difficult" - of course it is not difficult but it beats me why if one word will do why use four? It is like using a combination lock every time you want to switch the light on, come on guys think, one flick of a switch and I can read my book I don't want to have to remember 1234 to switch on the kitchen light and 4567 to switch on the lounge light. In my case (clearly not yours) the computer is a tool not a play thing, I want to use it to get emails pull, write reports etc. I am not the slightest bit interested in the underlying OS. If I buy a saw, I want it to cut wood, what type of steel it uses or whether it has a hickory handle is not interesting.
So back to the argument, I do not have a problem with other people using Linux I just have to admit they are cleverer than me and there are lots of people who fit that bill but there are many who are like me and Linux is passing them by, and that is a shame as it is robust, it is open source and it is a fantastic operating system however just as many of you are sold on command line operation (I do not have a problem with that) whether or not you like it, there are MORE people who are not! It would be nice if Linux could address that market.
Before you say "it does by having a pseudo windows interface" I come back to my original point if all you want to do is run a program then providing it is already installed on your Linux machine then it works and works well. I wanted to install Thunderbird and I reckon it took me 4 hours, I do not want to learn Linux I just wanted to access my emails!
Sorry guys but there is no point keep banging the drum for Linux if you want more market penetration you are going to have to make a version that is much much more user friendly and if you do I and half the world will come into your fold immediately. Chris |
Hornet's nest? I think it's only natural that people will respond to your opinion, especially if it's a dissenting one regarding Linux, and a Linux enthusiasts forum. I bet it will turn more into a verbal pig-pile...
Now, I don't understand a couple of things here. If you're only using the computer to read emails, and write reports, isn't their already software installed to do this? Yeah, of course you might want to install Thunderbird because you like that, but then shouldn't you have used a Synaptic if you didn't want to get involved with the command line? You inadvertently said, "3476 turn on light", for an operation that was as simple as "turn on light".
So what does it boil down to? Linux is too complicated for users? I don't think so. There is a big learning curve? I think that's more accurate, but what most people don't consider is that there was a learning curve when they first used a Windows OS too. I understand that doesn't really solve your need of a robust OS that just does what you need to, but I think you wound up complicating things for yourself. There is a certain extent where you can't really avoid getting up-close and personal with Linux, but if all you wanted to do was install an email client and write some reports, I don't see the need to ever even open a command line.
Now, you claim to want a version that is user-friendly, but I think you have a different definition of user-friendly than most Linux users. To me, user-friendly is offering me plenty of options and controls about how I do things. There are at least four ways off the top of my head I can think of to install programs on a Linux box. Now, that may be viewed as complex, but when you bring "user-friendliness" into that context, aren't you really trying to accomplish "idiot-proofing" ( for lack of a better term ) more than "user-friendliness".
There's a delicate balance going on between the Linux community. I think half of the time, the problem isn't that Linux is too complex, it's that the documentation is far too varying. If you ask one Linux user how to install thunderbird, he may tell you one way to do it; if you ask another, he may tell you another, and so on. There's options and control there that the long-fledged Linux community loves, but I think it's becoming difficult for new users to really get a consistent answer on how to do something.
Finally, I think you're simply over-exaggerating the amount of investment it takes to overcome the learning curve of Linux. Learning when and when not to use "sudo" is similar to learning when to install a program the Administrator account or a normal users account in Windows. I'm going to use a vicious term in a gentile way: Ignorance. That is what it comes down to in this scenario. Frankly, you're not interested in learning how you need to do something on Linux, you seem to just want it to be the way it was on Windows. You're not interested in why programs are installed in a specific way on Linux, you seem to just be arguing that it should be like Windows to avoid a learning curve. The problem with this is that, I don't care who you are, when you first got on Windows, you had to learn how to use it too.
Coincidentally there's a lot of effort now days involved in offering users ways of doing things that are more intuitive to Window's users. I think that you're simply lacking a good broadened knowledge of which distributions do that. A lot of people say that the huge multitude of distributions is one of the reasons so many people are turned away from Linux, but if there was one standardized, monolithic form, in which every way to do something was the same, wouldn't we basically be back to the elements of Windows that so many turn to Linux and open source because of?
In a way, I think most Windows users won't be happy until there's a version of Windows that runs on the Linux kernel. Good luck on that.
Linux is rubbish, my reply to your points. 
Linear Mode
