Yes. And yes.

I have no idea if I want Gnome or KDE. Can I switch between them? Why doesn’t my distro simply pick one for me and let me know that there is another option if I want it?

WindowsXP has a great installation system. I think the only thing I need to tell it is what timezone I am in-- and it does this so that I don’t have to reset at daylight savings time each year! SuSe 9.3, on the other wrist, asked me to pick every damned option it could think of- how the hell should I know?!

Thing that bugs me most: I have a 4 button trackball. Under “mouse options”, I can choose what kind of mouse I have, but not what the buttons do. Also, I still haven’t figured out how the hell to install software...

This rant has been a bit incoherent. Sorry about that. Am working on a paper just at the moment. My time and energy is going to questions about war and peace, I have only minimal energy to spare for matters of system maintenance...

Bravo, Asa, for having the gumption to speak out on this level about the challenges for Linux! I hope that your voice carries enough weight behind it to effect change in the Linux community.

Seeing how you dig into Ubuntu, I’d love to see what you’d have to say about most KDE-based distributions. Even with Ubuntu’s “you shouldn’t ever need the command line” philosophy, it’s ironic that most of the instructions on their FAQ instruct using the command line.

Sadly, since open source is largely done by volunteers, it seems like most of the people who would develop the ease-of-use interfaces would be the folks who don’t need it, and therefore they won’t get done. Unless of course a company actually pays developers to do it. Maybe this is why there’s no real alternative to Quicken or Money on Linux, where the general Regular Linux Person attitude is, “Whoa, you have a financial life?”

Again, wonderful series of posts!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage

Why Choose a wife or life partner while we're at it?
Aren't arranged marriages just fine for "Regular People".

Why have menus at McDonalds. Don't most "Regular People" just want a big mac anyway?

Why not make all cars automatic, for the "Regular People"?

Why stop there, let's standardize the entire world by a single focus group driven consumer tested standard???

I mean, isn't that what the regular people really want?

Did you ever stop to consider that maybe Linux shouldn't bend to people that aren't meant to use it, and that maybe these people should instead sharpen their computer skills and rise to the occasion of using such a simple, robust and powerful system?

There are other systems they can use, not the least of which is Mac.

If you are just looking for the ultimate system where Firefox and Mozilla products can be shipped defacto with the hardware, and have this dying urge to piggy back it on the a Linux OS, then MAKE ONE, and spare us this BS.

Beer,
It may be robust and powerful, but it ain’t simple. Come to think of it, your restaurant analogy isn’t a bad one at all:
Every restaurant you go into has a whole bunch of ingredients in the kitchen. What the end user is presented with is a menu of options for how these ingredients might ultimately be prepared. Now, if someone wants something not on the menu, they can ask the chef for it, and it shows up on their plate. Almost no one does this...

Can you imagine for a second what would happen if Asa's dream came true and there was ultimate binary compatibility on the platform, and linux "sold out" on the desktop?

Adobe comes in with it's full product line, the non-loki game companies come in, all these huge companies come in with huge cash for closed source linux products, and it turns into windows, because that's where these devs come from.

That's Asa's ultimate future, that's what lies at the end of that road.

Here's Linus on binary driver compatibility from a couple years ago

http://seclists.org/lists/linux-kernel/2003/Dec/0340.html

"I occasionally get a few complaints from vendors over my non-interest in
even _trying_ to help binary modules. Tough. It's a two-way street: if you
don't help me, I don't help you. Binary-only modules do not help Linux,
quite the reverse. As such, we should have no incentives to help make them
any more common than they already are. Adn we do have a lot of
dis-incentives.

Linus "

Linux is the ultimate free, learning system, where "almost everything" is shared and open source. In the world Asa wants to create, I'm seriously afraid that will almost all disappear, and that the good qualities that made people download and try Linus's new OS in the 90's will be gone to end user, circuit city commercialism.

Linux is growing, and it's growing on the desktop slowly, but I think that's a good thing. As a wise person once said, lasting change never happens quickly, only in small steps. For people in general to truly migrate and learn the way the linux system operates, and for them to appreciate UNIX like systems like linux, will take a considerable amount of time without ruining it, and turning it into something else.

*rolls eyes at Beer*

The first comment made by Andrew Cory was perhaps the whole issue in a nutshell. Linux needs to get to a point where it 'just works'. Easily, smoothly, and preferably a lot more streamlined than it is now.

