Fighting FUD with Humor 530
Technophiliac writes to tell us MadPenguin in running a review of "Fighting FUD With Humor" Marcel Gagné's 2nd edition of "Moving to Linux". From the article: "The biggest obstacle is fear. Modern Linux distributions are easy to install and easy to use. Unfortunately, we are constantly presented with messages telling us that it's too hard and that the average person couldn't possibly grasp the complexity. That's rubbish. People aren't stupid and people who use computers learn new things all the time."
Re:It's not that it's hard (Score:2, Interesting)
It's true (Score:5, Interesting)
I knew someone who hand-coded HTML to make web pages around 1997, before HTML-authoring tools were common. And these were pages with graphics and menus. But she was absolutely convinced that she should use Microsoft products because you'd have to be "a computer genius" to use anything else. I couldn't convince her that writing a file in LaTeX was structurally very similar to hand-editing HTML. She had a complete psychological block, and would even get mad at me for daring to use anything else.
Linux is not easy to use..... yet. (Score:1, Interesting)
I love to play with Linux as a toy, but it simply fails as a mainstream operating system for the masses in the current form, even if that includes nice looking GUIs.
You lose! Good day sir!
Re:FUD??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Linux is not easy to use..... yet. (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems to me that Apple so far is the only one that's gotten this message. They made a beautiful operating system based on BSD, and managed to do so while still making a famously user-friendly interface. This gives all the power and flexibility that the most advanced techie could need, but also keeps things easy when they need to be so. I love opening up my powerbook wherever I am, knowing that I don't need to jump through hoops to connect to wifi, and then busting into the root filesystem when things get screwy. All my favorite unix apps work just as well as they do on a linux system (thanks to Fink), and absolutely any device can be connected to it without the faintest headache. Whenever I need to install something new, I just double-click on the
All I'm saying is that the linux community needs to keep more of these compatibility issues in mind when updating the features of the newest release. Stability is certainly an issue worth dealing with, but the os will NEVER be successful until it has the ease of use of os x.
C'mon... if I tried to put linux on my mom's computer, I would never sleep because of all the midnight trouble calls. I love the OS as much as anybody else, but it is simply not practical for the average person..... yet.
Re:not easy enough to install, not easy enough to (Score:3, Interesting)
"And BTW, Gagne might want to update the subtitle of his book, "Kiss the blue screen of death goodbye." I have to use Windows a lot at work. I haven't seen a BSOD in years."
Me neither. That's the author's way of trying to spread a little FUD himself. Maybe it's an attempt at irony.
Re:Let's be HONEST here (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm smart, most of us here are smart, but I'll admit that sometimes I run into the occasional road block where I can't do something in Linux that I can do in Windows.
Linux isn't easy and it's not a pretty shiny desktop OS. Let's just admit that.
By that definition, nothing is easy. Whenever I boot into Windows, I find a load of things frustrating. Same goes for when I'm using my iBook. Where are the multiple desktops? Where is the proper maximise? Where's the decent shell?
Yes, if you learnt Windows or spend most of your time in it, you are going to find Linux more difficult to use. That's true with any combination of different operating systems. You're using that as a stick to beat Linux with, but it's true of any operating system.
Re:not easy enough to install, not easy enough to (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, I agree with you completely. Trying to set up my Hauppauge PVR 250 video capture card in Ubuntu has been torture. After spending 10 hours following *WRONG* tutorials and how-tos, I finally went to the Ubuntu chat room (which was friendly) which directed me to the mythtv chat room (where one person was friendly, but everyone else was a jackass. From-memory transcription:
Him (after I've already solved the problem anyway): "This is for MythTV problems, not setting up hardware!"
Me: "I've been here an hour already working through this problem, and you never complained before."
Him: "That's because I wasn't here!"
Me: "Well, the IRC client didn't show you logging in just now, so you must have been here."
Him: "You have to leave. This is the wrong chat room."
Me: "Fine. Where do I go?"
Him: "I don't know, but not here. Try #ubuntu"
Me: "I did. They told me to come here. And they were right, because now my issue's solved."
Him: "Well, they're wrong and idiots."
Me: "You just told me to ask them for help, and now you're telling me they're wrong and idiots?"
I logged off. But you get the point. The guy was an asshole. The 'official' site of the Hauppauge open source drivers (at least the one Hauppauge linked me to) had blatantly wrong (and internally inconsistant) documentation on how to install it. And, after all that, I can't get any of the TV viewer apps in Ubuntu to actually work!
All I'm trying to do is get a VHS tape and put it in a mpeg2 file so I can burn it to DVD. VHS -> mpeg2. You'd think it was the hardest thing in the world.
(Psst, anybody willing to help, pop me off an email: blakeyrat at gmail)
Re:amen to that (Score:3, Interesting)
It's very nice of you to help people out like that on message boards, and of course if you don't feel like answering a certain question, you can just not answer it.
But there's a certain class of user who will continually post questions that can be answered with 30 seconds of googling. Questions like "Can I use this 1MB SIMM in my P4 box?".
