Re: [tlug] Am I the last to know?

[Attila Kinali <attila@example.com>]

On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:10:40 +0900
Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> wrote:

> I have a certain amount of sympathy with the idea that they don't just want to 
> be blindly following Windows and Mac but want to be doing something new and 
> innovative in the desktop space, and with the idea that if you're trying to 
> innovate you have to try things and be willing to make mistakes and learn from 
> them.

Yes, but there are already many books written on interface design.
Reading them an applying common sense gets rid of the most obvious
mistakes. But unfortunately, the human computer interaction field
is a small fringe field, because the psychologist dont think it's
sexy enough for them to engange (or too much about computers which
are incomprehensible and don't contain a psychology whatsoever),
and the computer scientists think it's not hard enough science
(as if computer science itself is hard science....)


> I think the problem with Ubuntu is that they're so attracted by the new and 
> shiny that they can't actually tell *when* they're making mistakes, and hence 
> can't learn from them.

Yes, definitly. But it's not only ubuntu that makes the mistakes.
When i bought my new laptop, not too long ago, i thought i bite the
bullet and try gnome. Well, still gnome2 at the time. My first impression
was, that many things that i got used to opening a terminal, typing a command
and done with it, took literally minutes to hagle trough menus and wizards
until i figured out that i cannot do what i want (like having my laptop
start up on a fixed ip and only use dhcp when i'm not at my home network).

When debian migrated to gnome3... well... after half a day trying to
get used to it... i uninstalled all gnome packages and went back to
plain X w/o any desktop enviorment... and lived happily ever after.

I really wonder when the OSS desktop guys will finally learn that
computers are about work getting done. A support for the human who
uses it. Not a tool for its own sake. Which also means that the computer
has to adapt to the very human who uses it, and not the other way round.


		Attila "Leave my Linux alone!" Kinali

-- 
Why does it take years to find the answers to
the questions one should have asked long ago?