Re: Win vs. UNIX usability (Was: Re: gnome-terminal idea)

[Tim Moore <tmoore tembel org>]

On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Steve Luzynski wrote:

> David Jeske wrote:
> [snip]
> > 1) Some things about a system 'just make sense' and are consistant,
> > many things about a system are intuitive only after they are learned.
> > It's important to recognize that having an installed based of people
> > who have 'learned' something is a compelling target audience. For
> > example, people might not consider the windows control panel, app
> > installation, file manager, etc "intuitive", however, there is a huge
> > user base who understand them, and allowing tasks to be performed in
> > similar ways will leverage that installed base of windows trained
> > users.
> 
> Very little about moving a melted bar of soap around on a fuzzy piece of
> rubber is intuitive if you ask me. I still long for a touchscreen on
> every desk. :)

Perhaps it's not intuitive, but it's pretty damn easy to learn. It
probably takes most people about two seconds to get everything except
double-clicking and perhaps dragging.

Directly manipulating the screen would be better, granted, but only on a
flat screen which can lie horizontally on a desktop, and a stylus would be
better than an actual *touch* screen, especially until monitors can be
made to cover an entire desktop inexpensively.

On a somewhat related note, I have a trackpad on my home computer. I used
to think it was great -- much more intuitve than a mouse. When I brought
it to school, I was one of the few people in my dorm hall with a computer,
so people tried to borrow it a lot. Invariably, their first reaction after
sitting down was to stare at the trackpad for a few seconds bewildered
until I showed them how it worked. One person even tried to slide it
around the desk!

> [snip]
> > *** Here are the "unix person's" answers to the above questions:
> > 
> > - copy a file off a cdrom: open up a terminal window, su to root,
> > "mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom", "cp /cdrom/<filename> <destination>".
> 
> Hmm. On my system I just click on the gnome drivemounter applet. My
> system administrator (me) set the user option in /etc/fstab for the
> cdrom.

I've never used it, but supposedly autofs makes even that step
unnecessary. It automatically mounts the file system when you try to
access it's mount point, and unmounts it after a certain amount of
inactivity.

> > - install an application off a cdrom: open up a terminal window, su to
> > root, "mount /dev/cdrom /cdrom", then use one of: (a) command line
> > rpm, (b) gui rpm, (c) tar, (d) tar, then ./configure, then make
> > install, (e) or worse...
> 
> I've only two Linux applications on cdrom. Both of them had an install
> script right in the root that does pretty graphical pointy-clicky stuff
> to load the software.

That's pretty nice. Which applications?

> > - download and open a file from the internet: click on the file in
> > netscape, the save dialog comes up. However the netscape save panel is
> > pretty poor, they save it in their home directory somewhere. (non-unix
> 
> Isn't this where you want Joe User to save crap they download off the
> internet? I for one shudder to think of a system where you let users
> download stuff directly into /bin.

Agreed. However the Motif save panel *is* pretty poor. For that matter, so
is the GTK+ one. Frankly the nicest one I've seen on Unix is the KDE one.
The nicest one *not* for Unix seems to be Apple's Navigation Services API
which will appear in Mac OS 8.5. This is still unreleased, though, so I've
only seen screenshots and descriptions.

> > - download and open a file from the internet: click on the file in
> > netscape, click the "up arrow" until they get to the desktop, save the
> > file. Minimize netscape, look for the file they downloaded on the desktop, and double click it.
> 
> Wow. Obivously you've never seen what a horrible catastrophe teaching
> people to save things on their desktop is when you get into a server
> profile based environment. One user called me saying it took them 30
> minutes to log in and out. I finally tracked it down to the fact that
> they had moved C:\Program Files to their desktop because the crappy GUI
> of Windows does not make it clear when you are moving, copying, and
> making a shortcut unless you use the incredibly counterintuitive
> right-drag.

Yeah. On a Unix system it really makes sense to do everything in your home
directory. I think that's actually a usability *improvement* that Unix has
-- it gives you a place to do everything. Win 95 has My Documents, but
most save panels default to the directory the app is in. Accordingly,
that's where most windows users save their documents. :-P

And, frankly, I don't see why people want to put things on the desktop
anyway. For me, that's one of the *least* accessable places to put icons,
since it's almost always covered up. The panel is a much better place to
put things. NeXT figured this out when they made the dock. You can't put
things on the NEXTSTEP desktop. Now Apple is changing that again in Mac OS
X by removing the dock and letting icons on the desktop. Double :-P

> >   - LOGIN prompt
> >        win98 explains the login prompt to the user the first time it
> >        boots. Nextstep installs with an account called "me" with no
> >        password. It automatically bypasses the login prompt as long
> >        as the "me" account has no password. To get the login prompt
> >        one merely has to set a password for the "me" account.
> 
> I don't necessarily think that logging in is a horribly confusing thing.
> People use ATMs, you have to log in to those also. A more user friendly
> login banner ("Type your username" rather than "login:") might be a
> viable option.