There's where you're wrong. The average person wouldn't even know what to Google for. They wouldn't have the framework of background knowledge to know what search terms were relevant. I teach physics to community college students, and I think in terms of intelligence and education their bell curve is probably pretty similar to the bell curve of computer users in general. Most of them have an extremely hard time figuring out technical information by reading. Most of them, although they're in college, have a reading level somewhere around 9th or 10th grade. Many are immigrants, and English is difficult for them. Many of them just don't have the background to understand lots of technical stuff that would be obvious to a geek, e.g., they don't have any feel for whether the Earth's atmosphere is 10 miles thick or 1000 miles thick. They don't know the metric system, so "1MB" doesn't immediately imply a million bytes to them. They're not stupid, but they're not ubergeeks either, and that's the way most of the population is, too.
Re:It's not that it's hard (Score:4, Interesting)
Now compound that with the notion that Linux is something geeks use, and thats why people aren't switching in great numbers.
Re:HAHA (Score:5, Interesting)
However, just last week a man who's on disabilities for a brain injury (He has little to no short term memory) came in and asked me if I could get him a free operating system. (He wanted Windows XP. He had bought a refurb p3-500 that came with XP, the hard drive bought the farm, and when the guy who sold it to him fixed it he wiped the OS. He said it was only a "trial version until you got your own system". Full of shit, I know.)
Anyways, on a whim I did a quick google for linux distros, caught a wikipedia page that seemed to make Ubuntu out to be what I was looking for.
Now, I've never touched linux, except for playing counter-strike and quake on linux servers. I downloaded an install image, installed it, and voila.
It was beyond easy and it came with everything I needed. I sent the man with the brain injury home with a disk and he came back the next day with a huge smile on his face.
It worked. First time, totally out of the box. Recognized all his hardware, and came with everything he could possibly want. He was acting rather cheeky about the presentation he put together with OpenOffice and was pleased as punch.
So yeah, if the unemployed and brain injured can install and configure and use with great ease a linux distro, I'd say they've finally made that first big step towards main-stream acceptance.
(And now my other Ubuntu box has become my baby. Too bad it won't run half-life 2. Oh well, worry about an install base first, the developers will follow.)
Re:not easy enough to install, not easy enough to (Score:3, Interesting)
At this very moment I am typing with my monitor on it's side. Why? Because my mp3 player crashed windows hard. Never does that in Linux. When trying to perform the 3-key salute to do a hard reset I accidentally pressed some combination that put the whole screen on it's side. Upon reboot (which included a lengthy disk check) the screen is still sideways. So now, my mp3 player doesn't work (with Windows) and my screen is sideways. Great. I sure am glad Windows is easy to use.
One more thing: I had to search for and download the drivers for my sound and video card for the Windows installation. Not for Ubuntu.
Re:It's not that it's hard (Score:3, Interesting)
1. It has a need for package management. To me, this is a fundamental flaw with the design of the operating system. There are other techniques and ideas to handle how software is installed.
2. It requires user input for installing a simple desktop system. It should as simple as boot from CD, click install, walk away cause it will reboot and ask you to create an account when done. This operation should, by default both install and overwrite a previous install without losing/breaking a single application install. This install should also automagically install applications a user would normally expect his/her computer to come with.
3. The formal seperation of System and applications is not very good, see OS X for an example of how to do this properly.
4. It emulates Windows UI design and does it poorly. Configuration requires more knowledge than a traditional user has.
5. For "simple things, like Windows, it treats the User like a moron and does a poor job at it. It shouldn't be "easy" if and only if you find the proper wizard to do it and click the buttons in the right order, it should just work.
6. Any and all error codes should be written colloquial english. They should only notify the user if the User has a good reson to know the error happened.
7. Developing tools for Linux need more work and should encourage developers not use package management as a way to install applications.
8. Linux developers should focus on creating tools, not emulating tools already created. The cooperation of professional graphics artists and UI designers would be extremely helpful. Make whitepapers of the UI before designing the application. You'd be surprised how much it will improve the outcome.
8. Most people don't use Office at home, stop using that as an excuse. On top of this, the ability to read and write office documents, especially ones that newer version of Office can't even read has already been solved.
Re:Let's be HONEST here (Score:3, Interesting)
I did spend at least an hour getting Quake III to work in Linux properly. It still doesn't quite work as well as in Windows.
It's been a while since I used Windows (probably around 2000 or 2001), but I used to run into roadblocks there too. You say you had trouble getting Quake III working on Linux? It took me quite some time to get a decent working TeX installation on Windows. Perl, I seem to recall, was also a little annoying: you could install ActivePerl but every now and then you'd run into hiccups with paths or environment variables. Nothing hard of course, but then there's nothing too hard about setting up Quake III on Linux, it just takes a little time to find all the hoops to jump through.
Of course I understand getting TeX, Perl, Python, a decent shell and terminal emulator (which believe me took quite some effort on Windows) is now a lot easier because Cygwin has matured (it was still a little young and quirky at the time I was using it, and TeX certainly wasn't in the package list initially), but then installing Doom3 on Linux was a hell of a lot easier. Everything has it's quirks and its difficulties - it's all about what you want to do, and as long as your expectations are defined by Windows then clearly Linux will look harder. In my experience, depending on what exactly it is you need to do, Linux and Windows turn about to be about as hard to manage as each other.
