Re: User friendliness as a goal and a thing to be worked on
Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> I'd like to join this discussion for a brief moment, if I may, even if
> my own opinion is rather fixed already.
>
> Ease-of-use is good, whether you define it as ease-of-learning,
> ease-of-getting-things-done, ease-of-installation, ease-of-system-
> administration, or any combination. I doubt anyone disagrees with this.
> However, technical quality is, I think, more important for Debian. That
> is: it is more important that things work correctly and securely than that
> things are easy to use. While I have several subjective reasons for this,
I think this is the difference between "a" goal and "the" goal. At least
for my packages, I try to make sure they work first and they do the right
things.
Then, if they are all happy, I work on improving the user friendlyness of
the package. A good example is ax25-utils, which works ok (non i386 problems
notwithstanding) but it doesn't make things as easy as it could be for
the user. I'm now working on doing things like start-stopping the daemons
and setup of the (many) configuration files.
> hard to learn or install. Earlier this year I had a discussion with a
> blind Linux user, and he told me, among other things, this:
[...]
> all installation without screen output. No boot disk ever sends
> its output to a com port so I couldn't follow the boot prompts. I
I have a collegue who is blind and irc with another blind user. Both use
Linux and find it a lot easier to work with as a lot of stuff is text-based.
They also both comented on the fact that it is very difficult for them to
start up as they need the output to go to the com port. At least one of
them was thinking of going to Red Hat as they had some sort of quick start
system which meant, theoretically, with a single floppy disk and CD they
could get a system up and going.
- Craig
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