Make Linux "Gorgeous," Says Ubuntu Leader 688
OSS_ilation writes "They say beauty is only skin deep, but when it comes to Linux and the free software movement, people like Mark Shuttleworth think looks have an important part to play. On his blog and an article on SearchOpenSource.com, Shuttleworth and a slew of open source end users say that the look and feel of open source is also a matter of wider acceptance among enterprise players who are used to Windows, yet crave Mac OS X and the functionality of Linux. 'If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful,' Shuttleworth said. "We have to make it gorgeous. We have to make it easy on the eye. We have to make it take your friend's breath away.' With the early success of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Shuttleworth and company may be onto something."
Re:Don't make it beautiful, make it Just Work (tm) (Score:3, Informative)
From TFB (the fine blog):
Re:Wow, and accurate assessment! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow, and accurate assessment! (Score:3, Informative)
KDE provides similar functionality, but it's not as easy to find. The tool to set it up do it is in one of the menus but every distro seems to try to hide it. Here [kde.org] is documentation on how to use it.
No editing text files. No plain text passwords. No root privileges required.
try WinObj and see what drive letters really are.. (Score:3, Informative)
Deep inside the Windows NT/XP kernel, it maintains an object namespace very similar to a Unix filesystem. You can use WinObj from sysinternals.com [sysinternals.com] to navigate this object namespace. Notice that under the 'Global??' folder you will find the entries 'C:' and 'D:' and so on symbolic linked to the appropriate file system. Also, '\Device\*' in the object namespace is very much like '/dev/*' on Unix.
It is evident that drive letters under an NT kernel is just a DOS compatibility after-thought. The kernel doesn't have concepts of drive letters.
Re:-1, Doesn't Get It (Score:3, Informative)
And someday, if they try really hard, OS X will be nearly as self-consistent as KDE is today. When the Mac equivalents of KIO slaves are universally supported, for example, I' d actually consider switching to OS X. Until then, it's too flaky and ad-hoc for me to take it seriously
Just for a the sake of a differing opinion.
That middle ground is what is wrong (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Wow, and accurate assessment! (Score:3, Informative)
* Where should I save my work ?
* How do I read files from a CD ?
* When I install programs, where do they go ?
* Speaking of which, how do I install something ?
Windows provides answers to these questions in form of GUI. I can click on the CD-Rom icon, I can pick programs from the Start menu, I can add/remove programs using the GUI tool, and I can save my files pretty much anywhere I want. As a power user, I know some registry hacks and UI tweaks and such, but I can function without them; I can also fit most of the implementation details (registry, c:\Program Files, D: drive) into my head at once.
Linux provides *no* answers to these questions -- or, at best, a whole host of confusing, conflicting answers. I'd love it if Linux worked like Windows, by providing all these answers in the GUI. I'd love it *even more* if Linux had a consistent way of doing all these things from the terminal... But it does not. You've got apt-get, rpm,
I understand that, with quite a bit of work, I can configure Linux to work the way I want. But Windows answers my questions out of the box, and I need to get work done, so I don't care to spend a week getting Linux to behave.
Some answers but why change? (Score:3, Informative)
In your home directory sorted in whatever way makes sense to you - or on an NFS share used by a lot of people for collaborative work named after the project, division or whatever - not F: M: or whatever windows shared drive which may differ between desktop machines.
If you get something that isn't available with the distributions package manager it depends on what it is. Local stuff only to be used on that computer goes in /usr/local, optional stuff like java, openoffice and commercial software puts itself in /opt with it's own installer, stuff to be shared with other computers (which you probably won't be doing) goes in /usr/share. If it is stuff that only you will use it can also go in ~/bin to avoid having to install as root.
All distributions now look on the net for what you want and work out all dependencies. On Fedora "yum install packagename" or a GUI tool from the system menu, on Ubuntu and Debian "apt-get packagename" or a GUI tool from the system menu, on Mandriva a GUI tool from the system menu - Gentoo (not for newbies and it turns unix veterans into newbies again) "emerge packagename", and so on for other distributions - even package management on solaris. If the package is not on the list you can still get it, download it, read the instructions and install it - but you don't have to live on the cutting edge.
As for consistancy - it was called CDE - people liked choice more instead.
All that said - applications are the entire reason to use a computer, and if you have to learn to use a lot of different applications it may not be worth shifting to a different platform. You can get a lot of linux functionality with cygwin and ported versions of rsync, find, grep, awk, ssh, ImageMagik (batch processing of graphics files) etc. With X windows on your MS Windows machine you can use all linux applications on your screen with the actual programs running on a linux box you are networked to - that's how people with MS Windows at my workplace run interactive graphical software on a cluster.
In my workplace there were many people that just wanted to type reports and access remote machines - stability problems and MS Word formatting problems with embedded images drove them to linux. There are people that require specific applications that only run on MS Windows so they use Win2k or XP and X Windows. Linux is not MS Windows, has no registry (although g-conf is a misguided imitation done poorly and on a per user basis) has no C: drive and is different enough that your MSDOS specific knowlege will not apply - and the concept of doing everything with a GUI if difficult unless you are resticted to a few options or put incredible amounts of work in like apple. With a CLI you don't swear because the option you need to apply is greyed out because the developer didn't think of a paticular set of circumstances and then have to find and hack a text file anyway to get around it. A combination of CLI and GUI works well in a lot of circumstances and pipes let you do unexpected things quickly without having to buy/download a new program.
Re:Wow, and accurate assessment! (Score:1, Informative)
And as far as the other changes, they were gradual and evolutionary for the most part. Learn a few new things every year, and you'll do just fine, so life went on indeed. Switching to linux is an instant *radical* change all the way down to the core (processes/threads/IPC/etc), NOTHING is the same, you just need to relearn it all from scratch. None of what I've learned over that 20 year time frame is applicable, you just have to unlearn it all. It's much the same as going from a highly skilled mechanical engineer who designs cars and advanced mechanics to some n00b who struggles to fill the tank of his new car. Frustrating is a weak word.
Honestly, I wish I could hack it at that linux stuff, but no matter how hard I try, I just can't. So the day I can't work in IT from Windows-related stuff, I'll be out of IT. Hopefully that'll be long enough that I can retire before (even if that means working boring maintenance jobs on "legacy" apps that run on Windows for the last few years, just like some still work on mainframes today)