[H-GEN] Re: Unix vs NT [long; both informative and then religious]

[James C. McPherson]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs "James C. McPherson" <James.McPherson at mq.edu.au>)


Doug Young writes:
 > (Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs "Doug Young" <dougy at gargoyle.apana.org.au>)
 > 
 > And the holy war continues !!!!!!!!! :)  :)  :)
 > . the
 > > difference with *nix is that things generally follow some sort of logic.
 > once
 > > you grok the logic you can work things out on your own.
 > 
 > Hmmmmm ..... I don't know that "grok" is exactly what I'd call an "intutive"
 > term ...... thank goodness we now have some 20th century technology applied
 > to *nix ........ KDE even managed to get the "mount / unmount" thingy fixed
 > for floppies & CD's ..... thats gotta be a step forward from all that
 > command line stuff ........ even if Win 3.x and .........even  AppleMac
 > (excuse me while I chunder) had thought of it a couple centuries ago :) :)
 > :)


Oh, gee! "20th century technology applied to *nix" ?? Shouldn't you have
actually written something like "some advanced user-interface design
principles have been applied to *nix" instead? (For grok, have a look at the
Hacker's Dictionary, compiled by ESR). I think you misunderstand (or at least
are seriously misrepresenting in order to troll) the idea behind mount. It
hasn't been "fixed" in KDE as you claim (nor in gnome, cde, openwindows etc),
but a graphical shell has been applied in order to make operation more
transparent to the user (ie, require less knowledge about how the system
works). This can be both a good and bad thing. OTOH, it means that you can say 
to your users, If you want to copy to/from a floppy disk/zip disk/etc then use 
the filemanager program. OTOH, you also have to tell them that they need to
explicitly release the floppy/zip/etc from within the filemanager application
because otherwise. 

You also write "thats gotta be a step forward from all that command line
stuff". Now, as you should have noticed from the traffic over the past few
days on this list, that's like waving a rag at a bull. The people who
subscribe and post to this list are generally quite comfortable with command
line unix and in most cases prefer cli to gui. Both interfaces have their pros 
and cons, but it does seem to be the case (I don't know about the others on
this list but I've been working with various unices since 1990) that as one's
experience, comfort level and knowledge about unix increases, one tends to
prefer to do little things like mounting/umounting floppy disks without having 
to remove one's hands from the keyboard. It's partly an efficiency thing and
partly because you acquire an appreciation of the system operations that occur 
when you mount/umount, and what can go wrong if you don't umount before
removing a disk (or running mkfs on a partition for that matter). 

For somebody who is so keen to have a gui on every machine he comes in contact 
with, I am quite surprised that you find the idea that the Macintosh had a
working, intuitive gui starting in 1984 to be chunderous. In terms of
consistency, usability, friendliness and even speed, the Mac's interface then
and now beats the MS "designed" version. Sure, I don't like the menu bar at
the top of the screen all the time, nor the fact that I can't have multiple
virtual desktops, nor the fact that I can't get a command line interface very
easily (at least last time I checked). But at least I know that with a mac I
can sit down at one and drag the floppy disk icon to the trashcan to eject it.
I can't do that with NT/95/98. In fact last time I checked a box running some
MS OS, dragging a floppy disk icon to the trashcan/recycle bin resulted in a
prompt about erasing the disk. Both are kinda intuitive, but I prefer the Mac
version. 

For both NT and the mac, the gui is an integral part of the system's interface 
to the world. However, NT's gui and underlying operation/philosophy is not
consistent, unlike the Mac's. Unix, on the other hand, has the gui as an
add-on. The other difference there is that the people who have designed those
guis have known how unix works (they know the philosophy, having done the
required reading and immersion in it), and have adapted their guis to suit. 

If you want a gui, you know where to get one. And how about you stop whining
about how guis are so much better and just get the job done. I think's fair to 
say that humbug is in general more interested in efficiency and neatness than
point and click. If it so happens that point and click is the most efficient
method of achieving the task, then so be it. Otherwise, use the cli and above
all, don't forget to read the documentation, try it yourself and _then_ ask
questions. 


cordially,
James C. McPherson
--
Unix Systems Administrator            Phone: +61.2.9850.9418
Office of Computing Services            Fax: +61.2.9850.7433
Macquarie University   NSW    2109     
AUSTRALIA			     


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