[H-GEN] Re: Unix vs NT (religious war :-)

[Martin Pool]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Martin Pool <martinp at mincom.com>)

Alistair Robson wrote:

> Whilst I do believe that Unix is much better than NT I think the unix
> community sould take head of what Doug is saying.  There is a point in all
> of this.  Yes Linux is a bother to understand for newbies to *nicies but
> ,as I have done, if people go through and take the time to read,
> comprehend and act then the problems will usually be fixed.  

Perhaps what we need is not so much GUIs, but wizards.  Hear me out:

The existing GUI configuration tools (linuxconf, the KDE and GNOME
Control Panels, etc) are a large step up in friendliness from editing
raw configuration files.   I think they do roughly as well as the
control panels in NT, with the advantage that the underlying text files
are still there for expert users, standardization, configuration
management, and so on.  

Although the particular tools can always be improved I think there's a
limit in how friendly they can be to the naieve user: it's all very well
to make it easy to configure routing tables, but that doesn't at all
help people who explicitly *don't want to know* what a route or network
address is.

The standard (and quite strong) argument is that they have no business
setting up a network if they want to be ignorant about how they work. 
At the very least, it'd be impossible to know that the system they've
set up is secure.

However, people simply are going to want to do things without
understanding them: there's a large and lucrative industry built on
encouraging this attitude.

Perhaps we need to go beyond configuration tools and have wizards to
handle the common cases: for example, "I want to use my computer as an
internet gateway", then rather even asking people about IP addresses
just go ahead and pick some from the private blocks, and set up routing
based on that.  (Hopefully it'd be driven through one of the
configuration-file APIs so that at least the output would be sane.)

-- 
Martin

I think it's fair to regard the whole of software development since
the 1950s as a social experiment - with some major results due back at
the end of this year as I remember.
			-- Richard Drake

--
This is list (humbug) general handled by majordomo at lists.humbug.org.au .
Postings only from subscribed addresses of lists general or general-post.