cups is great and easy to configure

Posted Feb 29, 2004 18:37 UTC (Sun) by ice (guest, #19875)
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

i completely disagree. cups is such a great, flexible and
easy-to-configure and -manage system. what good could that gui-stuff do
if one's literate enough to read a text file and change some lines in it?
if configuring cups is too much hassle for a person well i suggest this
person get a copy of windoze XP, an hp printer an hp jet admin or sth
similar. this combination will do anything this person wants even before
this person even knows what it is she/he might want.
in these times of ever-growing complexity and extremely specialist
knowledge of almost anything in this world i am terrified by an attitude
that demands that computers MUST be the sole island in the middle of all
this complexity where anything MUST work after one click and without any
knowledge of the inner workings of this extremely sophisticated and
complex system. computers by themselves ARE NOT SIMPLE and ARE NOT EASY
TO USE - what might be are the veils other persons cover them with. today
there's systems that are very "easy" to configure, but may be less
flexible, and there's systems harder to configure, but may be more
flexible. if one likes more flexibilty, this person needs more
information, and i think this person must somehow get this information
BEFORE starting to work on the actual problem.

i used to teach a part in sysadmin-classes and was amazed at how (usually
after having absolved the first - usually windoze - parts of the course)
knowledge-free and self-assured the students there started working on a
complex problem: they blindly relied on some "wizards" and were convinced
ANYTHING could be done "intuitively:" "i don't know sh00t about DNS or
whatever a zone is, but surely SOMEWHERE i gotta click the right
mouse-button and it will work...."
not that i want to accuse esr of ANY of this, but my experience with cups
was just the opposite and i think the people of cups and
linuxprinting.org deserve a lot of BIG FAT THANK YOUs.
i had to setup a couple of network printers on with a centralized
printserver in a heterogenous network. took some reading and thinking and
of course i got in moods similar to esr's on the way, but now i know a
little bit about cups and the next setup will be much quicker and easier.
and even though personally i can work better with textconfigs, the webgui
of cups is really cool i think.

cups is great and easy to configure

Posted Feb 29, 2004 21:19 UTC (Sun) by dve (guest, #15903) [Link]

I must agree. Compared with - say - Microsoft's own obscure, unreliable, mendacious and misleading printing subsystem, CUPS is more like a breath of fresh air. Sure, my end-users couldn't add or remove printers under CUPS. But then, they couldn't manage it under Windows either.

At least CUPS provides a straightforward interface that leaves you in no doubt as to what is wrong, when it goes wrong (ESR and I must not be using the same thing) _assuming_ you understand printers and what ails them.

ESR? My only real objection is a fundamental premise of your article: You have assumed that Aunt Tillie knows far more than most computer users do. I'm not sure who _your_ Aunt Tillie is ('Aunt Tillie could handle this just fine.') but I can line up a dozen users from our corporation who have been using computers, and indeed printers, every work-day, all-day for more than eight years who still do not know the difference between a monitor and a mouse, or a laser-printer and a dot-matrix. Many more are still not quite aware that things have to be plugged into other things (power, networks, serial and printer ports) in order to work at all, let alone communicate with other devices.

The most IT-savvy person at my company (aside from myself) plugged an ethernet cable into a PHONE socket, KNOWING that it was a phone-socket, and expected it to work, and was confused when it did not.

And that's about normal. I've worked for a lot of SME's over the years, and there's nothing unusual about that.

Remember, most of our Aunt Tillies don't even _have_ a computer, because they find Apple and Microsoft products far too confusing to set up or use.

cups is great and easy to configure

Posted Mar 1, 2004 13:39 UTC (Mon) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link]

I think you misread Eric's rant.

Indeed, when using a wizard I expect it help me through some less exotic installation options. Having to use a wizard that does not live up to the most basic expectations (i.e., it will simplify some common task for me), is much, much worse than having no wizard at all.

If your software is so complicated it can't be configured with a few mouse-clicks, aunt Tilly probably doesn't need it and doesn't want to know about it, so everybody will be very happy if you just leave it at a simple README: "This software is not for the faint of heart, you really have to know about DNS to be able to do anything useful with it." Some software is intrinsically complicated, and it is okay to ask of users that they invest some time in trying to figure out how to configure and use it. Fine.

If you however distribute a shiny wizard that advertises to be a "DNS configuration wizard" it'd better know about zone transfers and reverse lookups. And know it damn well.

At least it should be able to see that things are not working out the way it planned, and it should tell me, "look, I really cannot help you out here, I'm just a simple wizard, please consult <insert other source of information> for more help".

Frankly, I would have expected some simple administration tasks and problems to have been addressed and dealt with by now, by most distributions (which I think have lot of responsibility on the usability front, if only for including software packages that I suppose comply with certain standards). I can't believe that printing and other such mundane tasks are still a pain in the OSS. This is not quantum gravity, this is getting the bloody printer working.