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I am
not a usability expert, or programmer or anything like that, so this may not be
the right format for these comments. I have been for years an MSOS user going all the way back to 1989 and
the days of MSDOS. During the time since then I have become fairly
familiar with the guts and internal workings of PCs. Not because I wanted
to, but because I was forced to with all the bugs and idiosyncrasies of the
various MSOSes. I had told myself that as soon as there is a viable alternative I will
switch to another OS source. Viable in this case means that when
you install it everything Just Works, no messing around with sound cards, IRQs,
mice, printers etc to get them to work. And there are a sufficient
number and quality applications / programs that run on such OS. I had
read that Linux was just about there, so I downloaded and tried several
versions, including Fedora, Linspire, Knoppix, SUSE 9.3, Xandros and so
on. The installs were all on a blank HD, and none installed and
everything Just Worked. The main problems seemed to be recognizing the printer and installing
the correct drivers, the same for the 4 button wheel optical mouse, but this is
a MS mouse so scarcity of Linux drivers is to be expected. Some of the
supporting applications looked pretty good. I also had problems
with CD drive mounting, when a music CD was inserted, sometimes a mount drive
message came up, and one system even brought the player up and indicated the
song names etc. but no sound. So then instead of trying to have a working Linux PC, I just
concentrated on becoming familiar with the Graphical User Interfaces.
First I tried the KDE GUI, and I found it to be fairly glitzy, has a fair
amount of flexibility, is not all that intuitive and somewhat hard to learn,
and is still a bit unstable. For instance I could not set the screen
fonts to the size and style that I wanted, there is several places to adjust
fonts, but none are all that clear about what fonts are being adjusted, also
when I did mess with the desktop appearance to get it somewhere like I wanted,
the system would freeze on boot the next time up. And with my limited
knowledge of Linux this is a significant problem. I tried the GNOME GUI that comes standard with Fedora 4, this thing is
fairly intuitive and easy to use, I was able to set the desktop up, (and also
the fonts) the way that I liked it. Fonts seem to be a thing with Linux,
but I have a disk load of them from my earlier experiences with MS
programs. I copied these into the Linux Fonts Folder and they seemed to
work fine, there seems to be more than one font folder in Linux, in fact
several. I don’t know which systems get their fonts out of which
folders, but it seemed that each folder contained a specific type of font,
since mine are TT, I loaded them into the TT folder. I found GNOME to be solid and stable, very few error messages, no
crashes, and always a clean boot. It recognised both CD and DVD drives,
played music in either one when a CD was inserted. The mouse is
functional, it is recognized as a three button, the wheel works but not the
paging buttons. GNOME is certainly easy to learn for the basic
usability items. I never could find the hardware Set-Up, to install
drivers, make hardware adjustments etc. even after I drilled down on just about
every menu. My suggestion is to make little changes to the present
layout concept, I find it satisfactory for basic use and possibly basic users,
there may be some look and feel / navigate / usability improvements
possible. But add some more sophisticated function at deeper menu levels,
such as hardware adjustments, more sophisticated clock functions etc. In
the help pop-up boxes, a single question and not a double barrelled question,
asked in the positive and not in the negative form. I don’t know
what it is about programmers but they always seem to ask questions in the
negative format. “would you like to close the program without saving
this file?” YES / NO The confusing double barrelled and
negative. What is wrong with: “Do you want to save this
file?” YES / NO. I know that usability experts are consulted
on this GNOME project, this is just a user perspective on usability. In
two words “not bad”. Tom McLernon |