2007-06-24 08:24:09
Userfriendliness (Windows is not) (Score:5, Informative)
by einhverfr (238914) on Monday July 11, @12:11AM (#13030327)
(http://www.metatrontech.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday June 23, @01:15AM)
When I teach free computing courses to the community, I often teach that a lot of the frustrations that many of us have with computers are a result of trying to make them use
r friendly. This is because the original idea of a user friendly computer was that the user should be completely abstracted from the operation of the software (think Mac OS 8
). So we are left with an opaque "magic box" and when it breaks we feel helpless because the error messages aren't helpful.* Furthermore, not only did Microsoft completely sc
rew up this concept and impliment it badly but nobody bothered to actually tell the developers that error messages like "This program has performed an illegal operation and w
ill be shut down" don't help users feel empowered about their computers.
When I worked at MS (PSS), you would be surprised how many people calling tech support mentioned that their first reaction on reading this error message was that the police h
ad been notified. Fortunately with ME and XP the inappropriate tone of the error was finally fixed.
Then comes the fact that many versions of Windows allow you to go ahead and destroy your system because there is no concept of permissions (Win 9x) and so users have become q
uite resonably afraid of destroying their system and losing their work.
Say what you will about Linux and userfriendliness. However, I have found that novices are quite easily able to feel comfortable quickly on Linux. Intermediate users take a l
ittle longer. And there have never been any of these alarmist error messages that bring to mind swat teams coming to one's door... I guess the most alarmist error message one
can see in Linux is a "Kernel Panic" but for people who spend their lives in X, they never see the text of the error message.
Linux provides a more comfortable environment for learning how to use the computer for many users. I can't tell you how many of my customers are now using it for this reason.
My cusotmers know that they can accidently delete their work, but they can't crash their system unless they are logged in as root. So they tend to be more adventurous about
learning new things.
t, it is usually *extremely easy* to pinpoint the cause. For example error messages like "Error in line 156 of httpd.conf: tomcat.so Is this really a valid dynmaically shared
object?"