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Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux)
SearchEnterpriseLinux interviews
Ximian's Nat Friedman. "What misconceptions exist concerning Linux desktops that may be holding back enterprise adoption?
Friedman: The No. 1 misconception is that usability is a major barrier to adoption and that's not true. It used to be. There was a study done recently with a group of 20 users who had never used a computer before. Ten were put at a Windows PC, 10 at a Linux PC and they were given a list of simple tasks like sending an e-mail, surfing to a Web page and the usability results were pretty much the same. The real problem is getting your work done if the applications don't exist." (Found on Footnotes) (Log in to post comments)
Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux) Posted Apr 13, 2004 22:04 UTC (Tue) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link] The idea of measuring Linux usability through using people who have never used a PC before is absolutely preposterous. What is that going achieve? What is that going to tell you? That state of being (never having used a PC before) is going to last for only a few minutes - at the moment the subjects sit down, they will no longer "never have used a PC before" - i.e. they would have begun a learning process, which hopefully will lead to a long, productive and fruitful relationship. And what will they learn? That the PC is a piece of kit that treats them from day one as if they are idiots. Save us all from "usability experts". My guess is that few, if any, of them have actually done a 10.000 or so seat rollout at any time in their careers. I have, and what I learned is that when you treat users with respect and approach them as intelligent beings, most of them will surprise you. When you treat them as idiots, they simply ignore you.
Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux) Posted Apr 13, 2004 23:15 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] I would gather from your comments that your focus is on corporate desktops with experienced users. It seems like Nat and company are focusing more on the non-experienced market and those that are technophobic--which is, from my experience, a very large segment of society. I do, however agree with you that using completely inexperienced users is probably not the best direction--since as you said they are not going to stay that way very long. Usability studies do have a great and useful purpose, as long as the usability goal is aiming at enabling the user to forget that they're using a computer to get things accomplished--they just do it, with minimal invasive thinking about how they're doing it, or what contortions they have to do to convince the machine to do what they want it to. It's when people start being too slavishly adherent to one particular metaphor that things start to break down. (For example, not everything in the world can be fit into the 'paper on a desktop' metaphor as was fashionable early on in the Macintosh world.)
Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux) Posted Apr 14, 2004 3:21 UTC (Wed) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link] the problem with taking users with a little experiance is that they will naturally be better on the system they have experiance with.if they took 20 windows users and put 10 of them on each OS I will bet that they will do better on windows then on Linux (in fact microsoft has sponsered several studies that say exactly that). once the users have experiance on both platforms then you can do a fair comparison, but it's really hard to do that at any point other then no experiance at all.
Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux) Posted Apr 14, 2004 6:11 UTC (Wed) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link] In my mind, the really interesting question is: when you properly train a Windows user, and you properly train a Linux user, which one comes out on top, and which one has the better user experience, especially in the long term? Which one yields higher productivity? Why is the goal to place totally untrained or inexperienced users behind a machine? Why is that thought of as a "target market"? The opening line of the article is "What misconceptions exist concerning Linux desktops that may be holding back enterprise adoption?" - This clearly places the scope of the discussion in the work realm. Now, if you are a truck driver, aren't you supposed to have a truckers' license? At least, in Europe you are. This implies that you have been trained to perform a complex task adequately. Why is PC usage different? Clearly, if training for any platform is too costly with respect to the job you perform, then probably PC usage is not going to do anything to boost your productivity. And at the end of the day, it isn't about using a PC, it is about boosting productivity.It really is not hard to do a usability study on experienced users. Get these unexperienced users. Train them well in the respective platform, to the same level. Now they know where everything is and how everything works in relationship to their job. Oh wait. No need for the study anymore. I have yet to see a "usability study" that was actually usable. Usability engineers fall in the same catagory as telephone sanitising engineers in my book. The real test of a platform's applicability and maturity comes with how easy the experienced user can arrange the interface to suit her needs in a robust fashion? How inviting is the platform to explore and learn? If you run as root all the time, and your platform is not particularly stable, trying out new things will result in crashes. So a (naturally curious) user will swiftly learn that experimenting (i.e. learning) is going to bring trouble, and then doesn't do so anymore. This is further excacerbated by the sysadmin, who doesn't want to come round to fix stuff all the time, so usually a stern talking to will follow. In the enterprise, this usually means "total environment lockdown". All this will keep the user inexperienced, and will breed a strong antipathy towards the computer. On the other hand, a robust platform that invites experimentation and is stable is actually a joy to use for these experimenting users, and the reverse will happen - users will become smarter about how they work, and learn to use the machine to their advantage in ways we, "the experts" probably never thought about. Lockdown, usability, simplification and all that stuff is a symptom of an unstable core platform, and work should be done to increase stability, not to reduce the potential for learning. Haven't we learned anything from Microsoft?
Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux) Posted Apr 26, 2004 18:24 UTC (Mon) by nobrowser (guest, #21196) [Link] which one has the better user experience, especially in the long term? Which one yields higher productivity? Why is the goal to place totally untrained or inexperienced users behind a machine? Why is that thought of as a "target market"?Because not even productivity, let alone better user experience, really We can improve GNU/Linux and other free software to any degree of perfection,
Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux) Posted Apr 16, 2004 5:01 UTC (Fri) by jtc (guest, #6246) [Link] Perhaps useful data could be gathered via an experiment that employs 2n Macintosh users who have never used either Linux or Windows: Have n users try out Windows and n users try out Linux.
Friedman: Expectations rising over Linux desktop (SearchEnterpriseLinux) Posted Apr 14, 2004 7:01 UTC (Wed) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] When somebody claims that a user new to Windows XP is productivefaster than a user new to, say SuSE 9.1, it's scientifically interesting to figure out whether that is because the user starts from a base of being familiar with earlier MS-Windows versions that are more similar to XP, though it's also less relevant to somebody who has a group of users that are already familiar with other MS operating systems (as opposed to coming from being familiar with other Unix-like systems).
