Re: [tlug] Holy smokes, Unity and Gnome 3 suck worse than I ever could have imagined.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Scott Robbins writes:

 > [Steve Jobs said:] You have a box.  You drag the file to the box
 > and click, and there's an option to burn to disk.
 > 
 > Which, for the vast majority, is good design.   We have to remember that
 > those of us to whom the computers are more of an end, rather than a
 > means to an end, look at these things differently than said majority.

Er, that's good design, period, when it's good design.  It's the GUI
equivalent of a pipe.  It provides One Obvious Way To Do It.

I've burned a lot of discs on my Macs, and I have yet to miss the CLI
of mkisofs and cdrecord.  Now, it so happens that all the discs I've
burned on my Macs have required at most three drag-and-drops.

On Linux, I don't think I've ever used any of the interesting options
of those programs, and of course most defaults are wrong (eg, who
*doesn't* want Rock Ridge extensions?) and you have to supply /dev
paths for the hardware.  For most people it's /dev/cdrw or something
easy like that, but still....  It's not that I can't imagine using the
flexibility of the plethora of options, but in fact I never have.

On the other hand, I know *why* it's very hard to implement the
simplicity of the Mac interface on Linux.  I have used "find" as a
front end to mkisofs.  I have burned discs on hardware that cdrecord
-scanbus can't find.  I value those things as *features*, even though
they tend to get in the way of simplicity on modern hardware.  Still,
I admire the simplicity of the Mac interface in most cases, and only
in a few cases does it get in my way (unlike on Windows).