[elija]

Over the course of many postings in these forums. many people have said
Linux sucks it's just not user friendly. Other people have said that it
is very user friendly.

They can't all be right. Or can they?

The question that needs to be asked is "What is user friendly?"

Ignoring the fact that it is a very funny and geeky web comic, we can
turn to the question of what user friendly means in terms of a computer.

Definition:
User Friendly: It does what I want it to do in a way that makes it easy.

Taken in that context, it can be seen why users moving from Windows into
the world of Linux can find it unfriendly. It is different after all.

Speaking personally,the user friendliness of Linux means different things
at different times. I will give two examples here:

If I am configuring a web server, I consider it very user friendly that I
can drop to a terminal and with a few deft commands / text file edits have
a web site up in running. I have yet to see a gui for this task that I consider
as quick and easy.

If I am surfing the web, I consider the gui to be a blessing and find Firefox
and the other browsers to be remarkably user friendly. The text based
browsers, while useful for rescuing a borked server with no gui available, are
not as user friendly.

To new Linux users, especially those moving over from Windows, please
remember that it is different and that there will be a learning curve. I think
Linux has the problem of being similar enough to Windows that people expect
it to work in the same way.

I also find myself wondering what other peoples definition of user friendly is.

[ls354]

Too many variables not everybody will be happy and the main problem people have is that they are used to the Windows GUI. Also this type of people usually suck at basic research and by basic I mean "Google".

Keep in mind there's a difference between administrator and user.

[smolloy]

This is a great thread to start because I think the definition of user friendly has changed.

To a lot of people "user friendly" means that they can start using it with no prior experience and without having to learn anything new, but I think this is a bad definition. Perhaps you could call this "newbie friendly". For me "user friendly" means that the code is friendly to the user -- i.e. it allows me to do what I want without getting in the way. It means that the majority of the effort is not spent getting the code to do what you want.

An example,
Notepad.exe is "newbie friendly", while vim is "user friendly".

Any idiot can open up notepad and make a small text file. If they were familiar with C++, they could open up someone else's code in notepad, edit it to their heart's content, and save the modified code. But the interface gets in the way (IMHO). Having to highlight an area of text, press ctrl-x, then move the cursor to a new spot, and press ctrl-c, to cut and paste seems like a lot of effort compared to the equivalent commands in vim (d5d5kp for example).

Vim is *not* newbie friendly (look at my d5d5kp example!), but typing those arcane commands is much more efficient when compared with the equivalent mouse movements and ctrl commands in notepad.

Thus, when you've spent the time learning how to use vim, it is *much* more efficient, and therefore much more friendly to the user, than notepad.exe.

A lot of the "linux isn't user friendly enough" arguments are about this very point. New users want us to strip away all the power than certain apps give us, just because they seem arcane and weird on first inspection. They want everything to be more like notepad and less like vim, which seems to be removing the whole point of linux. Many things are different about many distros, but not bash commands. If someone is having a problem, in many cases it doesn't matter which distro they're using -- you can tell them to drop to a CLI, and type a few bash commands. But to newbs, this seems weird and old-fashioned. They'd rather be directed towards a GUI, but they forget that we don't know their exact set-up, so we can't guess the right gui to point them at, but we CAN fix their problems with bash commands! They mistake the bash newb-unfriendliness for user-unfriendliness and immediately start criticising!!

Linux is *much* more user friendly than any other OS out there! (In many ways it's also just as newb-friendly as windows, but that's an argument for another thread.)

[SagaciousKJB]

User Friendly

Offering a User more Than One Way to Do Something

Many Linux distributions have different ways of accomplishing the same things, and in fact many of the "standard" programs ( such as in binutils ) offer their own alternatives to suit a user's preferences. On top of this, most if not all Linux distributions offer the user a rich envrionment for scripting, programing and other development so that they may facilitate their very own way of doing something.

