Re: Where is Debian going?
On Sat, 13 Jul 2002 15:49:28 +0100
"Shri Shrikumar" <shri@urbyte.com> wrote:
> most people here. It is intuitive for me now. However, for someone
> who has never seen Linux / X / KDE / GNOME before, it is all still
> new (an improved hopefully)
I share your thoughts about the current state of intuitivity in
usage of desktops like KDE or GNOME; anyhow, I don't give much at
all anymore on the concept of intuitive GUIs in everyday use.
Actually, I spent quite some time installing GNU WindowMaker as
default desktop on computers being bought by persons that never had
used a computer before in their life. Experience is that those folks
were quite happy with our preconfigured WindowMaker desktop, its
icons and menus (we used to completely build our own menus there,
only including a few applications and naming them by what they are
doing not by what their real name is - so they had a menu item
"mail" launching sylpheed, a menu item "www" launching galeon and
so on...). Anyhow, this is about personal usage, and about persons
who are completely new to both computers and GNU/Linux. Seeing some
of the small and mid-range companies here that are trying to migrate
to GNU/Linux, things are a lot more difficult. I also thought that
using KDE is a good thing because KDE is intuitive in its usage, but
obviously this was a fault; the only reason why KDE (or icewm, or
fvwm95 for that matter) are good as desktops is because they look so
much like the MS systems they used to work with, before. Same about
office packages, for example, that's why there are some people now
having severe problems with OpenOffice - not because it actually is
not intuitive to use but because it simply looks different than
MSOffice in some fields of use. That's, overally, where, in my more
sarcastic moments I am starting to believe that intuitive handling
of software doesn't mean anything at all in a world where most
people which currently are using computers are trained to work with
a Microsoft GUI and are trained to use _exactly_ this GUI (like,
"click on 'Start' in the lower left screen corner to find your
applications") rather than to understand the basic elements,
structures or concepts of GUIs in general. Sadly, there still are
very few courses / documentation papers available to teach people
those things... at the moment, and also due to the needs of our
customers, I have started something, like, a documentation idea with
the goal of explaining a few basic things about computers, desktops,
GUIs and all this stuff, starting with the basics. Sadly I'm short
on time pretty much, hope I'll finnish this some day...
> What I am saying is that, when there are package dependency issues
> or such, testing is good enough for desktop use. Sure its buggier
> *but* it is not that much more buggier that windoze *and* it is
> almost as easy to figure out (generaly speaking).
Well, yes. I am using testing and even unstable on some of our own
machines, and, there, even unstable works pretty well most of the
time (running in common everyday desktop tasks, using KDE 2.2.2 and
OpenOffice.org). Though, I _never_ actually would provide a customer
with this software in general, even while right now I am tending to
make exceptions from that due to the fact that, for what I have seen
so far, woody didn't change very much the last one, two months and
IMHO and in comparison is at least as stable as potato.
Cheers,
Kris
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