[H-GEN] Windows to *nix

[Anthony Irwin]

Hey All,

I was reading Andrews post about linux becoming more mainstream and 
thought that may be this post would show some things that maybe some 
people have never thought about it would be interesting to see what 
others think.

As for the free software community and attracting windows users I think 
there will always be some conflict there but again I am not sure that 
it's such a bad thing. *nix is not windows and should not be viewed as 
such and although you could probably use a *nix system in a windows way 
people should at least know the concepts behind *nix.

Below is my general view of the 2 worlds it's my opinion on things so 
feel free to disagree.

NOTE: I am extremely anti windows and may have a warped view but thats 
for you to decide.

Windows: In the windows world developers have the mind set that their 
users are afraid of computers and don't know what they are doing and 
don't want to know and that they should hide as many options as possible 
and create friendly terms that make it easier for people who know 
nothing but when you do know what you want you never seem to be able to 
find what you want because its called something that has nothing to do 
with what you want or is hidden several layers deep through menus and 
pop up windows to avoid scaring their users and in many cases the 
options you want won't exist because thats to hard for people to 
understand and why would anyone want to do that.

*nix: In the *nix world developers have the mind set that their users 
are only going to be newbies for so long and that they will learn the 
terms and what they are trying to achieve. Once the users know what they 
are doing they will be able to do more use the correct terms and have 
more power and flexibility. *nix developers will create lots of small 
utilities that can be used together to do things that they never thought 
anyone would want to do. It means learning how to use these tools and 
thinking about how to put them all together to get the result you want 
but in the end it means that you have no restrictions and can do 
anything provided you are willing to learn.

The joining of all these programs may result in a really cool user 
friendly gui program or a bash script that is run in a cron job it 
doesn't matter because you have the power.

Now I know that you are not always going to want to learn the ins and 
outs of everything I know I don't and sometimes I just go find a gui app 
to do what I want and don't look at all the cli tools. A perfect example 
of this is burning a music cd, I don't want to find out how to convert 
every mp3 to a wav file and type a big long list of wavs to create a 
music cd I will just use the k3b burning program and drag and drop the 
files and click burn. But if I want to burn a iso cd image I will use 
good old cdrecord at the command line as I find it faster then trying to 
load and navigate through the menus of the gui app.

This is they type of power and flexibility that windows users will never 
experience because of the mind set of the user base. Now these days 
there are more and more user friendly programs linking all these tools 
together to make it easy for people to do things and thats a great thing.

Now I realise that this power and flexibility comes at the expense of a 
longer learning curve. But realistically most people will continue using 
computers for the rest of their lives so spending a bit of time to 
dramatically increase their productivity and increase their ability to 
get things done is an invaluable investment.

Most *nix users are conditioned to first think for themselves and read 
the man page, readme's, faq's etc. Then google then post a question. By 
doing this they will expand their knowledge as they are doing new things 
and therefore have a better grounding in what they are doing and are 
less likely to make costly mistakes. They will have a larger knowledge 
base as a reference point for learning and understanding new things and 
from what I have seen tend to be hands down the best computer users around.

Now some people may say that computers change so fast that it is a waste 
of time learning it all. But seriously how often has things drastically 
changed in *nix that it would be a waste of time learning it? Sure in 
windows every release they seem to totally change things and move 
options to other places but in *nix if you are going about things using 
config files they are always in the same place and the config is the 
same or has slight modifications.

Also in a *nix system everything is open you can find everything and see 
what is happening to help diagnose problems or just to understand whats 
happening. Windows seems to try and hide everything and make it secret 
and obscure making it harder for people to know whats going on and fix 
problems in fact all the windows people I know say the only real way to 
fix windows is to format and reinstall.

Sure being able to diagnose problems, read through logs and manually 
changing configuration files can be a steep learning curve but once done 
you control the computer not the other way around.

I guess I feel it would be extremely cruel to introduce someone into the 
*nix world without releasing them from their shackles that were put on 
them when they learned the windows way. By removing them of their 
limiting mind set given to them by the windows world they can become 
free to use their computer anyway they wish and if that is point and 
click then so be it but at least show them the light so they can decide 
for themselves.

I guess I am being one of those traditional *nix bigots. It would be 
interesting to see how others feel about it but the only people I know 
that only use *nix systems are hard core *nix people that see a lot of 
the new windows world methods for doing things bloated, cumbersome and 
bug ridden.

I for one hope that people continue to learn the *nix ways and that the 
user friendly *nix distros don't completely hide the fact that there is 
more to life then the point and click gui.

Kind Regards,
Anthony Irwin