Sam Varghese
Friday, 07 November 2008 04:55
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Over at iTWire, we are often in the position where we disagree with a fellow writer and say so. This morning, I found my colleague Davey Winder's piece "Opinion: why Linux sucks at being user friendly" to be a litle too general to pass without comment.
I must admit that unlike Davey I don't have experience of playing with the AmigaOS. I do, however, have two Macs at home, one Windows PC, several boxes running different ports of GNU/Linux and have fooled around with many other operating systems as well.
All said and done, I incline to the view that "user-friendly" is a relative term. It all depends on the individual, the programming (and I don't mean this in a technical sense) of the past and individual likes and dislikes.
That's why people can reconcile themselves to using an operating system where you click on Start in order to shut the system down.
Let's look critically at the points which Davey cited, in support of his assertion that GNU/Linux "sucks at being user-friendly."
1. Linux is a developer's OS
Any operating system is meant for developers. I don't fool around with Linux, the kernel that is, except on rare occasions. I do mess around with application or desktop settings which are a function of other bits of the whole.
As someone who has used Windows since 1989 and GNU/Linux since 1998, I have seen far more things break on the various versions of Windows than on GNU/Linux. After switching to GNU/Linux in 2000, I have updated through four releases - potato, woody, sarge, and etch - and seen only one breakage, due to a third-party application called CUPS (common UNIX printing system) back in 2002. This was fixed in about an hour after I sought and received help from my local Linux user group. Try doing that with WIndows.
Every service pack of Windows brings breakage of some sort or the other. A simple Google search will corroborate this.
2. Linux developers are blinded by love
There is a method to development of an operating system, whereby there
is a clear demarcation between the kernel space and the user space.
This rule was violated by Microsoft in search of functionality - it is
the reason why a simple application error can pull the whole system
down.
Users need to be protected from such things - which is why Microsoft is
belatedly trying to introduce such safeguards. User access control was
one of the reasons why Vista failed - once users have got used to
promiscuity, it is difficult to get them back to using a system as it
should be used.
Linux is unlikely to go down this path - if it did, a great many people would switch, probably to the BSDs.
It takes less work for someone to restore their backed-up personal
files than to reinstall and reconfigure an entire operating system -
that is the simple reason why Linux has a system of user accounts which
work properly. If anyone thinks that allowing malware to trash an
entire system is a good thing and an indicator of user-friendliness, I
respectfully beg to differ.
