by Lawrence Wade:
[About: Linux 
] [catsandcoffee.org ] [mail]
Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet.
Here's why.
DISCLAIMER: I love Linux and the various open-source desktop metaphors and applications which are out there. I use them daily. But we have to stop kidding ourselves that these are ready for Joe Sixpack to use at his cubicle for anything more than the simplest of tasks.
Since I posted this out of frustration a few months ago, I've been utterly inundated with e-mail.
About 50% is flames from developers telling me that I'm an asshole because "Linux has [vi or emacs], the greatest word processor in the world!" (The scary thing is that these people actually seem to think that Joe Sixpack is even gonna be able to bring up the help screen, let alone save his work.). I think we need developers of user-space applications to spend a lot more time on looking at consistency with other applications, matching The Competitor's software feature-for-feature, and actually consulting with people who are artisitically inclined before making UI decisions. ("artistically inclined" != home-drawn anime posters on the walls. Note this screenshot from the otherwise very good AVI Preview which demonstrates that this blight of tacky and idiotic UI design isn't exclusive to Linux.)
[...]
Read the rest of Lawrence Wade's article on his page at http://www.glowingplate.com/dissent/
A posting from /., releated to Lawrence' article:
Re:Dad and the other desktop users... (Score:2)
by Tackhead (54550) on Wednesday February 05, @07:17PM (#5236251)
www.glowingplate.com/dissent [glowingplate.com]
w00t.
That's the best summary of the problem I've seen yet. I'm also glad to see you cover the "telnet to the workstation and kill the process that ate X" solution. The fact that (unlike Windows) the underlying OS remains up and running is irrelevant — if the end user doesn't have another workstation and a LAN handy, they still have to reboot, just like in Windows.
That the user ends up having to reboot because they mouse-clicked elsewhere on the screen, with a drop-down Bookmarks menu present, while Netscape 4.x was trying to render a gobby page of HTML with too many layers of nested tables does not mean that web designers who code for IE are "evil", or that Mozilla is better than Netscape and they should be using it instead. It means that end users will go back to Windows and IE.
