The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 2:16 UTC (Fri) by eyal (subscriber, #949)
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

I don't know when ESR last used some of Windoze command line tools, or some of the less used GUI tools - they aren't much better than his experience with CUPS. But that's besides the point.

ESR may be right that CUPS, or a multitude of other open source tools, don't have good enough UI, documentatiion, and whatever other parts avergae end-users might need.

However, I think it's better the way it is.

I think it's better that kernel developers, CUPS developers, or for that matter developers of any infrastructure software, remain focused on producing technically best of breed solutions, and leave UI to someone else.

Looking at the Windoze analogy again, M$ licenses many pieces of software from other companies, wraps them in a UI shell and incorporates them into Windoze. Neither ESR nor aunt Tillie would ever have any complaint to the developers of those internal modules, because M$ is the front end.

It is the job of the distributions to pick and choose the pieces they deem to be best, wrap them in installation and configuration shells, provide aunt-Tillie-oriented documentation, support forums, etc.

And indeed, many of the distribution do a fine job, to the point they let average users install a powerful workstation, connect it to a local network, share files and printers with Linux and Windows machines, and do pretty much everything else.

Some people above commented about SUSE's Yast configuration tool, I have good experience with Mandrake from version 8.0 and it's getting easier and better every few months (by now it's easier than any Windows setup...). I'm sure there are many other distributions that can handle print sharing configuration easily and smoothly.

So, let it be this way. It's more efficient to have techincally minded projects remain technically minded, and let distributions do what they do best - build end-user distributions. It's not just technically more efficient, but it also creates a better market structure and provides business opportunities around Linux and free software.

Eyal.