Offerring a User as much information as they want about doing something, and offering resources for more

Is there anything that doesn't have a man file at this point? On top of that, is there any man file which doesn't have an accompanying "info" file, or resources to find even more documentation and information? There are man files docuenting applications, to applications configuration files, to libraries, to C functions, etc.

Giving the user the choice to learn how to do something, or to learn how to do something and understand the principles around it

This is a bit of a supplemental, but given the user the option to quickly learn how to accomlish a task is also very important, and most man files are constructed in such a way to give examples of how to use the program, and often the programs themselves offere more abbreviated help documents that aren't formatted in the same way as a verbose man file.

Offering the User full freedom for their computer.

As in, choosing which software to use, which componets of this software, how they will have it configured, what aspects of the system they can create/modify themselves, or basically any other aspect of giving the user absolute control over their envrionment.

This is basically what user-friendliness is to me. Sounds a lot like the principles underlined in GNU. I'm not sure if I'm moddling my definition around it, or if GNU moddled itself after a definition simliar to my own.

I like to think that my definiton comes out of being extremely literal. To me, "user-friendly", means exactly that: Friendly to the user. To me, offering to the user A) The Tools B) The Knowledge and C) The Understanding to accomplish what they do is the bare minimum to contitute user-friendliness. I think you can gradually become friendlier by adding in D) The Option of Facilitating use of A) without need of B) and/or C). In other words, if a user just wants to change his file permissions, the man file should show him how to quickly do so, instead of explain to him the nuances of Linux file permissions. Offering a user complete freedom over their envrionment, to me, is beyond "friendly"; I suppose we could call it user-filanthropy.


There seems to be a consensus though, among a concentration of non-chalant users, that "user-friendly" is supposed to mean "user-convenient". They simply want to accomplish their given tasks quickly, effeciently, and with as little thought as possible. I think that this just ties in with option D. It's part of being user-friendly, but in my opinion, if a friend were selling me that short, I'm not sure I would consider them that great of a friend, and I certainly wouldn't consider an OS that offered only that very user-friendly.

In a way it seems that people that want "user-friendly" to indicate a lack of a learning curve. I simply don't think that will happen with any OS, because any of them are going to be an unfamiliar environment the first time anyone uses them. However, if I had introduced myself to Windows at the same time that I introduced myself to Linux, I know for a fact that I would have learned Linux far quicker thanks to its openness, its consistency in offering all A), B), and C) and usually D). That is not to say that using WIndows would be a challenge, but learning how to do anything exceedingly useful in Windows would be. I think most people can sit at a computer and open up a Web Browser or Email Client, but get a brand new WIndows user, and a brand new Linux user, and tell them to upload a file to ftp. Now, this is assuming neither user even knows what ftp is... A Linux user can simply type, "man ftp" to get a comprehensive knowledge about it, while a WIndows user is probably going to be pieceing a puzzle together from Google. Even if they did type "ftp /?", that's only going to tell them how to use Windows' ftp client; it won't give them B) or C), which probably means they won't be able to accomplish D) at all.

That example is extreme, but there have been things that I've learned how to do in one year on a user-friendly OS ( Linux ) that I never learned in nine years using a user-conveient OS ( Windows ). Before switching to Linux I use to think, "Man, I know WIndows like the back of my hand, I don't want to spend that much time getting use to another OS," but within one year on Linux, that has shifted to, "I know how to do virtually nothing on WIndows as compared to what I've learned how to do on Linux. I never want to have to figure out how to do something on Windows again." So, to me, it's interesting how this user-convenience that people seem to want is part of why learning how to do something seems like so much of a challenge. I think that user-friendlness finally comes into fruition when learning is convenient, because at that point, convenience in use will follow.

Just my $0.02

[hazel]

A fascinating subject! I've already said what I want to say on this, so here it is.

[ozar]

User friendly might be an OS that when you sit down at the computer it says hello, and a hand comes out of the screen to shake hands with the user. It also issues frequent compliments to the user so that the user remembers it's friendly.

