ParadoX Inc

This is mostly a post I made on the JustLinux forums in response to a question that was sparked from something Linus Torvalds put down in the Gnome Mailing list back in December.

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Till Kamppeter wrote:

>

> Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot

> listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against

> listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing

> than useful to the user.

I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This \”users are idiots, and are confused by functionality\” mentality of

Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will

use it. I don\’t use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long

since reached the point where it simply doesn\’t do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE.

Linus

Thats a pretty arrogant statement in my opinion. The thinking isn\’t \’users are idiots\’ but \’user dont want to reinvent the wheel\’. Most people are not programmers, Linux/Unix admins or even Windows admins. They just want to use something and go on with their business, not analyze and nit-pick everything to death.

Here\’s my post on the forums…hope it makes since to any non-computer person reading this (if so, what ARE you doing reading this??)

True, making things for idiots will bring in the idiots…BUT if the idiots communicate with you and let you know what they are having troubles with, you can fix it and make it better. If Linux was only designed to be used by Linux people then only Linux people will use it and wonder why the rest of the world doesn\’t see things their way. It\’s a two way street and the BS flows in both directions.

What developers need to worry about instead of \”should this be easy to use or easy to configure\” is that they should be asking \”IS this easy to use and what should be done to make it better?\” We don\’t need to throw every option possible at people, but we shouldn\’t hide them all either. People won\’t change something if they don\’t know it\’s there (buried in a .config file somewhere with little to no comments).

Easy to use and pretty is what the future should be for Desktop Linux, OSX should be setting an example of this. Easy to use and nice to look at, it does NOT mean that we should focus on making MAC clones, or Windows clones. It means that we should use what works and build on it.

There is no \”they stole this idea from so-and-so\” argument that holds any water these days. Everyone has mimicked something at this point, look at movies, want to watch something \’original\’? Not going to happen but they can make the same stories more interesting and build on them. Superman is a very good example, it\’s the same story over and over but told in a different way making each of them good in their own way. This is what Linux should be (and is in a way), the Superman of Operating Systems. It only needs to be told in an easier way to understand, what do most people understand more, Kal-El or Clark Kent?

Linux elitism needs to end…and so does Windows elitism and Apple elitism. Choices are good and people should not get so upset when someone makes a choice that is not theirs. If someone has a different view then the one you have, don\’t get bent out of shpe because of it. You don;t need to change your opinion any more then they have to.

Diversity is good, selfishness is bad.