On Thu, 2005-11-10 at 13:49 +0000, Dave Briggs wrote:
I would have thought that all of the mainstream distros these days are just as pointy clicky in operation as Win98, if the hard bits like installation have already been done?
You'd think this would be the case. However too many people confuse Familiarity with Intuitive.
Windows is NOT intuitive, but it gets described as being easy to use because lots of people have learnt to use it and are now used to that way....The industry calls these people apologists because they know you have to jump though hoops sometimes with Windows..but it's still "easy to use" because they know those hoops.
I suspect if you did a clean room experiment (i.e. with someone that had never used a computer before) Then most mainstream systems (Mac, Windows, Linux) would come out about equal....for every instance where you can describe Linux as being counter intuitive there is an example of Windows being equally difficult and so on.
However Windows in general wins the ease of use battle because it is familiar to a good percentage of the Computing population.
I have seen Windows users become completely lost on an OSX machine despite the fact that it is (to a point) one of the more intuitive systems available.