Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, July 18, 2005:
Why Gnome Can’t Make it To Your Desktop
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Interesting post by Joshua about some things going on on the Fedora mailing list:
"I’m not sure why someone who uses the computer for surfing the net, checking email, and writing papers would want to learn these commands, but a very vocal group of people on fedora devel thing were doing them a disservice by not making them memorize them."
You should read it, but in summary he's wondering how these folks who say they want Linux on the desktop are ever going to get there. The answer is that they won't. He dances around the reason why, but luckily for you I know why!
It's because there's no USERS in the process. Sure the developers "use" it but that doesn't count. The guys are hard core talented programers, but that's the problem. There's nobody around to say "hey what's that big E do" or "why isn't there a little disk icon so that I can save my work?". And the reason there's no users is because there's no ways for regular users to get involved at a fundamental level.
If you've ever looked at one of those mailing lists you know that they can't go there. Same with the forums.
So here's the kicker. They'll never get on the desktop because they have no offices, they're entirely virtual. This gives MS a huge advantage. Why? Because at this point Microsoft is comprised as much with non technical workers as tech. So when the programmers get out of line some guy from marketing who only uses Word is there to say "I don't get it". That's a very important function, because if he doesn't get it then alot of other people don't either. MS has a built in way for users to get involved, where as OS Linux developers don't.
I know what you're thinking, that's the kind of stuff that leads to crazy wizards and overly simplified UI. True, but that's way better than a UI where you have to be a geek to understand that dropping down to the command line and using cp is superior to copy and pasting your file between folders.
Discussion
There are some ways for regular users to get into the loop -- such as trying out the major builds and giving feedback. But at the same time the developers who are in charge of the projects need to be more accepting of the people who are not as technical as they are.
The first step should be to create installers. This would allow users who don't have a compiler and 10 years of experience in C to try out the product.
Another issue that I find in a majority of open source projects, is the lack of a well designed website. Usually there is wiki that came from some template, but it is very hard to find the information that i am looking for.
Created by Noam on 07.18.2005 10:07 pm
Yes the websites are bad. Even the corporate ones are bad. I've often tried to find information on Red Hats site and it's difficult. Also trying out builds isn't something that users do. There's way to much complexity in those things. The installers are bad or nonexistent. I actually don't have a problem with any of this, it only bothers me when they talk about wanting to go mainstream with it. If it's a tool for geeks that's great, let it be that. If they want to get to the average user then they need to start making big changes.
Created by Ian on 07.18.2005 10:07 pm
After reading Ian's post and others, I posted my take on the linux desktop state of affairs here:
http://www.graysky.org/mgc/archives/2005_07.html#000374
Created by mgc on 07.18.2005 10:07 pm
Nice post.
"The question is whether the linux desktop developers really want to strive to expand the user community to include folks who never want to learn anything as complicated as "ls"
I think the more real question is if the developers want to take a back seat to the users. Open source is about developer driven development. Windows and OSX are decidedly about User driven development. Of course they have a financial reason to be about User driven development. What will the OS developers reason be to reach out to the users? It doesn't appear that "to destroy Microsoft" has worked very well, as you said it's basically just lead to a bunch of different distros and no unified message.
Created by Ian on 07.18.2005 10:07 pm
[...] The web has been abuzz recently with talk about the much-fabled “linux on the desktop”. I think it is going to be a while before you find a non-technical friend making “got root?” jokes and installing linux on their desktop, no matter how cool they think the screenshots of Xgl effects are. But there is a shining example of what is possible, and it comes from Apple’s OSX. [...]
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Created by mgc » Lessons for Desktop Linux from OSX on 07.18.2005 10:07 pm