And to the extent of Linux being the 'ultimate free' anything -- it is only free if your time is worth positively nothing... sorry, but its true.

(for the record, I am happily typing this from KDE in Suse 9.3 - it is quite possible to love Linux, and, at the same time, not be so blinded by religion that you can see its faults and where it desperately needs to improve...)

"And to the extent of Linux being the 'ultimate free' anything -- it is only free if your time is worth positively nothing... sorry, but its true."

This kind of freedom

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0596002874.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Good book, to an extent, so is "Just for fun", though I can't claim to have read it completely yet.

Beer,

I don't think Asa is saying that all options should be removed. Have you looked at the Firefox options screen? At the extensions and plugins? More customization than you can shake a stick at.

Lets apply this philosophy to Linux. Hide the complexity under a nice shiney, polished, easy to use hood.

Hell, if Asa has got anything to do with it, it will have *more* options to configure, and they'll be nice and easy to use and roll back if you don't like them.

Imagine going to some advance settings, seeing the option "Swap KDE for Gnome" "Swap Firefox for IE" stuff like that.

Groovy.

john.e.boy

Is it that difficult to try both KDE and GNOME? Well you choose one, you try the other, and stick to one of them. You will anyways want to have both since you might need KDE apps in GNOME and the other way around.

bottom line:
As long as Linux desktop is growing, means that Asa is not entirely right.

I never really undersood why installers (be it Linux on one end, some MS apps on the other end) don't present a menu for the user to specify the customization that he might want during the install process. Something along these would be nice:

1. Typical Install (for novice users)
2. Typical Install with limited user choice
(Click on the following items to expand user choice)
- User interface (screen, mouse, language, etc.)
- Communication
- multimedia
- Security
et al
3. Expert Setup (full customization)

Asa,

I think you're dead on. The RP Linux distros could learn a lot from what Apple (and NeXT, before them) did to the Unix UI: you barely notice that there's a Unix underneath. [And you actually have to search fairly hard the first time to find "Open Terminal". ;-)]

The beauty (and downfall, for RP) of the Linux ecology is that everyone has almost all the tools necessary to create their own distro.

So, maybe you should trademark "RP Linux(tm) - Linux for Regular People" and start trimming away, so we get the Firefox of Linux and not the Winnebago of Linux (vis-a-vis the Firefox(bird) vs. Winnebago comparison of FF to Mozilla SeaMonkey).

Cheers,

Christian

Beer, I think you would (& will) find that a distro which really managed to cut out the unnecessary mess of prefs and apps, and was marketed as such, will turn out to be a real success and would quickly rise to the top of Linux distros. Just look at how quickly Ubuntu has become popular, and that's without actually reaching the target of being truly simple and hassle-free.

The dooms-day scenario you're painting above wouldn't happen, since there will always be free (& open source) software to compete with any commercial software that decides to enter the Linux market in a serious way. Also, all the mega-geeks will always have a near infinite amount of omni-tweakable distros to play with, since basically all distros of today are of that nature.

"As long as Linux desktop is growing, means that Asa is not entirely right."

I'm afraid you're probably wrong. The Linux desktop is still at such low numbers that any growth is most likely still just a few more geeks daring to make the switch.

Make a simple Linux distro, fine. It's definitely needed if home users are ever going to use Linux. However, make sure the geeky distros don't get any less complicated. I love Gentoo for the fact I can change anything and everything. I can fiddle with every single preference for everything, and I prefer to use the terminal to most apps :D

Gnome 3.0 is supposed to be fixing all these problems from what I've seen. It doesn't have 8 media playing programs in the menu, because it doesn't have programs any more, or folders for that matter, everything is hidden behind abstractions.

It's what convinced me to switch to KDE, same as Windows XP's dumbed down UI convinced me to switch to Linux.

"Is it that difficult to try both KDE and GNOME?"

No, but it's difficult to know what that actually means to start with. If you ran an installer and it asked you which if you'd rather have "Ping" or "Pong", would you risk a choice (not knowing what either entails) or exit as quickly as possible?

If you're a geek, you might go ahead and make the choice. If you're not, the choice will most likely scare you and you'll be worried about picking the wrong thing. At this point, most normal people will give up and may not consider trying again in the future because "it's too complicated and I don't understand".

Let me simplify the answer to this question, when installing "the Internet" and given a choice of modems to select, my father turned the PC off. These are the people that make up the largest market share and these are the people that don't want the choice between desktop environments (as if they'll even know what that means).

