On Fri, 2006-06-09 at 09:22 +0100, Bob Dove wrote:
Compared with 'doze. 'ux is too complicated for a pointy pressy clicky user but I can cope with 'ux and OOo.
Part of that complication is down to unfamiliarity. *nix does some things differently and in a way that is difficult to present in the same way as Windows (I am thinking about things like software installation and drive letters vs mount points here)
A lot of it comes down to the distro of choice...I am betting that a SuSE distro can be configured and operated without ever resorting to a command line, that's even almost doable in ubuntu. One thing that is sort of lacking (YaST aside, but that has it's own problems) is that the GUI tools to do these things aren't always grouped together in the same way that Windows does with its control panel.
God forbid that 'ux and OOo should be clones of doze but 'ux ain't doing much to win doze users over (in my humble opinion of course!) The desktop looks a bit enthusiastic amateur to me
I have always felt that KDE looks that way a bit (I used it with SuSE, at the time the only viable option on SuSE for about the first 4 years of my linux exposure) But I think that gnome looks a bit more polished. Again the distro can have a huge affect on how the desktop is initially presented.
- probably why you guys like the command line so
much! Personally, I'd like an OSX type desktop - seems cleaner somehow - and it works. Of course, now that clever clogs has ported OSX to PC!!!
For me the using the shell doesn't reflect any inherent design weakness in the GUI, it's just that some things are easier or quicker if you can pipe a couple of small tools together. Even in Windows there are a lot of things I do from the Command line because once you understand it they can be done quicker.
for example if you know the name of a service in Windows that you want to stop, going to the command line and typing net stop servicename is quicker than hunting down the services control panel, finding the service in the list and selecting stop from the right click menu
OSX may run on a PC, but you will never get the same Apple experience because that experience is a combination of hardware and software. OSX is easy to use because Apple already know all about the hardware it is supposed to run on and a good percentage of the peripherals are also Apple approved. Put OSX on a PC and it is no better (and in some ways a bit behind) Linux
The Apple GUI may be pretty (and to my mind is one of the better graphical interfaces available) but I still drop down to a terminal quite frequently when I am working on a OSX box.