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Distribution quote of the week
If the general principle of 'specialized technical crap confuses people
who don't understand it' is a mystical urban legend to you, you might
want to try teaching a class to less-experienced computer users or
watching usability test videos. Or maybe try volunteering at a community
technical helpdesk. Your opinion will change pretty quickly.
-- Máirín Duffy(Log in to post comments)
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 14, 2013 8:06 UTC (Thu) by Rudd-O (subscriber, #61155) [Link]
It's so disheartening to see so many techies in that thread condescending, discrediting and dismissing the valid concerns and observations that Mairin raised. And these are people that influence the UI's direction!
"Linux was hard for me, why should it be easier for the newbs" is exactly the kind of "fuck you got mine" attitude that kept desktop Linux dead. Meanwhile, Android finally delivered on the promise of hundreds of millions of Linux installs.
Hmmm... I wonder why Android succeeded while these moron geniuses in charge of the "Linux Desktop" never got their act together. Do you think it might have something to do with the lack of "fuck you got mine" attitude from Android developers in charge of building the UI? Hmmm... when was the last time anyone saw an Android phone with a GRUB menu?
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 4:19 UTC (Fri) by The_Barbarian (subscriber, #48152) [Link]
>attitude that kept desktop Linux dead.
Yah know, these days I can't really say I have a problem with that. Let them keep their Windows and OS X and Android and iOS. I don't even want them here in the Linux camp.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 9:16 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Software freedom must be for everyone, or one day it will not even be for nerds.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 12:37 UTC (Fri) by The_Barbarian (subscriber, #48152) [Link]
Android is free, they can have that
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 13:13 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] If the standard delivery state of Android included (or at least provided very easy access to) all tools and source code needed to rebuild Android on Android, that position might have something vaguely resembling merit. It would, however, still be the kind of obnoxious insular elitism that reinforces pretty much every negative stereotype of the Linux community.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 15:32 UTC (Fri) by The_Barbarian (subscriber, #48152) [Link]
>obnoxious insular elitism
'sok with me!
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 16:37 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> Yah know, these days I can't really say I have a problem with that.
Other people do. They write software for other people to use, not just for their own specific purposes.
Making things easy for non-technical users doesn't detract from people like you who love to setup bootloaders by manually editing their boot partitions with vim and dd.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 18, 2013 11:33 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
You somehow managed to get it wrong in all accounts. Congratulations.
> so many techies in that thread condescending ... And these are people that influence the UI's direction!
Really? I thought Mairin was the one actually influencing UI's direction.
> "fuck you got mine" attitude that kept desktop Linux dead
"fuck you got mine" is the universal attitude. Most people download Linux for free and never, ever, give something back. It doesn't keep anything dead, though, because it's the expected behavior. It's the extremely *rare* few with a "this can be done better" attitude that keep the show going.
> Android finally delivered on the promise of hundreds of millions of Linux installs.
Show me just *one* non-technical user who has installed android on a phone that was running anything else. Got ahead, I'll wait here.
> I wonder why Android succeeded while these [expletive] in charge of the "Linux Desktop" never got their act together.
Maybe it's because Android is backed by a big corporation with capacity to talk directly and influence device vendors. Maybe it's because phone users do not have an expectation to run Windows applications and games on them. And maybe there a dozen more similar reasons...
> Do you think it might have something to do with the lack of "fuck you got mine" attitude from Android developers in charge of building the UI?
Definitely not. Because *most* people in charge of building anything do not have such attitude, specially those doing it for free, on their own time and often paying the expenses with their own money. Those people are most often doing a labor of _love_ and deserve all our respect and admiration.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 18, 2013 20:55 UTC (Mon) by duffy (subscriber, #31787) [Link]
"Really? I thought Mairin was the one actually influencing UI's direction."
I try my very best along with the rest of the Fedora team, but nobody likes making decisions and implementing things that the community is against - community members obviously have a say and influence here and their opinion is extremely important. We don't exist without them. I'm just so very disappointed that some have this opinion, I'm not sure where it's coming from, although elsewhere in the same thread it's pointed out that high schoolers have no business using Linux - I mean, really? I started using Linux when I was in high school! Who is Linux for if it's not for normal folks who are just as deserving of software freedom as you or me, who is Linux for if it's not for high school students with extra time on their hands wanting to hack on things?