Usability is not lacking? yeah right. Posted Apr 14, 2004 13:02 UTC (Wed) by paulpach (guest, #20903) [Link] Sure browsing the web, reading email or writing a document with openoffice is neck toneck with microsoft in terms of usability. However, there are many other things that normal people do on their desktops that are very poor usability wise. Here are two examples: Add a USB mouse to your system: * In Windows you plug the mouse, and it just works, even the wheel. * In Linux, you plug the mouse and go: now what?. No instructions are provided, no hint on what to do, nothing. It turns out you have to edit an obscure XF86Config-4. Same on pretty much every peace of hardware you plug in. Share a file or printer with a windows box: * In windows, open the explorer, locate the file or printer, right click and click share, name the share, check read/write permissions and hit ok. A trained monkey could do it. * In linux, I spent hours trying to share a printer with samba, and I simply gave up and bought a print server. I am sure I could come up with at least fifty use cases where a person who has never used a computer would be completely lost in linux, but could figure it out on windows by looking at windows help and by trial and error. These problems are being addressed, but we clearly are not there yet. So don't say usability is not a problem in linux because you can browse the web, that is very miopic.
Administration may be lacking. Posted Apr 14, 2004 13:25 UTC (Wed) by doodaddy (guest, #10649) [Link] Right. While I agree with your points, there is a difference between administering a box and "using" a box. A techie can complete the installation. After that how easy can an office worker send email, browse, work spreadsheets, etc.? I think major improvements have been accomplished for "use" and that is the point.(Also, my uber-techie friend tell me you can plug in a USB mouse without trouble. I believe he uses Slackware.)
Usability is not lacking? yeah right. Posted Apr 14, 2004 13:48 UTC (Wed) by james (subscriber, #1325) [Link] You'll notice that both of these examples are intrinsically to do with administering a computer. In "enterprise" / business situations, the end user shouldn't be doing that, on Windows or Linux. It's outside the scope of the article. But you make good points, and your examples do illustrate the problem well. If you plug in a USB mouse, on current hardware, you want it to Just Work. There's no particular setup involved. That can reasonably handled at or just above kernel level. (And it is, or will be: the /dev/input/mice abstraction does what you want. Newer distributions should use that automatically). That's easy. But usually, you'll want some user configuration. "Do you want to share that printer? Do you want to use IPP, lpt, or SMB?" (Actually, inside a firewall, the question should probably be "IPP, lpt, and SMB": but getting security right in the face of novice users is not easy.) And both KDE and Gnome are cross-platform: Gnome, on particular, has to work on Solaris. For normal user interaction, Gnome and KDE can assume that they're running on a Posix-compliant system. Unfortunately, hardware administration tends to be different on different Unix-like systems. Which doesn't make it impossible, but getting it right is harder than normal user interaction. We'll probably end up with Gnome and KDE front-ends for hardware configuration, and OS dependant back-ends, which has to be capable of working with users going in and making changes manually. It's going to be an interesting challenge. Incidentally, when dealing with samba, swat is your friend. Make sure it's running, and go to http://localhost:901/ (usually).
Usability is not lacking? yeah right. Posted Apr 14, 2004 15:40 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Add a USB mouse to your systemLinux 2.6.x routes all mouse events to /dev/input/mice, and that's what XFree86 should always be using. As for the mouse wheel, XFree86 should autodetect it. If it doesn't, it's a bug in XFree86, which can and should be fixed. XFree86 is rather an exception that a rule in its backwardness. Hopefully things will improve soon. Share a file or printer with a windows boxYou seem to be confusing Linux with GNU/Linux. There is nothing except hardware access that should be responsibility of the kernel. The rest should be in userspace. Sharing should never happen without user being aware of it. If you don't like the tools to configure the printer, look for other tools and report a bug for the distribution you are using. There is nothing Linux-specific here. It's a function of the desktop environment. It you chose not to use desktop environment or chose an inferior desktop environment (or the distribution chose it for you), be prepared to do things by hand.
Usability is not lacking? yeah right. Posted Apr 14, 2004 18:17 UTC (Wed) by ordonnateur (guest, #6652) [Link] And this is why GNU/Linux on desktops will happen in large enterprises first and filter down to the non-technical home user. Home users and small businesses buy an appliance they expect to just work, large scale buyers allow for support costs, and can see the advantages of a locked down box that dosn't do everything the company dosn't desire. Familiarity at work trickles down to the home, especially when the relatives and friends the home users call to help them out are using Linux.
Usability is not lacking? yeah right. Posted Apr 14, 2004 20:10 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link] You said you had fifty examples, but your two given ones turned out to be just half one:1. USB mouse. in my machine at least (running sid) Just Works. even the other mouse keeps working. Yes, documentation, documentation, documentation (what you said about windows help). You know what would I like? This: . distro changes policy: from now on, every documentation (man, info, /usr/share/doc, HTML help) will be, on instalation of packages, (a) converted to HTML; (b) integrated in a Big Help Index; (c) cross-referenced. . more: in the DE, and in the shell, hooks for context help, pointing to the right place, above. voilą. even better then windows help. the text is already there, what is lacking is the index.
Usability is not lacking? yeah right. Posted Apr 26, 2004 18:53 UTC (Mon) by nobrowser (guest, #21196) [Link] distro changes policy: from now on, every documentation (man, info, /usr/share/doc, HTML help) will be, on instalation of packages, (a) converted to HTML; (b) integrated in a Big Help Index; (c) cross-referenced.You already have that with Debian, if you install dwww (and swish++ for the index). But, of course, not everybody wants it, so it's not installed by default.
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