ObsessiveMathsFreak's Journal: The Linux Desktop Approaches. Millions Flee in Terror.

I've just spent the last TEN HOURS trying to draw THREE simple images of circles, rectangles, lines and one or two pasted in images. TEN HOURS I've spent swearing, cursing and damning the eyes of whoever decided that "Hey the GIMP is GREAT!!!! Let's thrown everything else out the window!!!!" GENIUS!!!! BLOODY GENIUS!!! ARRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!!!! ...ahem...

As I was saying. The GIMP sucks for making images. Here's why from http://www.gimp.org/
"The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages."

The GIMP is designed for editing images! It is completely useless at creating them! Yet in Fedora what Image Creation Utilities are available by default. Why the GIMP of course! You've also got KPaint v0.6. The danm thing doen't even have a fill tool for christs sake! And let's not forget XFig. Why move into the modern era when you can play arounf with vector graphics for hours. Vector Graphics?!?! WTF?!?! Xpaint people!! Hello!!

Once again Redhat play right into the hands of the naysayers. Newbie Linux users starts fedora. Newbie user hates browsing around in spatial mode. Newbie user can't watch movies. Newbie user can't play CDs. Newbie user can't play MP3's! Newbie users can't even scribble around in a simple mspaint type app!! Newbie user cant update system! Do redhat actually care if they attract new users or not?

The general newbie user will walk away from fedora thinking, "Linux is useless". And you know what? They'll be right. If distros continue with this idiotic structuring the Linux desktop will never get anywhere. You don't attract more linux users with the lastest sendmail or ssh versions. Users don't go, ohhh and ahhh, just because bash now supports 64 bit Unicode languages!!

Users want an easy to use, simple system with good apps! They don't give a shit about security. You supposed to do that! They don't need the GIMP! they need Xpaint. They don't need Rhytmbox! they need a working CD player! They don't need spatial browsing!! That sucks ass!!

Linux's future, like most things, depends on getting new people, paticularly young people to support it. New users will only venture into a system if it is friendly to them in the beginning. Newbies will not put up with complicated apps and having to configure /etc/yum.conf to get anything to work, and they shouldn't have to.
Windows will be dominant for the next 40 years! At least! Why? Because millions of kids grew up using windows! They started with solitare, played with paint, worked up to net browsing and went on from there. Legions of users who got good at computer by starting from the simple basics and working up from there. But on most distros, there are no simple basics! You've thrown straigt into the deep end, and guess what? Most newbies sink, or thrash their way back to XP. Why is it that the entire Linux community seems to think that everything is perfectly user friendly right now. Whatever I need to do I can get done using bash and perl scripts. Why just watch me sudo right now

I remember my first forays into Linux. I almost gave up right there. It's as if the Linux community is suffering from some collective brain damage when it comes to UI. We don't need it. We have bash. Meanwhile millions, nay billions, run screaming from the Linux Desktop paradigm. Don't make it easy to use unless you really really have to!

What was I ranting about again? Oh yeah the GIMP. Take my advice friend. Get yourself some of that #yum -y install xpaint. And for any newbie user, who would quite rightly be perplexed by that last one. It means log in as the root user(computer administrator), run the yum program(a software updater application) telling it to answer yes to all questions when installing xpaint(a graphics program very like paint on windows).

You see that's what people need to say to newbies. Not Just edit /etc/runinit.4/ to point to /dev/hdb2 on boot. That is not helpful. We should _never_ have to say that to a new linux user. The fact that we do should be the biggest indicator of all that something is wrong with the linux desktop.

I'm going home to draw up those picture on a windows computer. I don't have right to the university computers and xpaint won't compile. I'll be amoung the great unwashed, uninstalling spyware if any of the people who designed Fedora would dare to retort. Good day to you sir!

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