Linux Elitism
|
| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| ColonelPanik Jan 16, 2009 10:41 PM EDT |
Ya think? From the comments: "I think Ubuntu is doing so well partially because the community is full of people who don't see using an OS as a aptitude test. Toss in the many folks with Microsoft Derangement Syndrome who claim the company is just a branch of Satan and we have an image problem." I assume the final "we" there is the Linux Elites? |
| bigg Jan 17, 2009 9:53 AM EDT |
I don't know if it qualifies as elitism, but pretty much the entire Windows philosophy is built on one assumption: users are too stupid to run a computer. All they can do is click on an icon to open an app, do simple tasks with that app, then close the app. The Linux philosophy is that anyone using a computer knows is capable of doing so correctly, or is capable of learning, and with some effort can use the full potential of a computer. |
| dinotrac Jan 17, 2009 10:28 AM EDT |
bigg - You've got that wrong, and Excel is the proof. Excel is very powerful software that very bright people can use to do sophisticated things. Sure, dumb people can use it to create horrors, but... The real deal with Windows is a variation of "The OS should be invisibile" -- the computer should, more or less, disappear into the work you're doing. You shouldn't have to be a computer pro to get things done with your computer any more than you should be a mechanic to drive your car, or electronics engineer to watch your television. |
| jdixon Jan 17, 2009 10:44 AM EDT |
> ...the computer should, more or less, disappear into the work you're doing. I.e, the computer should be an appliance. Which is a wonderful concept except for one detail. Appliances are made to do one thing (or one set of related things) and do them very well. They are not general purpose devices. Because they are designed for that one task or set of tasks, they can make a lot of design decisions which are great for that task, but make using them for anything else problematic at best. For example, how many good uses can you think of for a frying pan. Computers are designed to be general purpose devices capable of performing a wide range of (possibly unforeseen) tasks. The two design goals aren't really compatible, and a good multi-purpose computer will never be as simple to use at any particular task as a device designed for that specific task would be. So you can either have a computer appliance designed for a specific set of tasks (the EEE with it's simple interface is a reasonable first generation example) or a general purpose computer, but you can't really have both at the same time. The best you can do is have them use the same hardware and switch between them as needed. A truly well designed computer would have an intelligent interface which would switch it's modes depending on the capabilities of the user and the task at hand, and be capable of presenting multiple modes to different users at the same time, but we're a fair ways from that being an option. |
| dinotrac Jan 17, 2009 11:55 AM EDT |
jdixon - You are, in theory, right -- but WRONG!!! The infinite world of possibilities that exists across the population does not exist in a population of one. In use, most computers are used as appliances. People have a set grouping of things they do: the browse, they write, the caclulate, they game. At my brother-in-law's garage, they look up repair procedures and create bills. The computer can, when things are going well, disappear beneath the task. |
| bigg Jan 17, 2009 12:07 PM EDT |
> Excel is very powerful software that very bright people can use to do sophisticated things. I'm not saying you can't do sophisticated things with Windows, I'm saying that the appeal of Windows is that supposedly anyone, even the fictional grandmother with no technical side, can run Windows without any effort. Buy a computer at Best Buy, plug it in, click a few buttons, and you're good to go. Software installation is a breeze, whether for you or the guy who wants to steal your identity. The answer to far too many problems is to reinstall the OS. The goal is to allow the user to ignore as much of this stuff as a possible. I just don't think it's good practice, and it comes out of a belief that the user is not capable of doing things right, or at least too lazy to learn how to do so. |
| dinotrac Jan 17, 2009 12:15 PM EDT |
bigg - Understood. I was objecting to stupid. BTW -- lazy is wrong, too. I spent a year doing technical writing and was amazed at the energy people put into learning the quirks of Office software. |
| phsolide Jan 17, 2009 7:09 PM EDT |
I vote for linux elitism as "fiction". I've never had trouble with any questions I've asked, I've always gotten help, and sometimes it even worked. I've been able to install and use a number of distros, culminating in Slackware and Linux From Scratch. I'm Joe Sixpack - born in Kansas, raised in smallish (17,000 at the time) town in northern Missouri. I got a degree in Aerospace Engineering, but I've never attained anything other than contempt for Windows. I've been a more-or-less lifelong Unix user. I bought a Radio Shack CoCo III in '86, and ran OS-9 level 2 on it, since I wanted to find out how multi-tasking worked. After that, I have had a Unix or Linux box at home ever since. From '95 to 2001, I even ran NetBSD. At work, I have to use Windows. Now there's an elitist environment. Everybody knows better than the poor, sorry (l)users. Nothing has documentation that's worth a cr@p. Rumors, myths, voodoo and cargo cultism rule the day, as nobody wants to ask the "Help" desk for anything - at best you'll be condesended to, at worst they'll realize your user ID has "administrator" privilege, and take that away. At least on the linux and unix boxes at work, I can have my own bin/ directory and compile stuff like flex, or bison, or whatever. The CIO Decrees what software the Windows folks get to use, and if nobody convinces him/bribes the software onto the "approved products list", you just don't get to use it. The publicly avowed reason is that "viruses can infect any old user's computer if we let you morons go wild installing all that unsafe software". |
| tracyanne Jan 17, 2009 7:20 PM EDT |
@Phsolide I worked in a similar corporate environment once. being a programmer, I worked out my own way of getting unapproved software onto the system. I used to email it to myself. But.... you couldn't send executables, and making compressed archives also didn't work, so I wrote a program that converted the compressed archive to my own version of base 64... to get around any chance that they might have a base 64 scanner, and restored it at the other end. I emailed the initial source code for the base 64 encoder/decoder to myself and built it on the machine at work. After that I had no trouble installing any software, as long as it was only for current user, myself. |
| jdixon Jan 17, 2009 9:42 PM EDT |
> You are, in theory, right -- but WRONG!!! Well, unlike you Dino, there's nothing unusual about that. :) > In use, most computers are used as appliances. Agreed. But the key word is used. Each user uses a different subset of it's capabilities, so there's no easy way to actually design the unit as an appliance. It's up to the user or the IT department (in the case of a corporation) to customize it into being one. That's a difficult and incomplete process. A true appliance would be designed as such from the beginning. > I spent a year doing technical writing and was amazed at the energy people put into learning the quirks of Office software. It's amazing what people can do when you pay them to do it. :) |
Posting in this forum is limited to members of the group: [ForumMods, SITEADMINS, MEMBERS.]
Becoming a member of LXer is easy and free. Join Us!