[LAU] Laid to rest is Pro Tools LE"...

[Rob]

On Friday 04 March 2011 12:25, Andrew C wrote:
> Command line isn't not n00b friendly, 

It isn't merely "not n00b friendly".  It's n00b-hostile.  Many such users, 
probably most of them, literally think command prompts are error messages, 
that they did something wrong to be presented with a featureless black 
rectangle that does nothing when you click it.

You can say they just need education, but the thought processes involved in 
choosing something from a menu of options versus actively deciding what to 
type into an otherwise blank window are completely different, actually 
using different parts of the brain.  I prefer the command line for most 
administrative tasks, but I haven't been either a n00b or a normal user 
since about 1983, and I'd guess few if any on this list are.  Even then, I 
remember wishing for a couple of months that I'd gotten more console games 
instead of a computer, because the learning curve was a bitch.

I've set up family members with Linux (Mandrake/Mandriva, and then Ubuntu) 
without them ever running a terminal app or typing anything but emails.  I 
carefully chose which hardware I recommended to them based on how well it 
played with Linux, and made sure they were no more than two clicks away 
from anything they wanted to do.  I stopped bothering with doing that 
several years ago, not because of the command line, but because my family 
lives hours away from me, and whenever they'd seek help from closer 
relatives because they didn't realize I could ssh into their systems and do 
what they needed done remotely, they'd end up with a pirated XP install and 
the next thing they'd be asking me was "Do I have a virus?"

Advocating Linux audio to new, non-technical users (not people who 
live with you and therefore can get the benefit of your constant 
tweaking to fake a seamless experience, but people whose machines are 
outside of your control) isn't served by assertions like "it's not worse, 
it's just different".  What would help would be flawless hardware 
detection, automatic system configuration, and everything needed to make 
music already running in the background when the user decides to get to 
work by making a selection from a menu or clicking an icon on the desktop.

Even then, getting their computers to boot from a USB key or CD/DVD will 
likely involve more technical ability than most of them possess.  I'm more 
optimistic about people buying Android phones than about the chances of 
getting them to run Linux on anything else.  Many people involved in Linux 
audio seem to think it's a feature to have a separate low-latency kernel, 
or that the user has to launch an audio server and manually set up 
connections before running most audio applications.  Far be it from me to 
argue with that... or to ever recommend such a setup to someone who just 
wants to record some professional-sounding music.

Given all that, making statements like "the command line isn't n00b 
friendly" amount to little more than a state of denial, and it's not 
helpful.  Not only has the user interface world moved on, but it moved on 
about 25 years ago.  

And this applies to creative users and multimedia applications about ten 
times more than it does to general computing tasks.

Rob