Asa isn't saying that all configuration should die and no distros should be complicated. For a start, that could never happen, but the problem is that there isn't one, single distribution that caters to normal people.

Pushing a Linux distribution further in the usability direction isn't going to somehow strip your advanced geeky distributions of everything you love, it's going to make a **distribution** of Linux viable for normal people.

Market share IS important, because Linux needs to matter on the desktop in what we call "the real world" before hardware manufacturers and retailers start taking it seriously. You pride yourselves on Linux being "a choice" or an alternative to Microsoft Windows, but by deliberately stating that you don't need more users, you're only making it worse for yourselves.

I spent most of this morning escaping GNOME, looking for something simpler. At first I thought I was happy with GNOME but then I got restless. I tried a bunch of different window managers, but found out that Ubuntu is not very friendly when you break out of the default desktop model. Tiny fonts, malfunctioning apps and window misbehaviour... I liked IceWM the best out of the dozen or more window managers I chose, but couldn't for the life of me fix the fonts, which stayed miniscule no matter how much I increased font values in configuration files and dialog boxes. Simplicity, please! I'll go with a standard, too, just please make this a bit easier for people like me.

I think a lot of Linux geeks confuse complexity with customizability. This is not the case. I can configure many things in Windows, but they are neatly organized and hidden from Regular People. The defaults are appropriate for Joe Average. And if I need to tweak really low-level options, I can adjust registry settings. The lesson for Linux: software can be powerful, but simple as well. The OS should not spam the user with things they are least likely to use.

"Did you ever stop to consider that maybe Linux shouldn't bend to people that aren't meant to use it, and that maybe these people should instead sharpen their computer skills and rise to the occasion of using such a simple, robust and powerful system?"

Ahh the eternal engineers lament. Asa is covering what will make Linux more able to become a viable os in the marketplace. Not what will make it the coolest OS evar. People simply won't learn Linux, not just regular people, the vast majority of people regular and otherwise.

Asa's whole point in these is that Linux needs to be more intuitive to people who grew up or learned first on Wintel platforms. There is a difference between making a marketable product and the best product possible. Asa isn't claiming that these changes will make the OS better to a person fully versed in both Linux and Windows. But they will make the crucial transition people bearable for mid level end users who are curious about trying Linux but whom get scared off by unfamilliar system architecture.

A common complaint against Asa has been that the AOL grandma crowd is hopeless anyways. Thats most likely true unless they learn on Linux first, which almost no one does. The real place where Linux has the potential to make inroads are people who are reasonably competant with PCs but who hate MS, there are alot of them. Switching to a new OS will always be painful, you just need to lower the pain level to the point where it doesn't drown out their antipathy for MS.

This isn't to say Linux needs to be a Windows clone. No one needs another OS/2 Warp on their hands. Instead what Linux needs to do is make the transition inutitive between the two systems. Figuring out how to do that is a pain in the ass. In the beginning you want to make it similar enough that Windows users can follow along and learn the differences. Christ maybe even a less annoying version of the Windows paperclip might be in order. You just need to avoid the moment where the new user just sits back clueless and wonders "what the fuck do I do now?" MS has an organic advantage here b/c there is a world of help desks, family and friends, and 10x more websites setup to tutor Windows users. Not nearly as much for Linux users. So the key is to avoid the what the fuck moments as much as possible by guideing along the new user as much as possible.

Much easier said than done, and most distros have attempts at it. But no one does it really well yet. So it scares off alot of prospective converts. I'm not sure the best way to fix the problem. But there is definitely a problem that needs to be overcome if Linux ever wants to be more than a niche product limited to server farms and computer geeks.

The comment by Andrew Cory strikes me with some irony:

"WindowsXP has a great installation system. I think the only thing I need to tell it is what timezone I am in"

Given that one of the most frustrating things I find about installing Windows is that it seems to require that it be told what country I am in half a dozen times. Pick your localisation settings -- English (Australian) -- three times, then set it as the default and hit Apply. Only then can you remove the US English language, as otherwise it's "in use" by setup.

Then we come to the Time Zone selection, and instead of sensibly defaulting to one of the 3 Australian time zones, I default to GMT-8 (from memory?)???! Trawl through a ridiculously long list looking for correct time zone.

