- My brother-in-law upgraded his motherboard. He could not get the onboard sound system to work. He brought the system to my house and messed with it for more than 4 hours using the CD that came with the motherboard, using the manufacturer's website, using Google searches, etc. He went home with his sound still not working despite all was could do. Knoppix booted and used the sound right away so we knew it was not a hardware problem.
- My father uses Windows XP. He loved the automatic thumbnails in Windows Explorer for browsing is photos. He installed a few software packages that deal with graphics. One of them disabled the thumbnails. We un-installed all the packages. Thumbnails still disabled and we have found no answer to re-enabling them. So, he now lives without a feature he liked.
- Ask a normal user to configure the firewall in Windows XP SP2. They don't know the first thing to choose and the first time it won't let them use a program they like, they disable it anyway.
- One person writes a document in Word and sends it to a friend. The friend can't open it in their Word program because their's is older than the first person's version. They don't understand how to have the first person save the file in the older version format so they can share the document electronically. They just print documents to share them.
Shall I go on?
Why do users have this difficulty? Because they don't want to understand and the GUI, no matter how good, doesn't make up for a lack of knowledge.
It's incorrect causality. Users of Windows blame themselves, don't complain much and just live with it when something doesn't work like they expect. When they have problems under Linux they blame the Linux GUI because it is different, not because it is not good enough.
My eight year old runs his Linux KDE desktop and applications just fine, thank you very much. His report on tropical flying squirrels, typed and formated by him with some help me, came out of OpenOffice.org in wonderful shape. I don't think he has had any more or less difficulty there as he would using Windows.
Linux will not get ahead by expecting users to stay dumb. Windows users stay dumb too despite it's supposedly easier GUI.
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Posted by: alandd on March 01, 2006 02:39 AM- My brother-in-law upgraded his motherboard. He could not get the onboard sound system to work. He brought the system to my house and messed with it for more than 4 hours using the CD that came with the motherboard, using the manufacturer's website, using Google searches, etc. He went home with his sound still not working despite all was could do. Knoppix booted and used the sound right away so we knew it was not a hardware problem.
- My father uses Windows XP. He loved the automatic thumbnails in Windows Explorer for browsing is photos. He installed a few software packages that deal with graphics. One of them disabled the thumbnails. We un-installed all the packages. Thumbnails still disabled and we have found no answer to re-enabling them. So, he now lives without a feature he liked.
- Ask a normal user to configure the firewall in Windows XP SP2. They don't know the first thing to choose and the first time it won't let them use a program they like, they disable it anyway.
- One person writes a document in Word and sends it to a friend. The friend can't open it in their Word program because their's is older than the first person's version. They don't understand how to have the first person save the file in the older version format so they can share the document electronically. They just print documents to share them.
Shall I go on?
Why do users have this difficulty? Because they don't want to understand and the GUI, no matter how good, doesn't make up for a lack of knowledge.
It's incorrect causality. Users of Windows blame themselves, don't complain much and just live with it when something doesn't work like they expect. When they have problems under Linux they blame the Linux GUI because it is different, not because it is not good enough.
My eight year old runs his Linux KDE desktop and applications just fine, thank you very much. His report on tropical flying squirrels, typed and formated by him with some help me, came out of OpenOffice.org in wonderful shape. I don't think he has had any more or less difficulty there as he would using Windows.
Linux will not get ahead by expecting users to stay dumb. Windows users stay dumb too despite it's supposedly easier GUI.
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