Hi,
Thanks for all the replies, and after having read back over my original post I feel I must apologise for it's bloated length :)
Maybe linux geeks should install mandrake once in a while to see how things are done there?
BenE
This would be great! But at the end of the day the majority of the "geeks" probably don't have the time to do this. Forgive me if I'm off the mark here, but I feel the secret to success of the open source model is that everything that happens is mutually beneficial for all involved. A point that is stressed in The Cathedral and the Bazaar is that none of the rules or social norms in the hacker culture have really been written down and followed as such, the beauty of the whole system is that it just *works*, often without concious implementation.
However, this does pose some problems. The decentralised peer review process works fantastically to a point, but when a product needs something that is outside the requirements of the peers themselves - it becomes unlikely for it to happen. Because the developers are perfectly capable of using a command line interface, they're unlikely to claim a fault in an application being that it has no intuitive GUI that could be picked up and used by anyone.
Now obviously this generalisation does not apply without exceptions, far from it - or we simply wouldn't have XWindows or desktop environments at all! But to really produce something ergonomic and intuitve we need continual evalution by outsiders, non-geeks if you like. The question is, how do you get people with little deep interest in computers to contribute to a programming project without motivations like say money? And also in doing so, would the development model itself suffer or be held back as a result?
(this is email is going to get horribly long again, I can feel it)
The big challenge for open source software writers going forwards is to go out and actively seek input and advice from graphics designers and similar people as well as the many people for whom the computer is just a piece of office equipment, entertainment centre, etc . People who, basically, couldn't give a toss about the software as such but just want a tool to do the job and will ask the awkward questions like "why can't I just switch it on and use it?".
<snip>
Keith
Again, what is the motivation for these people?
In conclusion, there is and will be a place/case for packaged GUI-based distros on the desktop, (although if I were rolling a lot out I'd build one in G2 and clone it), but the lack of a GUI, and text based config files is a major, major advantage Linux has over GUI-based server systems (accepting that on Linux the GUIs edit text files).
Cheers, Laurie.
You use the word "server" here. If you mean server as in web server, file server, print server... then these are all things that will be used by the geeks themselves - people who will perhaps find their productivity slowed rather than quickened by a GUI interface. If that's not what you mean at all, sorry ;)
I'd also like to stress that what I'm suggesting is definately not that the flexibility of a Linux system be compromised by a GUI, in fact everything about the traditional ways of using Unix and all the command line interfaces and source code et al should remain - or it simply wouldn't be Linux. However, it shouldn't be there by *default* when trying to aim the product at the other 95% of the population who don't mind having it all hidden away behind point and click interfaces. What I'm saying is that there should be an easy, intuitive, graphical *option* for those who want/need it.
Here's what I propose. If you're on this list, and you see a text-based answer to a user's problem, and think "that's new, I would have done it with such-and-such a set of dialog boxes/menus instead" (or vice versa,) don't hold back, post your version as an alternative.
What do people think? Might this work? Or am I talking complete rubbish? re.
Great idea Dan, there's usually much more than one way of solving a problem in Linux and where there are alternatives they should be listed. Of course the risk is that by offering too many options you begin to make the original problem look more complicated than it perhaps is! What do people think on this?
Using a GUI-based distro everything comes up sweetness and light with no baffling questions to answer. My impression is there's a huge gulf between the two types of distro. People like me have neither the time nor the patience to trawl endless newsgroups or cryptic manuals trying to figure out what the software is expecting; they just give up and go back to Red Hat / Mandrake / SuSE / Windows. We have work to do and the operating system is pretty much of an irrelevance as long as it runs the applications we need. It'd be nice to learn more about Linux but not if it means stopping work for a month just to even get the distro installed.
-- GT
I think that this is a really fundamental point. It may be that Linux can solve a problem a million times better than the alternatives, but people like *easy* solutions.
To me, if someone has to ask a lot of questions to simply get something to work in the first place, either a) the documentaton is bad or too long or b) the program itself has not been built with the user enough in mind. Perhaps there's also c) the problem is itself by nature a very complicated one that requires a complicated answer. When this is the case, no matter how many pretty buttons you put on top of something - it's use is still going to be complicated because there are so many variations on the answer to the problem. However, this does *not* mean that we can't do our darned hardest to make it as stress free and systematic as possible - the question is, who are the best people to be doing this? If it's not the people who are traditionally involved in developing software, how do we go about getting an outsider to contribute?
Sorry again for the length of my post.
One other thing - I'm very new to the whole Open Source idea myself, and if I'm missing something here then please don't hesitate to contridict me. My opinions are only based on my own experiences and the experiences of a few people around me - but they *have* been experienced so I see no reason why they shouldn't be discussed.
-- Ben "tola" Francis