I recently had the pleasure of doing an OS X installation which gets this one right. I tell it what country I'm in, and all the localisation and time zone defaults go to sensible ones for that country. The way it should be.

Here's to hoping the various Linux distros don't make you jump through hoops if you live anywhere outside the USA...

I fully agree with things mentioned here (more than any of your points), though I wouldn't like to take Microsoft as a standard of simplicity. Actually, MS Office is just an example of how interface should not be built. Windows is a bit better.

Beer, dude, come on! Your reasoning above is lamer than lame! Can you actually really mean what you say? Have you opened your mind and actually considered a word that anyone else is saying? Don't be so extreme, man, with loose metaphors that add nothing to the discussion. Do this for me: Do a search on Human Interface Design. Read some of the good stuff that comes up - there's a particularly good set of guidelines on some KDE linux related site, I forget where. Asa's not talking about removing all the wonderful configuration options, he's talking about hiding them from the user that DOESN'T want to see them. You're a power user, click the little checkbox during install that says "I am a big geek and want to have all options available". Most of the rest of us will glibly ignore the little box, and will have just enough options to satisfy us. There's a study on toothbrushes available for sale, that found once more than 3-4 products were available the given consumer was actually less likely to buy ANY of them! Strange, huh? hmmmm, wonder why that might be? Seriously, think about it. Does that make sense to you? If not, it's probably important to try and figure out before commenting on a phenomenon you clearly don't understand.

For anyone who hasn't read it, this is one of the best critiques of the Linux user experience (Ubuntu specifically) that I've ever read:

http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/04/11/ubuntu

Because Firefox is the default browser for Ubuntu 5.04, he also dishes on some of the clunkier Firefox features.

And it is true that, at the moment, Ubuntu 5.04 is "as good as it gets" in terms of easy-to-use Linux. I'm hoping they continue this trend and continue to make Ubuntu fast, lean, simple, and difficult to break accidentally.

When women and minorities first began entering job markets that had traditionally been dominated by white men, there was a widespread feeling that they had to be "twice as good" as those white men in order to gain any kind of acceptance.

Apparently the same is true of Linux; Windows throws the same sort of complexity around the Start menu, but because "people are used to Windows" that's OK.

That, and some of your complaints are a bit spurious; you're upset that it has some games installed?

And since Asa has taken the opportunity to bash [heh] the "open terminal" in the Ubuntu desktop context menu, I'd like to retaliate with an offtopic story about my mother-in-law.. dialup always connecting at 28k, one phone line, cellphone doesn't work indoors, and I'm tech support. She's been on Firefox since 0.9. She likes to browse for furniture, wall paper, theater reviews. She likes to scan photos and upload them to printing services. She's a smart cookie. Poorly designed web aps are her biggest problem.

But this one killed me -- "I accidentally hit something on the keyboard and now none of the pictures are loading!" So I talked her through Tools->Options->Web Features, assuming the "Load Images" box had mysteriously unchecked itself. Nope, it's checked. And "for the originating site" was uncheck as usual. So what's up?

It never occured to me to have her click the "exceptions" button because I knew she had no desire to use that feature and no idea it even existed. It's properly buried in the dialogs, like an advanced option should be. But half an hour later, running out of things to try, we're back in Web Features and I tell her to click Exceptions. Presto, the web site she was on is there in the exception list. Did she type in the address and click "Block"? Of course not. Because it turns out you can also add the current site to the exceptions list by right-clicking on an image and selecting "Block images from..." Eh? Is this a feature used often enough that it belongs in the context menu? Worse yet, it has a quick-key, so all you have to do is right click on an image and hit "g", and presto, instant mother-in-law-bafflement.

My request: Leave this advanced option buried and don't include a shortcut for getting to it! And just to be extra-sweet to me, have the "Exceptions" button list the number of exceptions currently defined.

While we're at it, how many times a day do you folks decide you want to set your wallpaper to an image you find on the web? Probably, not very many.

Thanks for a hell of a browser, by the way.

There may be an interested and enthusiastic niche who will listen to Asa's and Asa-like rants about usability and create a *single Linux distribution* that is exactly how Asa and other likeminded usability enthusiasts envision it.

There is no need to change the entire community to realize this kind of vision. Simply getting enough interested and enthusiastic people together to scratch this itch is what's needed. The rest of the non-interested Linux community can go about their business as usual. Everyone wins. If someone wants to make "Regular People" distribution -- more power to them. This is not a good reason to complain to (and about?) those people who do not make this their main goal in life. There are some people for whom developer is really the main user and they strive to make the OS developer-friendly. The same thing that is friendly to the "Regular User" can turn out to be developer-hostile. At the end of the day, these "befriended" developers can then turn around with user friendly software.

