Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Usability fork

Author:Seth Gordon
Posted:11/22/1999; 12:31:34 PM
Topic:Why Linux Won't Splinter
Msg #:13255 (In response to 13218)
Prev/Next:13254 / 13256

From my experience wrestling with Linux over the past few months, the usability issues fall into two categories:

  1. Programs with a GUI do not have a consistent interface. So, for example, you can't always look at a dialog box on a program you're running for the first time and know which shapes represent check boxes and which represent radio buttons. This is basically a social problem -- there are, I understand, perfectly servicable GUI libraries that Linux programmers can download and use for free, but they don't all produce the same designs on the screen, and the community of Linux hackers hasn't developed a consensus yet on which libraries to use. ("Standards are great, we have so many to choose from!") I assume that "market forces" will eventually make one library, or one set of identical-to-the-end-user libraries, the victor, but I don't know how long that will take.
  2. System configuration can be a mess. Before you put a single real user's account on a Unix system, it has dozens of little configuration files and shell scripts all over the file system, all interacting with one another and with the device drivers. If you know what you're doing, you can set these up to do all sorts of clever things. If you use an auto-configuration program that knows what it's doing, you can choose from the configuration options it provides. But if the options available through the auto-configuration program doesn't match what you want to do, or if the program makes assumptions about your environment which are incorrect, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can cause yourself all sorts of pain and suffering. This is a harder problem to solve, because the number of possible interactions between system configuration files is too large for any higher-level program to keep track of (can you say "factorial complexity"?), and because any experienced Linux programmer could come up with some clever and useful hack that adds to the mess.

I suspect that if we see truly "usable Linux" systems, they will sharply restrict the space of possible system configurations and supported applications, and warn the customers that if they muck around under the hood, they void the warranty.



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