26 Jul
2005
26 Jul
'05
7:10 a.m.
On Mon, 25 Jul, 2005 at 04:19PM -0400, Lee Revell spake thus:
On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 21:11 +0100,
james(a)dis-dot-dat.net wrote:
I agree with all this, but not when applied to everything, all of the
time.
A user friendly distro for new users would be great. Everything
working as expected (that is, as Windows does) and no suprises or too
many choices.
But I think that that's just one small place for Linux. How many mail
readers need to be written that work like a Windows app? What's wrong
with ones that work like a Unix app? Newbies don't have to use them.
I'll stick with emacs and mutt. They can use the mozilla thing (that
I can't remember the name of, sorry) for reading mail. Everyone is
happy.
And I think the same thing applies to audio. Audacity works out of
the box. If you want something more powerful, that isn't constrained
by what the rest of the world demands because they want everything,
right now and it has to be easy to use, then you have ardour.
And nobody seems to complain about the total lack of adherence to
de-facto interface standards that expensive apps like XSI, Maya, et
al. all have in common. In fact, that seems to be pretty much the
*only* thing they have in common - they are all different.
But why should we complain? They work well. Get used to the
interface (and come on, it's hardly rocket science) and there are
rewards - you can work quickly, access more features easily, do things
in new ways.
So, like I say. I'm all for "ease of use" but not if it gets in the
way of actually being useful.
James
I write my email in emacs. You can browse the
web with it too, if you
like. Personally, I've never wanted to, but who am I to tell people
what Emacs shouldn't do?
So, yes. C-S isn't silly at all. It makes perfect sense to the
people most likely to use evolution.
If your goal is to present a coherent desktop environment to the user
then you cannot require them to use Ctrl-S and Ctrl-F to do the same
thing depending on which app they are using. If we can't even agree on
that, then we have LONG way to go before the Linux desktop is usable.
Since we have a more powerful underlying architecture than Windows and
at least as good as OSX, there's no reason we should not be able to
present the same level of usability. We are talking about taking a
small *subset* of the full functionality of a Unix-like system and
presenting it to the user as a coherent computing environment. It
should really be trivial. Lee
--
"I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated
Development
That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you."
(By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)