Good point. They don't mind "authenticating" to their front door either.
But it should be optional, like in NS. It should be the user's judgement
how secure they feel. Of course, in this hypothetical easy-to-use
distribution that we seem to be discussing, there shouldn't be any remote
access methods enabled (perhaps even installed) by default. I think NS
specifically disallowed telneting in as "me" if there was no password,
kind of like how telnet servers won't let you telnet in as root.

> > Other things in Linux which have too steep a learning curve:
> >   - app installation
> >        You should not have to be root, and things should not have to
> >        install in some precompiled location.
> 
> You most certainly should have to be root to install an application that
> needs to make system wide settings changes or go into a /bin, /sbin,
> etc. type directory to run. You will have a tough time finding a large
> company that runs NT that allows the average user to load software - at
> least not a company with an IT budget smaller than gross revenues.

It would be nice to allow users to easily install into their own home
directories, though. Of course, this assumes that software be written to
work that way. We all know that software shouldn't hardcode locations
anyway, but we also all know that a lot of it does.

Again, NEXTSTEP seems to have solved this problem pretty well, too, with
its app-encapsulation.

> >   - installs
> >        The Linux installs have WAY too many questions for a beginning user.
> >        Win98 asks you what language you speak, and NOTHING ELSE. I think
> >        this is just great, and I am a technical user. BeOS is the same
> 
> Say what? Have you loaded Office 97? It takes 15 minutes to figure out
> which checkboxes you need to get anything beyond the "I just want to run
> Word" installation. Yes, there's a 'Typical' button. Many Linux apps can
> just go for it as well. In both cases you usually end up with a less
> than functional installation.

I usually don't have to specify a lot of options to *apps* that I'm
installing on Linux. I think David was referring to system installation.

OTOH, most people won't really be bothering to install their own systems
anyway. If they're going to the trouble to install a new OS, partitioning
their disk is going to be more trouble than most Linux installs. And if
they get it preinstalled, then there's no problem. In modern
distributions, there's rarely a need to reinstall, and even upgrades tend
to be pretty straightforward. The RedHat installer pretty much asks you
what language you speak, asks if you're installing from scratch or
upgrading, and if you're upgrading, that's about it.

Perhaps the reason Windows 98 has such a great installer is because they
know most people are probably going to need to use it every two weeks! :-)

> >        way. Everything which can be setup and configured can be done once
> >        the system is up. That way the user only has to learn one install
> >        and configuration UI. None of these configurations (i.e. networking,
> >        modems, etc) should require a reboot.
> 
> The only thing I ever reboot Linux for is installing hardware. You must
> be thinking of Windows.

I don't reboot much, but there are some types of configuration that take
much more effort than they should. Many window managers require that you
restart them to change their settings. If I change, say, my look and feel
properties for GNOME MDI :-) other apps don't respond until they're
restarted. But what really gets me is that you can't change the color
depth or resolution of your screen without restarting the X server. I was
outraged when I first used Windows 95 and it required a reboot after a
resolution change, but requiring a restart in the X server isn't much
better because it basically boils down to the same thing: an interruption
of my work. Furthermore, many users just won't be able to do it, either
because it's totally non-obvious how to, or because they don't have root
access. I mean, Mac OS just *does* it, and BeOS even lets me assign
different resolutions/depths to different *virtual desktops* fergodsake! I
guess this would require changing X, but someone really should!

> I don't mean to sound like I'm blind to Linux's usability challenges. A
> distribution designed for newbies should probably come up in runlevel 5
> by default.

LinuxPPC actually comes up with a display manager by default.
Unfortunately, the display manager is KDE's kdm, and even more
unfortunately, they did this not by changing the default runlevel, but by
starting kdm in rl 3, but the spirit was there!

> Installing software from source is admittedly difficult to
> get your hands around.

Even from binary packages.

> X is a bitch to configure, and the auto
> configuration tools like RedHat's Xconfigurator are only so-so.

X just has major problems in general. Hopefully Berlin will be better,
come soon, and not have too many migration pains. I kind of doubt all but
the first, though. 

> But don't sell a well put together Linux system short. My wife can
> handle firing up Netscape to read email and managed to find the games
> before I even had a chance to show her where the 'start button' was.
> She's not stupid, but she's no guru either.

I think that as long as the user has relatively simple needs, and someone
else does the installation and sysadmin, Linux can be just about as easy
to use as any other system. When the needs get a bit more complex, it will
start causing problems, though.

Tim