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

Posted Feb 27, 2004 11:03 UTC (Fri) by hensema (guest, #980)
In reply to: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org) by elanthis
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Nobody can be expected to be familiar with tools you only should use once. It's not like he'll be installing his printer five times a day, every day.

Sadly, the 'not familiar'-argument is used waaaay to often for tools you only use once. Seriously, when I told a Debian user that the Debian installer was too difficult to use, be replied by saying "yes, but you only install debian once". Think about it. Shouldn't the Debian installer be extremely user frienly, simply because it is meant to be used only once?

(substitute 'Debian installer' for about any installer or configurator)

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

Posted Feb 27, 2004 14:23 UTC (Fri) by jorvalho (guest, #2623) [Link] (5 responses)

Not really.

Because "regular" end users should not have to install an operating system.

Nobody ever thinks of having to install windows. At least not your "aunt tillie". It comes with the computer.

If your new computer came with Debian pre-installed, all you had to do from that moment on was upgrade with APT.

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

Posted Feb 27, 2004 14:35 UTC (Fri) by AAP (guest, #721) [Link]

Yes, but how many computers come with Debian (or even RedHat) pre-installed? It's a Catch-22. Nobody is going to pre-install Linux until enough customers demand it, and customers won't ask for Linux because "everyone knows" Linux is too hard for Joe Sixpack.

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

Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:39 UTC (Fri) by tomsi (subscriber, #2306) [Link]

> Because "regular" end users should not have to install an operating system.

This is the ideal world. In the real world - the Windows people end up reinstalling Windows far too often (even when using XP).

I agree that all seldomly used programs should be easy to use, but I don't mind having an advanced mode, letting you do all kind of stuff.

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

Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:50 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (2 responses)

> Because "regular" end users should not have to install an operating system.

But regular users may very reasonably want to add printer access to their system, or add it to a network which already has a printer somewhere.

> If your new computer came with Debian pre-installed, all you had to do from > that moment on was upgrade with APT.

They might just possibly also want to alter configurations of various sorts. The whole point of the article was that tools intended to assist this process far too often make it harder instead.

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

Posted Feb 27, 2004 18:04 UTC (Fri) by jcollardx01 (guest, #13784) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree whole heartedly. As a Linux newbie (who has been reading LWN for about 6 months.) I spent 5-6 hours this week figuring out how to add an application (eclipse) to the KDE menu AND GET IT RUNNING! All the documentation I found just kept repeating how to get it on the menu -- nothing anywhere about different ways to actually get it to run, what parameters to pass where, etc.

I've been programming for 15 years on DOS/Windows boxes, yet it took me this long to get a simple menu item working. If I were to contribute to Linux... It would be on a documentation project.

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

Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:41 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

>If I were to contribute to Linux... It would be on a documentation project.

Then please do... as you can see, it's badly needed.

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

Posted Feb 28, 2004 10:14 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

That's a non sequiter. The Debian user didn't tell you that the problem was that you weren't familiar with it; he told you that it was a minor problem in the long run. Sure the Debian installer should be extremely user friendly, but it takes a lot of work to make a good installer that runs on all the machines Debian installs on. It's also not something that developers use every day. A lot of developers like to work on making Debian better in their day-to-day usage ("scratching their itch") instead of something they rarely see. As a user, as well as a small-time developer, time spent on making things work I use day to day is more helpful then time spent on making something work I use once every couple years.