It really seems like a bizarre form of elitism and I really don't like it.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 18, 2013 21:45 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
If there was a +1 button on LWN, I would press it next to your comment ten thousand times.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 11:03 UTC (Tue) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]
Nah nah. You should patch the button to implement a +10,000 button, then press it.
Note I would certainly i18n-ed it to +10 000 before pressing it myself too!
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 10:26 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
>> "Really? I thought Mairin was the one actually influencing UI's direction."
> I try my very best along with the rest of the Fedora team, but nobody likes making decisions and implementing things that the community is against - community members obviously have a say and influence here and their opinion is extremely important. We don't exist without them. I'm just so very disappointed that some have this opinion, I'm not sure where it's coming from,
So, are you telling me that you are NOT influencing the UI?
> although elsewhere in the same thread it's pointed out that high schoolers have no business using Linux - I mean, really?
I'm sorry to say that, but this is a blatant lie. I will quote here the relevant excerpt of the discussion, so people can make their own oppinion:
---
> It really seems like a bizarre form of elitism and I really don't like it.
Beware who you call an elitist. When you point a finger at someone, there are four fingers pointing at you.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 11:20 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Saying someone is "the one influencing" a decision is not the same as saying they are influencing the decision. Disputing the validity of being called "the one influencing" the decision is not the same as denying influencing the decision.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 12:01 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Isn't her *the* *one* with the greatest influence, by virtue of her job?
But, anyway, what I see is not a valid argument. First she claims that user's opinions are of the greatest value and influence. But on the next paragraph she uses dubious accusations of "elitism" to discredit someone that just had a different point of view.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 15:16 UTC (Tue) by duffy (subscriber, #31787) [Link]
"Isn't her *the* *one* with the greatest influence, by virtue of her job?"
The ultimate influence/power is held by those with commit privileges. Generally designers don't have this.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 15:01 UTC (Tue) by duffy (subscriber, #31787) [Link]
Yeah you missed this gem
"i wonder how i survived to learn all this stuff which
Essentially analogizing my students as less astute than trained monkeys.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 21:51 UTC (Tue) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Maybe he was suggesting that YOU think that they are less astute than trained monkeys.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 23:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
There are lots of users who are not really familiar with such as a boot loader menu before they look into Linux. Comparing them to trained monkeys or implying that other people are doing so just for stating that a boot loader is confusing to such users isn't really defensible in any way. There are repeated comments like these that say people are stupid just because they don't understand or not interested in learning all the minutia of how things work under the hood and I find them entirely inappropriate.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 12:39 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Allow me to disagree. There are few users so unfamiliar with anything as my 4 years old son. Yet our PC's boot menu has not represented a problem for him, or for my wife who is completely uninterested in technology. In fact, I have yet to find someone who is confused in the slightest by a boot menu.
But that's not the point. The point is that you cannot pretend to win an argument by playing the offended card. At most you will halt discussion and poison the relation with the community. That's too high price a price to pay for wining an on-line discussion.
People that are easily offended are as dangerous (if not more) to a healthy on-line community as people that are too prone to aggressive behavior. Note that I do not say "prone to offend", and that's for a reason: offensiveness is a relative personal interpretation. Anybody can choose to feel offended by anything, no matter how unreasonable may it seem.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 13:04 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Unfortunately, I mostly associate utterances along the lines of "Anybody can choose to feel offended by anything" with the likes of Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson, and Jeremy Clarkson.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 17:33 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Interesting. I associate it with people like Salman Rushdie or Galileo Galilei, instead.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 18:37 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Being provocative is fine at times but just being rude doesn't make you Salman Rushdie. It makes you a jerk.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:41 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Rude is a subjective quality, just like offensive or beautiful: Salman Rushdie is a jerk for quite a few people out there.
But that was not a good example, Rushdie was being *deliberately* provocative. That's not what I saw in the mail exchange. What I saw was someone choosing to ignore a valid point on the grounds that the messenger was offensive and elitist, a clear ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.
