RE: [TCLUG:179] A Linux newbie needs some advice

["JoshB [JellyD/L]" <joshb@techie.com>]

Sometime around the 12nd of May in 1998, the wannabe 3|173 h4ck3r Christopher Reid Palmer sed:

> "Willy nilly"...that pretty much summarizes the Unix filesystem
> architecture.

you betcha =)

> 
> ....with each configuration file requiring completely different formats,
> each more confusing than the last.
> 
> > Remember gui's are for pc weenies!  Keep to the command line.
> 
> I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you're joking.

i'm not going to make a comment either way. gui's have their place; just
not on my machine. they're just not fast enough for my purposes, and hell
if i need pretty graphics for stuff. give me pine, lynx, emacs and
bitchx any day.

> > Go through /bin and with the help of the man pages identify what each file
> > does.
> 
> This is superior to a consistent, graphical interface that helps the user 
> along and teachers her, with all the commands and options readily
> apparent? How so? And let's face it, the man pages are almost useless for
> a beginner, and aggravating to the experienced user.

total agreement here, the man pages arent much help for anybody (tho i
_do_ like the coverage of the kernel C calls, but hell if an end-user will
be looking at those ;)

> 
> Sorry to rag on your favorite system, everybody, but let's face it: Unix
> has some crippling deficiencies; consistency, interface and documentation
> just being the most obvious. And it doesn't even necessarily suck more
> than any other OS, just differently. I'll admit it, my favorite OS has
> *no* working virtual memory manager, shits itself several times a day
> under normal usage (let's see if Navigator will open a document
> locally...nope. Hard reset time.), and cannot recover from memory
> fragmentation without rebooting. But at least the developers realized that
> they were serving actual end-users, and didn't have their heads
> completely up their asses when it came to interface design.

agreed. the mac os does have a nice, usable, mostly intuitive interface.
they've gotta really work on the stability and .. multithreading <g> of
the underlying os, tho, before i'd ever recommend it to a newbie. in my
experience, macos crashes more than windoze, amazingly.

> Unix needed an interface overhaul 15 years ago. Perhaps it's finally
> coming? On the SIGFS links page
> <http://acm.cs.umn.edu/~jaymz/sigfs/links.html> I put up three links to
> organizations devoted do simplifying the user interface to Linux, each
> with varying degrees of radical change (none near enough, but it's a
> start). Take a look. I personally am working with Project Independence.
> See you there?

i'm still kind of undecided on this whole issue.  i mean, a simplified UI
is nice if you want to increase the userbase to include normal human
beings, but if you simplify things, you take away the ability to change
the environment (otherwise the user can get lost). and if i can't change
my environment, down to the tiniest detail, if anything stops me from
doing what _i_ want to do .. then i won't use it. that's why i use linux,
because i love messing with source code, and customizing everything.
recompiling kernels, optimizing for my hardware .. this sort of thing
almost can't exist in an end-user environment, to a degree, because of the
potential for disaster. imagine the havoc that would be caused if the
everyday Joe Windoze read somewhere that he could "recompile windoze, make
it work better for your machine!" and set blindly off to do so. it could
have dire consequences, not to mention the pain in the arse it would be
for us to do tech supp for him.

im done ranting.









for now (:

-JoshB [JellyD] [joshb@techie.com]
[UIN:197861] [IRC:DALNet:#!safehaven]