GUI problems

[andrewducker]

Over here you can find a fantastic critique of what's wrong with the GUI of a recent release of Ubuntu Linux.  Amongst the various gems are this little bit on the quick start guide:

Part of the problem is that the Guide is greatly caught up in its own minutiae. For example, it contains this morsel: “Also in this release is the FAQ Guide which was ported from the Ubuntu Wiki to Docbook and is now a permanent feature of the Ubuntu documentation project.”

If you know too much to understand the problem with that sentence, here it is again, translated into a simulation of how a regular person would understand it: “Also in this spurt is the Worple Guide which was worpled from the Ubuntu Worple to Worple and is now a permanent feature of the Ubuntu worple worple.”

I’m one of the 0.000002 percent of humans who are subscribed to the Ubuntu Documentation mailing list, and they’re lovely people, but even I just don’t care about this kind of administrivia. How will reading this help anyone use Ubuntu? It won’t.

A real help system would have items on its front page like “Connecting to the Internet”, “Using files from Windows”, “Printing”, “Chatting online”, “Playing music”, “Making CDs and DVDs”, and “Troubleshooting”.

And is exactly what the people who produce Linux releases ought to be reading before they let anything go into the wild.

Comments

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

The last bit is actually the most hopeful thing:

I am grateful to my boss for lending me the laptop on which I have been using Ubuntu, and for giving me the go-ahead to post this entry, but I don’t speak for my employer and they don’t speak for me. My boss, by the way, is Mark Shuttleworth. I’m working for his company, Canonical, as an interface designer.

(Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu.)

[cruft.livejournal.com]

Only if they care about their Linux releases being usable by ignorant people. I hope to God Debian and Gentoo and their ilk never have help items about "Troubleshooting" and "Chatting online."

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

The nature of Linux pretty much ensures there will always be distros aimed at advanced users...Debian or Gentoo, or Slackware/Arch/Linux From Scratch/Whatever.

I quite like Ubuntu's approach however. It's a good balance between the leet distros and the ones like Linspire (flash promo) that try to do everything for you in their particular way. Not that targeting new users is a bad strategy from an advocacy point of view.

[azalemeth.livejournal.com]

I understood that message and had to stop and think what was wrong with it O_o....I don't like Ubuntu though. Gnome and me don't get along together well....It kind of makes me do rm -rf /.


And installing gentoo is easy for beginners! You just need three commands:

cfdisk /dev/hda && mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1 && mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/gentoo/ && chroot /mnt/gentoo/ && env-update && . /etc/profile && emerge sync && cd /usr/portage && scripts/bootsrap.sh && emerge system && emerge vim && vi /etc/fstab && emerge gentoo-dev-sources && cd /usr/src/linux && make menuconfig && make install modules_install && emerge world kde mozilla-firefox openoffice && emerge grub && cp /boot/grub/grub.conf.sample /boot/grub/grub.conf && vi /boot/grub/grub.conf && grub && init 6

(That's the first one)