And that leads us to the crux of the matter. Was Malone rude and elitist, as purported by Duffy? The mails are out there for all to see and consider.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 21, 2013 17:49 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Feel free to call it whatever you want but if you have a valid point, you are better off expressing it politely. Human nature being what it is, you are unlikely to convince someone else by comparing non technical users to monkeys.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 22, 2013 9:56 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] Absolutely.But that's not important here. Let me reuse your words and say that, Human nature being what it is, everybody can (and do) behave inappropriately eventually. We all have had a bad day. And if I have to deal with people because of my job, I have to understand that. Otherwise I'm behaving like a jerk too. Do two wrongs make a right? Curiously enough, I have just read about the "donglegate" thing that happened at PyCon. Those things should get us thinking about what's the correct behavior in those situations.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 22, 2013 14:10 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
For most people contributing to Fedora, it is *not* their job and this discussion has nothing to do with anyone having a bad day since such opinions have been expressed by the same people consistently. So your argument doesn't make much sense and I think you aren't aware of the history here.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 15:05 UTC (Tue) by duffy (subscriber, #31787) [Link]
There's also a longer history of this anti students / anti girls in Fedora line of thought, e.g.:
http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2011/01/fedora-from-bleeding...
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 19, 2013 16:21 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
In Fedora? In free software as a whole :((
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 20, 2013 9:32 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
Bah, it's easy to find dumb/sexist members in every big enough group of people.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 14, 2013 13:40 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]
I used to do post-sales telephone support and computer maintenance for a computer shop. In many ways, computers were simpler back then, and people had no clue how they worked. Today, we have "plug and play" hardware, but how many people buy hardware to plug into their computers? It already ships with everything in the box. Meanwhile they can barely understand the difference between "Wi-Fi" and "The Internet".
The problem isn't that end users are stupid (well, some are. Let's face it. But not all). The problem is that they don't know this stuff and don't want to learn and don't have time to learn. The time to teach them was when they were kids and that time has passed. Deal with the world as it is, please.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 14, 2013 15:53 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]
Well, there is no problem. Why should they learn the difference between WiFi and Internet?
That is exactly the reason things like Chrome books exist. Long has past since the time when everybody baked her own bread, and same should happen to operating computers.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 16:12 UTC (Fri) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
> and same should happen to operating computers.
Well, it's useful to know that some food is more healthy than other. Even if you buy if from the shop and don't bake it yourself. Because shops will happily sell you very unhealthy stuff.
It is also useful to understand some basic principles of WiFi and the Internet. Even if you just use the machine and don't intend to write a network driver. Because there is malware, someone might try to sniff your passwords and all the other nice misuse that happens theses related to computers.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 17:26 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]
Not knowing the difference between Wi-Fi and "The Internet" is like not knowing the difference between a radio and a radio station. I'm not advocating that people should be manually fiddling with wpa_supplicant and routing tables, but they should at least know the difference between a wi-fi connection and an internet connection.
Note: Windows 7 does a not-bad job of explaining this. For every network connection it gives you some basic info about whether or not this connection lets you reach the internet. I think Microsoft even exposes it as an API so that software can query the OS to see what kind of connection we have: none, LAN, Internet. This allows for better explanations about what the user should do if they can't get their mail, for example.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 16, 2013 0:37 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
I was talking to some very intelligent people the other day who didn't know the difference between the "internet" and the "world wide web" and had no idea how the message the one typed on their computer actually got to the screen of the other's computer.
To technophiles like us, this is second nature. But lots of people really don't know and mostly don't care. Current computer interfaces try to hide the details, so that it either "just works" or "just doesn't work", in which case a guru is needed (or a reboot/reinstall/reformat). This doesn't encourage people to learn.
So maybe people should know the difference between a wi-fi connection and an internet connection - but very often they don't and have not been exposed to the scaffolding that would help them learn.
Back when we used analogue radios with dials and valves, people had a closer connection to the tech, could hear the difference between on-station and almost-on-station and so were better placed to learn the distinctions. Modern interfaces seem to make "idiots" of people, presumably so they can be sold "The idiots guide to...".
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 16:41 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> The time to teach them was when they were kids and that time has passed. Deal with the world as it is, please.
The modern world is able to function due to specialization. People become very knowledgeable and focused on specific things and unfortunately this can have the side effect of making people insular.
What you are saying is the equivalent of a doctor asking why more people can't just do their own appendix removal at home since the tools are cheap and documentation is so widespread, or a financial adviser wondering out loud why more people don't get involved in currency trading since it's all so obvious.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 17:32 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]
I'm not trying to advocate turning everyone into a programmer. I'm advocating teaching everyone about some fundamentals of computers so that when their adult brains are ossified they at least understand that there are different kinds of storage in their phones, or that there are different kinds of network, or that Wi-Fi is not synonymous with Internet. Just like we teach children math when they're young, so that when they're older they might be able to use it, teaching them some basic computer info would let them understand, maybe, how to follow the directions to set up a home router. What's the difference between a guest network and another network? a 2.4GHz network and a 5GHz? Wired vs wireless? Wi-Fi vs 3G? 3G vs LTE? So many questions, and most of these issues are pretty easy.