I contend that user friendly is really a state of mind more than anything else, kind of like "happiness". If you think it's user friendly, then it is, and if you think it's not, then I suppose it's not.

It's really too bad that so many computer users have allowed Microsoft products to numb their minds.

[lucho]

Before launching into my rant I should point out that most of my
cynicism comes from the fact that 1) my educational background is in
Sociology and languages, and 2) I'm a language professor by profession
(English, Spanish, and Portuguese), in the corporate sector. What I see on
a day-to-day basis is that user-friendliness is this:

"User-friendliness" isn't a trait per se; it's a relationship, a correlation.
The less that a user knows about how he arrives at a certain result the more
user friendly a device is.

An example: Cars. How many drivers learn auto mechanics? Some learn
how to change the oil or check the transmission fluid, but how many know
what a flex plate is, much less how to fix it? There are some driver's edu-
cation courses in the US that don't even teach how to drive a manual
transmission! Cars, especially with automatic transmission, are very user
friendly.
Another example: Most of the people (no, not all of them. just most) who
make noises about "Windows is user friendly and linux isn't" and "Linux isn't
ready for the desktop" are the ones who know the least about computers.
Windows tries very hard to be user friendly; it caters to these people. IMHO
the tragedy here is when Window's user friendliness was allowed into the
educational system.
I guess my point is that user friendliness is a form of marketing:
it is frequently used draw attenton away from the facts.

[Dapper Dan]

Originally Posted by ozar

It's really too bad that so many computer users have allowed Microsoft products to numb their minds.

Amen to that. This is not a slam at Microsoft, but rather an observation.

It is my belief that Microsoft has made computing far easier than it really should be. It's kind of like they sell you a chauffeur, tell you to sit in back of the limousine, give directions and don't "interfere."

But what will you do when the day eventually comes, when the chauffeur is out sick or simply quits on you? How will you get around to the places you need to go? What if you have a flat tire or dead battery? You'll be up the creek because you likely never learned how to drive and maintain the vehicle.

With Linux on the other hand, we learn how to change tires, recharge batteries and more importantly, how to drive the limousine ourselves. Having done so, we see the limousine as "user friendly." Without a chauffeur, most Windows users do not.

EDIT: Hi lucho. You posted as I was typing! Intersting we should arrive at such a similar analogy simultaneously!

[bigtomrodney]

My own feeling is that too often the idea of user friendly is too loosely defined. While Linux traditionally - though less so now - has been hard to configure I think that a preconfigured Linux system is much easier to use than Windows. The configuration is the trick.

I still have to walk Window users through the difference between \Documents and Settings\Username\ and making a slew of directories on the C: drive. Watching user's PCs get slower as the months go by and the registry and the number of startup applications grow. So what's user friendly about that? Sure you can have work away now if you're happy to manage your file locations but you'll be cursing and going out and buying a new PC in a year under the assumption that your PC is just too old. Every new USB stick in Windows is treated as a new device and Windows pretends to install new drivers, delaying you a minute or two until it's happy.

...And on the other hand you have Linux. Sure the root partition looks intimidating, but that's not for you. Everything goes in your home directory and your PC will run just the same in a year as it did the first time you booted it. Every USB stick is treated as it is and distro/desktop depending it will be mounted on the desktop by its name. No confusion there.

So if you're asking me if Linux is user friendly? Yeah plenty. But whatever a lot of power users will tell you about managing drivers in Windows you can be sure that a lot of them haven't tried to install Windows, partitioning, installing modern SATA drivers etc. Because it's no easier - or even as easy - on that side of the fence than on Linux.

[elija]

I think it's kind of telling that everyone who has posted has a similar but
slightly differing view of what user friendly is. For me at least that reveals
the true scale of the task when making an operating system or piece of
software user friendly.

I do like the distinction between newbie friendly and user friendly. It is not
something I had considered before. As a developer, it is something I shall at
least consider in future.