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

[Anthony Towns]

On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 04:09:39PM +1000, Frank Brand wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Aug 1999, Martin Pool wrote:
> > Perhaps what we need is not so much GUIs, but wizards.  Hear me out:

I more or less agree with this. I even think I can cite the Debian MTA
postinsts as an example of where this is a useful thing (install sendmail,
smail or exim and watch the questions it asks you. "Are you an Internet
site, are you a sattelite system, etc"). Now this is admittedly far from
perfect (it's still far from obvious which selections a newbie should
make in some cases), but it's much easier than hacking sendmail.mc or
sendmail.cf yourself.

> I think I have noted in previous discussions with Martin that, if Linux is to
> become anything other than a fringe player, it might move in a direction that
> the current Linux devotees may not particularly like.

I doubt that's ever going to *really* happen --- it's generally the current
Linux devotees that are the ones willing to put in the effort to do things.

Mind you, it's possible that more possibilities will open up. For example,
when confronted with the choice of "ease of use" and "flexibility",
most Unix-people choose "flexibility". Similarly, "prettiness" versus
"power" generally falls in favour of "power". But we're having to make
those choices less and less frequently. Package managers and /ports
directories are generally both flexible *and* easy to use (at least
compared to "ftp; untar; hack source files; make; make install"), and
KDE and Gnome and E and whatnot are going a long way to making life
much prettier.

> I think the Linux community needs to come to some conclusion regarding the
> Linux strategy.

There is no "Linux strategy". Mind you, it's always possible that
individuals' respective strategies could use improving.

> Is it a specialist system for highly skilled (and in Humbug we
> are talking a lot of extremely well skilled people, not all mind you there are
> Doug and I to balance you out :^>) systems specialists OR is it a system to
> rival Windows in all its versions as a system for all men and all seasons. 

Having one system for all men and all seasons isn't necessarily a Good
Thing. Having multiple different systems all incompatible to some degree
or another is a good robustness technique: if one's not good enough for
what you want, there's still a chance another is; and if one has some
horrible flaw, chances are the others don't.

> If whoever is driving current versions of Linux decides to compete with MS,
> then sure, Linux needs to be a whole lot more user friendly

User friendliness is good anyway. I use X. I browse the web. I like having
things Just Work.

But there does have to be a balance --- someone has to know how to get down
and dirty into the system. And, ideally, the difficulty curve shouldn't be
all that steep.

I dunno. Maybe some ascii art would help with what I mean here. Fixed
width fonts, if you please maestro:

*WARNING! Opinion dressed up as statistics follows!*

I see Window's ease-of-use vs flexibility curve as looking something
like:

(hard)
  D    |           |
  i    |           |
  f    |          /
  f    |         /
  i    |        |
  c    |        |
  u    |       /
  l    |      /
  t    |     /
  y    |----'
(easy) +------------------------------
        (none)  Flexibility  (complete)

...whereas Linux's looks more like:

(hard)  
  D    |                 
  i    |                         ___                  
  f    |          ______________/
  f    |         /
  i    |   _____/
  c    |  /
  u    | /
  l    |/
  t    |
  y    |
(easy) +------------------------------
        (none)  Flexibility  (complete)

. That is Linux starts off harder and you have to keep learning if you
want to do the tiniest non standard things, but after a while you know
enough to do heaps of different things, then you have to learn a bit more,
and you can do heaps more. Wheras Windows let's you do a few standard
things without any major trouble, but then doesn't let you do anything
else without learning MFC and hoping.

It's probably not possible to get the ideal graph (ie, a horizontal line
along "easy"), because flexibility means choices, and people generally
find it easier to deal with things when you don't have any choice. So the
ideal graph is probably one that looks more like a diagonal line: if you
need a little more flexibility it's a little harder to use, if you need
a lot more flexibility it's allowed to be a fair bit harder.

As an example: it's nice to be able to automate things by writing some
shell, awk or perl scripts; rather than having to use C or C++ (or buy
the product of someone else's C/C++).

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.

 ``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it 
        results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
                                        -- Linus Torvalds
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