Jedidiah.
Re:Whatever! (Score:1, Interesting)
Can't agree more on the usability testing (Score:5, Interesting)
Wonderful, however if you write a regular expression for a non-geek, they will look at you as if you are speaking a foriegn language, which youa re in a manner of speaking. It is toally incomprehensable to them and NOT something they want to learn. To them the ideal search engine is one where you type out, in English (or whatever their native language is) what they want and the computer disambiguates it and finds things.
In other words, geeks have learned to think like computers, and so want tools that are like htat for maximum control. Normal users want computers to learn to think like them, so they have the lowest learning curve possible.
Re:Clearly... (Score:2, Interesting)
Elitist you are NOT, sir (Score:2, Interesting)
90% of people *are* total asshats, as well as idiots. But remember, idiots think that we are idiots. In fact, if there's no difference between the two groups, how do we if we're idiots or not? I mean, if we were idiots, we'd have no way of knowing by virtue of our idiocy.
As for dying sad and lonely... People who despise humanity congregate. As, ironically, do anti-social people. Just remember that most people are best avoided and the trick is to surround yourself with those both likeable and compitent.
Re:It's not that it's hard (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Installing windows XP asks you some questions too. Stuff like timezone is very important to set right, otherwise the time server will set your computer to the wrong time. Most people don't know what time zone they are in. Also, once installed, windows does very little, doesn't even have drivers for most of my hardware, and can't connect to the internet to download them, because my NIC doesn't have drivers either.
3. I'd much better go with the windows model, of lump everything together and let programs put stuff where ever they wish. Also, let the users put their files whereever they want to. Also, ensure that all the settings for both the operating system and the programs are in one big, easily corruptable file, so that if some program wants to wipe out the registry, then it can.
4. Nobody knows how to configure a windows computer either. The fact that you have to use a GUI for it means that all the useful settings are hidden in the registry, and the stuff that's in the GUI is just the minimal that it thinks people can understand, 80% of which they can't.
5. I don't ever recall my linux box treating me like a moron. It always asks lots of questions to make sure its doing what its supposed to be doing. Presenting the user with no options, and just doing a bunch of stuff you assume they want to do is a bad thing.
6. The user should always know when something goes wrong. To a certain point at least. Assuming the user has no idea what the error means, and therefore not tell them about it is just a bad idea. Sometimes computer errors require the use of computer terms to explain what went wrong. Also, I thought #5 just said linux treats people like morons. Now we are saying it is too complicated, and doesn't use plain english that everyone can understand?
7. Package management tools are the best way to install applications that require dependancies on other applications. If you want to code your own application, and include all the libraries that the application needs with the application, then you can go ahead and do that. Firefox, OpenOffice and Netbeans all use this method for installing, and they work pretty well. But it shouldn't be the only option available to all application developers, nor should it be pushed on them.
8. Pretty much all tools 99% of people need have been created. When it looks exactly like the windows counterpart we get bashed for not being innovative enough. When we do something like GIMP, we get bashed because it is too different. GIMP is a great interface. If you start out using it, all the other graphics packages seem weird and confusing to you.
8. I'm not sure what comes after 8 either. Anyway, reading and writing office documents is still a big problem, even with Openoffice. They are usually legible, but tables usually stick outside the margins, and many other formatting problems exist as well. Everyone I know has office at home, simply because that's what people expect you to use. Most of them don't pay for it, and frankly, I don't think Microsoft cares.
Re:It's not that it's hard (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny you mention agony, I know alot of people are more open to consider an alternate OS after going through the agony (or expense) of dealing with spyware. I work at a PC repair shop (reason I"m posting anon) and I can't stand it to see the people who only use their PC's to read e-mail and surf the internet paying upwards of $80-$150 to get them cleared of spyware (only to see them bring em back in a matter of months despite our best efforts to leave them fully protected and educated).
so why go to Linux? I'd say folks fed up with spyware and who just need to check e-mail, surf the web, and play online poker are great audience.
Re:amen to that (Score:4, Interesting)
After searching the internet for a while, I came across a post that was posted on some OpenBSD focussed site, and I was in luck. Someone had posted almost the exact question I was looking for. The exchange went something like this:
And it pretty much ended there. Now, maybe there is some security theory that I'm ignorant of here, but the whole thing just seemed... absurd. The site seemed to be set up for the sake of discussions on OpenBSD and such, the guy asking the questions was polite, and the guy answering was supposed to be an expert. I'm not an uber-geek, but I'm not exactly computer-illiterate either, and it seemed like, even if it's a dumb question, it's not so dumb that it doesn't warrant addressing.Ok, so I guess I'm not adding anything to the discussion, except to say that I know what you mean. There are lots of good, helpful folk out there. Gentoo forums come to mind as a place where I've looked for problems, even on a non-Gentoo machine, and just thought, "god, this is a lifesaver". But sometimes, it's just hard to find answers, even when you know the answers are out there. I've secure shelled into servers that've jailed me before, and yet I've never gotten an answer to this question that actually made sense and worked.