[H-GEN] LINUX GAZETTE ARTICLE

Martin Pool mbp at wistful.humbug.org.au
Fri Aug 7 23:39:31 EDT 1998


On Sat, Aug 08, 1998 at 12:22:07AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:

> Martin's already covered the philosophical points raised by the article,
> so if I may delve into the shallows of technical detail that were
> provided...

Did you agree?

I suppose the most important philosophical point, for me, is that
people saying ``Linux must do this'' or ``Linux must do this if it
wants a mass market'' are fairly annoying.  Some people are perfectly
happy with a geek-friendly interface, and there's nothing wrong with
that.

We should listen to and think about what he says, but it doesn't
necessarily mean we have to change direction.

> On Thu, Aug 06, 1998 at 05:43:53PM +1000, Frank Brand wrote:
> > Installing Linux puts you at a $ or # prompt
> > with no clue of where to go afterwards. 
> 
> That's crap.

I know.  I can't help wondering whether he installed a distribution
from about 1890.

> The Debian install puts you at a "login: " prompt, after about ten lines
> explaining what you've got to login as.

And RedHat, for better or worse, puts you in a GUI that looks a lot
like W95, including a start-menu listing and categorising all the
programs installed on the machine, and running a copy of Netscape
pointing to more resources.  And this will only get better when RH &
Debian start shipping GNOME.  

(Which, by the way, is just the _best_ designed toolkit I've seen for
a long time.)

Personally, I don't like fvwm95 very much, but I think it's an
excellent default: anybody sophisticated enough to want to get rid of
it probably knows how to.

> > I'm a Novell CNE with many years
> > experience working with PCs and networks, so I'm not daunted by a
> > non-intuitive prompt.

> Forgive me while I scoff, but `intuitive prompt' is pretty much an
> oxymoron.

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple.  After that, it's all
learned."  (Someone on c.o.l.advocacy.)

The fact is, what gets measured gets done.  The important thing to
most OS/FS developers is self-satisfaction: making sure their machine
doesn't fall over, that it runs fast, that they have good tools, and
so on.  The important thing for M$ is getting more beginning users to
pay their $195: the stability and performance need to only be
adequate.

So, it's important that people _can_ work out the W95 interface by
playing with it, and it's important that people can control and manage
and customize their open source software.

One thing making Linux address the new-user market more seriously is
that RedHat would like a share of those new users, and so they're
putting time and money into helping GNOME get off the ground.  The
other, I suppose, is that individual users would like to get it onto
the boxes of their non-technical colleagues, friends and relations.

> Forgive me, but buying a CD and hoping that you'll be able to just try
> out this Linux thing without thinking any further just strikes me as
> totally naive. 

'Dynamics of Software Development' says that in one release, the M$
Money developers' goal was to give the customer satisfaction within
ten minutes of opening the shrinkwrap.  They looked at how the box was
laid out, the way the manual worked, the way the install procedure
worked, the startup wizard, and the user interface.  People probably
didn't have to read the manual, or at least no more than a small
brochure.

It's a very nice example of running a whole-product development
process.  It really is an excellent result, on the dimension they 
were measuring.

_If_ Open Source software wants to appeal to that market --- and by no
means all developers do --- then that's the sort of question they have
to look at.

> Either:
> 	a) Sure. It does. Coz someone else already set it up for you.
> 	   Get someone to do the same with Linux, *then* compare.

So: buy RedHat: pay somebody to do the boring work of preconfiguring
and printing manuals and doing phone support.  Personally, I'm leaning
towards moving to Debian sometime, but I'd love to have a very
easy-to-get-started commercial distro around.

> or	b) Ummm. Not really, no. Sure, once you've installed it, you're
> 	   in a gui, but it's not exactly productive. Unless you *like*
> 	   editing with notepad. 

Which still has a 32KB restriction, BTW.  (Aargh!  I tried to open a
'small' file over samba a while ago, and it barfed.)

> No, you've got to first go and get your
> 	   Office CD and install that. Then you've got to go and get your
> 	   Outlook CD and install that. Then miscellaneous application
> 	   one. Then miscellaneous application two. And so on.

Tell them what happens when they want to _uninstall_!

> I will, at least, grant you that having the install ask you if you'd
> like xdm run at startup would be nice. I don't think Debian does this,
> but I could be wrong.

RH does this if you install X.  Of course, you have the option of not
installing it.

> And, if we're trading experiences and calling them arguments, getting
> a # prompt is still far better than not being able to get past the
> "Do you agree to this license?" question.

I thought this was going to be an RMS-style "I couldn't swallow the
license" point.

On which note, I think the M$/SPA piracy gestapo deserves more
attention: consider that a place which installs M$ stuff and by an
accounting mistake installs more machines than they're licensed for is
open to thousands of dollars in punitive damages.  Consider, further,
that some interpretations of the MSVC++ license bar you from competing
with M$.

> But Windows *never* tells you what it's doing. Ever.

There are some people who find it less threatening to just have the
machine crash than to have diagnostic messages scroll over the console
at bootup.  Strange, but true.

> You no longer *ever* have to recompile the kernel. [at least with Debian,
> and presuming any moderately normal situation. RedHat should be the same
> in principle, but I wouldn't know]

As of a while ago, RH didn't include APM support by default, which was
a bit bad.  But aside from that, no.

> But both Debian and Red Hat have standard kernels that you can just
> install and forget for most configurations, especially with modules.

Of course, M$ upgrades the kernel too, every time you upgrade the
browser.  (huh?)  And you can forget about ever getting the DLLs
uninstalled without wiping the machine.

Personally, the point is not so much the technology: it'll all be
obsolete in a little while, and M$ never won on technology in any
case.  The point is an ethical one about competition, corruption,
cooperation and freedom.

-- 
Martin Pool

-rwxr-xr-x  1 root          24 Oct 29  1929 /bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t  4 root     1310720 Jan  1  1970 /usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  5.89824e37 Oct 22  1990 /usr/bin/emacs
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