mikshaw
Group: Members
Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004 |
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Posted: May 07 2007,03:04 |
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Funny how this "user friendly" argument never ceases. Also funny how I always feel compelled to get mouthy about my position on the subject....
There's nothing arcane about Linux. It's quite the opposite. Everything about Linux and GNU is wide open, and freely available documentation and other forms of help are spread all over the internet. I might say that Windows is more arcane, as it is completely closed along with a majority of the software and hardware made for it.
As ^thehatsrule^ said, no operating system is going to be easy to use for someone new to it. The seemingly simple concept of clicking stuff isn't even terribly obvious to someone who has never done it before.
The concept of "friendly" is subject to the individual user's frame of reference and personal taste, and cannot be boxed into a single collection of features. A user who is quite comfortable with a Windows interface and its tools is obviously going to have to do at least some learning and adjusting when moving to any non-Windows system. The more unlike Windows that system is, the more learning the user needs to do.
This does not mean that the other system is less friendly than Windows; it means it is *different*. Linux is an extremely powerful and flexible system, much more so than anything ever released by Microsoft. This is a simple fact. In order to harness this power and flexibility, you *must* learn more than how to click. And this clicking is what the Windows user always seems to see as "friendly". It has to be clickable or it's somehow ancient or too complicated. But a graphical interface using current technology can do only so much before it takes more effort to use than what it was designed to save. The more functionality is given to the gui, the larger, slower, and more complicated it becomes. More complexity means it becomes harder to learn and is more prone to programming errors.
The reason I spent so much time talking about Windows and its graphical interface is because every time there is a debate on user friendliness, it basically comes down to people coming from Windows and seeing that things are done differently. For these people I would say that they should consider trying a different Linux distribution. There are several that make the transition from Windows much easier. DSL cannot be terribly friendly in this sense of the word because it is targeted toward old hardware that may not have the space and processing power to handle complex graphical applications. Roberts has put a lot of work into creating a collection of small, simple tools which certainly help in this area. It's actually quite surprising what can be done in DSL without even needing to open a terminal.
For my own idea of friendly, I prefer simplicity and the flexibility and power to do what I want with my system. This is pretty close to what DSL is. If DSL were focused mainly on binary graphical applications, I wouldn't even bother with it.
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http://www.tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/index.html
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