In other words, user-friendliness is a layered process. From kernel down, the system should first and foremost be developer friendly. Then the befriended app developer should be friendly to their user and so on. There are probably more than 2 layers there.

So the picture is not 0 or 1, black or white. I often wish software was friendlier to my needs, but I am not a "Regular User" and I often find "Regular User-friendliness" to be getting in my way.

I saw a screenshot of Linux (Redhat) for the first time, And It actually looks very well put together, I always thought of linux being a bunch of complicated code, a very bad gui for really hardcore nerdy people that compiled it everytime they wanted to do stuff like listen to music.. But I would want to try it out.. since I've been using computers for a while, the basics would pretty much hit me in the head, like the first time I seen a computer with windows...

Having tried various flavours of Linux I can't agree more with you Asa. I'm a computer programmer...and I know all about dlls, registry settings, compilers, etc, etc...but I still find installing and configuring Linux to just 'surf the net' way too hard (sometimes impossible). Part of the problem is drivers (which you don't seem to mention), and part of that can be blamed on manufacturers not making linux ones. But the much larger part (as you rightly point out) is to do with Linux itself. 12 text editors...10 different programs to configure my wireless settings...random UI crashes with no real explanation as to what's going on...and don't even get me started on the worst one of all - installing programs. I'm sick of Linux people whinging about how they don't want auto-installers, just look at the way things are installed on the Mac, and even windows platform - smooth and painless 99% of the time. And like Asa says, if you want options up the ying-yang, fine, just hide them from me - and I'm not even a Regular User!

Ubuntu is my own favorite distribution, but it seems to me that others, like Xandros and Linspire (formerly Windows), are a lot closer to what Asa's looking for, and have been for a while. I prefer Ubuntu because I feel it's technically better and doesn't get in the way of power users while still being elegantly put together, but it's not a hand-holding OS with wizards and lots of gui config tools and installer.

They aren't quite as Free as Ubuntu but they do offer no-cost versions that aren't seriously crippled. They'd probably get more support if a large portion of existing Linux users didn't WANT the features Asa thinks should be stripped away.

Screenshots:
Linspire, starting from install:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=293&slide=3
Xandros, launch menu showing Internet apps:
http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=247&slide=63

Um, make that first line read: "...like Xandros and Linspire (formerly Lindows)"

Heh.

I have yet to see how Ubuntu is any better or easier than Fedora Core or SuSE.
It's hard to get any easier than the new SuSE.

I think the incredible video player VLC (www.videolan.org) has a very nice solution for all of you.
By deafult, they offer basic configuration when you go to preferences, BUT if you want much more professional options, you just tick the "advanced options" box and you can change more or less anything about the program... You'd just have more options on each configuration tab.
For some programs, I don't need advanced settings (Kaffeine, Mplayer, Amarok...) but for some, I'd want to get hardcore on the preferences (KDE's window settings, Matlab...).
I think the "Advanced Options" tick can be great solution for all of us.

p.s. I don't know if VideoLan were the first to implement such a system... My apologies to the ones that did, if they're not VideoLan:)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage

Why Choose a wife or life partner while we're at it?
Aren't arranged marriages just fine for "Regular People".

The Divorce Rates in countries still practicing "Arranged Marriages" is much lesser that those where it isn't practiced!

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/peo_div_rat

For a stable and successful relationship between "Regular People" and a user friendly Linux is essential, else divorce is imminent!

Ubuntu Rocks!!!

I've just installed Ubuntu 5.04 on Intel Celeron 300 MHz system and it rocks.
It recognized my sound card Diamond Mounster Sound MX 300 - other Linux distros like Debian 3.0 r4, Knoppix 3.9 (and older distros like Mandrake 9.1) didn't recognize this card. Secondly Ubuntu installer recognized my USB cable modem, which is better than Windows 2K - I had to install driver from CD in order to use this modem under Windows.
The only drawbacks so far (I have been using it only for couple of hours) is that Gnome doesn't automtically mount all of my partitions, and istallation process is longer than other distros (apart from Debian) - above 1 hour.

Even update of Firefox is easier than in Windows, you onle have to click 2 times with your mouse.