Re: Window managers

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>| I packaged the RPMS so any newbie could install them.  The enlightenment
>| a window manager that actually works WELL with GNOME. The most important
>| thing to me is that new users try Linux. I have no personal preferences
>
>I think this will be a big problem for Linux in the future. One gets
>newbies and non-newbies. Then one have to be careful not to push away
>those who aren't newbies, as everything is laid out for a newbie.
>
>I would hate it very much if one was left without a shell because this
>is too dangerous, "what if dad just tried rm -rf /home, we cannot have
>this. there should only be gmc" 
>
>Maybe a split in the distros would be nice. One newbie version and one
>that wasn't?

[Careering wildly off-topic here...]

 In my opinion features should *never* be optimised for the newbie. This is
because everyone is a newbie once, but only once. You learn to use each 
feature in turn, then you want to be able to use it without thinking about it.
Document everything, and encourage users to read the documentation. If
necessary, have warning messages which can be turned off forever once the user 
has read them.

 If people can learn to drive, they can learn to use a computer. We don't 
assume that someone who has never seen a car before will be able to find all 
the controls and drive safely at 70 miles an hour. If we designed cars to be 
driven by these people, they wouldn't be very useful machines.

 Features should be optimised for the majority of users, and newbies are
normally in the minority. At the moment they are common because of the number 
of adults who are starting to use computers who never used them before. This 
will not last. In ten years' time, the only newcomers to computing will be 
young children. We don't design the rest of society around children, and we
shouldn't design computers around them either.

 Of course I'm not arguing against intuitive, consistent UI - the less new
features each of us has to learn, the better. However, there is a big
difference between making something intuitive (which is difficult), and
slapping warning notices and "Are you sure?" dialogs all over it (which is
easy but extremely irritating).


 - Michael Rogers