To fix your doctor analogy, I'm advocating people being able to read a bottle of tylenol and understand that it shouldn't be taken with alcohol because they're both metabolized in the liver. Or to be able to splint a bone in an emergency because you have a basic understanding of first-aid.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 14, 2013 16:36 UTC (Thu) by wagerrard (subscriber, #87558) [Link]
An assertion like, "A boot menu is self-explanatory, even to new-comers" just illustrates how distant some folks are from real life.
The mere *presence* of a boot menu can be confusing. I turned the machine on. Why is it stopping here? Am I supposed to do something?
Don't even ask about the blithe advice floating around in a zillion places to people who can't boot their flavor of Linux because it doesn't like their video card: 'Just add nomodeset as a kernel parameter'. If they get beyond the hurdle of figuring out how to do that, they are faced with a rather fragile display of technobabble into which the are supposed to insert the magic word in just the right place.
Why can't we have installers that know when nomodeset needs to be uses and offer to add it automatically?
You can't entice people away from Windows unless you accept the fact that their expectations have been established and framed by Windows, and design accordingly.
That kind of design doesn't mean taking capabilities away from people who know how to use them. It does mean, however, avoiding designs that only they can figure out.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 14, 2013 18:53 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> You can't entice people away from Windows unless you accept the fact that their expectations have been established and framed by Windows, and design accordingly.
Windows has it's own boot menu and 'press a key at this time' magic.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 14, 2013 21:16 UTC (Thu) by wagerrard (subscriber, #87558) [Link]
True, and most Windows users I know have no idea what it's for.
In any case, I think the current grub menu, on any distribution I've used, assumes knowledge that won't be there unless the user has taken the trouble to, first, learn that there is a tool called 'grub', and then chase down comprehensible documentation, read it, and understand it.
Unless they conclude that all their users have made a commitment to use Linux motivated by something other than "I'll try it and see", designers should not be making those kind of assumptions.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 16:02 UTC (Fri) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
> In any case, I think the current grub menu, on any distribution I've used, assumes knowledge that won't be there unless the user has taken the trouble to, first, learn that there is a tool called 'grub', and then chase down comprehensible documentation, read it, and understand it.
Really? I'd say Ubuntu hasn't displayed the grub menu by default for ages if the machine is single boot. You need to press Shift (or ESC for legacy grub) to get there. So the naive user should never end up there.
(Haven't installed Ubuntu for a while and the machines I use are multi-boot, so please correct if I remember things wrong.)
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 18, 2013 22:25 UTC (Mon) by duffy (subscriber, #31787) [Link]
If you're able to live your life happily unbothered by having any reason to need to go into the bootloader menu, why would you ever want to?
Seriously? Usually if I have to go into the bootloader menu, something's gone wrong, and that's not a happy scenario. If people need to go there, they will have a reason - someone told them to boot into another kernel, someone told them to boot into single user mode to retrieve their root password - etc. The instructions they get to do these things can easily include whatever hot key might be needed to bring up grub in the case it doesn't display by default.
If you have no reason to go, why should you go? It's not a particularly pleasant place to be.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 27, 2013 11:17 UTC (Wed) by valhalla (subscriber, #56634) [Link]
Most of the bootloader menus (as configured by default) I've seen in the last 5 years were at most a 5 seconds interruption in the boot process which, if left on their own, started a sane default. They didn't require any knowledge from the user: by the time he had started to worry whether there was something to do the default boot would have proceeded on its own.
The one exception are installer discs, but I hope that somebody who is installing an OS on his computer is able to choose between labels such as "Install" and "Try the system", and ignore
Distribution quote of the week Posted Mar 15, 2013 17:36 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]
I agree with most of what you are saying. However, I think that in cases where, eg, a user is expecting a dual-boot system, or should reasonably expect that possibility, a boot menu can be no problem. But on a system that shouldn't dual-boot, or for users who have no understanding at all what that even means, then yes. turf the boot menu.
Anyway, for any system that can use a boot menu, there are other UI paradigms that can be used to achieve it. Like a hidden boot menu (this is what Windows has) or a menu like most BIOSes: "Press DEL to access the menu". Users who don't need or want that menu need never see it.
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