On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 12:29:01AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
One of the great things about Linux is that things stay configured how you left them...I hope in the quest for ease of use and ease of installation that always remains the case.
Yes, but there is a tendency now in the more GUI based distributions to make the configuration (to my mind at least) more hidden and complex. I found that SuSe for examle was configuring things without me realising it at times, and more importantly it wasn't obvious (to me anyway) how to configure certain things because it wasn't at all explicit as to what things did.
Me too, I understand what Brett is saying that sometimes it is quicker, but that's only true if you know the filename of the application you are want. To somebody who is using it for the first time what's intuitive about typing "oowriter" to launch a Word Processor ?, Even after the first time why should I have to remember that my Word Processor is called oowriter and not just writer or OOWriter ?
Why is it any more intuitive to click on a (usually uninterpretable) icon? You have to learn what the icons mean just as much as you have to learn what words mean.