Re: Ubuntu user friendly?

Greetings,

I think it is true that making hardware changes to a working linux setup
can sometimes be more challenging than with XP. It is also true that the
flexibility and variety in the linux world means that there are
sometimes many ways to accomplish the same task, which seems simple in
Windows because there is one predictable way to do it (ie change display
resolution) and can be frustrating in linux, because one site refers you
to configuring xorg, another tells you to use the ubuntu menus, and a
third says you should compile a better driver. And knowing which advice
to follow isn't obvious to many.

That said, I'm not sure that any of the big 3 OSes is really more
intuitive than any other. I have clients in all three OS worlds, and I'm
becoming convinced that certain people and certain brains just connect
better with certain OSes.

Linux has come far enough that it is as good a newbie choice as Windows,
depending on the needs of the user. Seniors are great candidates for
linux, because they want to browse, email, skype, do photo stuff, but
they don't want to tinker with any hardware or settings, they just want
it to work (and they don't need their computer to run the latest version
of X game). And us geeky types who are sometimes more interested in
getting and solving a problem than in a system that "just works" also
love the access to the guts, the flexibility, the leanness, the
non-uniformity and non-conformist aspects of linux.

So is it better or worse, simpler or harder than Windows or Mac?
Yes. :-)

annrkiszt, you've told us at meetings that you have a different learning
style than many others, which helps make sense of your frustrating
experience described below. While I don't doubt that you are very
capable of learning and using linux, I am not a one OS evangelist. I
think people should feel free to find an OS that suits them and then run
with it. If solving/learning linux is driving you crazy, stop using it.
If/when you are ready to embark on a "learning adventure challenge"
again, give it another go.
      Les...

annrkiszt wrote:
> I'm so frustrated and pissed off right now. I'm sitting here thinking
> seriously of wiping linux from the computer and putting on a nice familiar
> pirated copy of windows, then spending my days dissing linux for the rest of
> my life.
> User friendly? I think not. I'm not a stupid computer user but this OS
> humiliates me. Its so counter intuitive!
> I put a nice 40gig hard drive in there. Can I find it? Heck no. I can't
> find anything on that computer. NO idea how to find things. Oh I know,
> they're organized by category under various weirdly named folders,
> irrespective of which drive or partition they're on. I also know that you
> have to tell the OS to look at the new drive using a /mount command, the
> parameters of which I can never remember. Why should I have to? It's
> supposed to be an easy system for beginners. A beginner with a command
> table in his hand???? Maybe Ubuntu disks should ship with tables of
> commands? Like the old message manager fold-out command tree?
> The other night I tried to change the screen resolution. Screen went black.
> I couldn't do anything. I finally figured out again how to change consoles
> and couldn't startx or do anything till finally at least ctrl alt del shut
> the machine down. When I booted it back up I had a desktop again but now
> there's no way I'll try messing with resolution again. There's no undo.
> There's no reverting if you can't see the screen. Nothing.
> If everything I want to do means I have to figure out how to access help
> files and spend a half hour or whatever searching for instructions and
> stumbling around trying to figure it out, is that user friendly????
> I can't get that computer online now. I don't know why. It was online last
> night when I turned it off. I turn it on today, no connection. Why? Hell
> if I know.
> Open the wireless configuration dialog. That takes me a while to remember
> how. It's not what I set it today. It's changed itself. I set it to wep
> open 128 bit passphrase but it's on hex. Why? Hell if I know. On windows
> it's simply WEP Open. That's it. No messing around. I change it. I close
> it. Nothing. Open it, it's on hex again. Nothing to show me if it's trying
> to connect or what the progress is. Finally after five tries I walk over
> and yank the plug on the computer, swearing like a guttersnipe.
> This is user friendly?
> I dunno if I care anymore. I always wait a day before settling on a
> decision but I'm seriously considering giving up for good on this OS. My
> first frustrations with it were with Redhat back in 1999 and it's never
> gotten any better. I've never been able to remember a command or a file
> heirarchy and this is the very first system that ever actually ran for me
> and even so it still has glitches in the video.
> I can't work this OS for anything and I'm one of the more tech saavy people
> I know. Hell, aside from the people in the linux group I AM the tech saavy
> person. People come to me for help with their PCs and I can usually fix
> things. Yet linux continues to evade me. I'm tired of feeling stupid. I'm
> tired of crying over it. I'm tired of facing a useless computer that I
> can't use for anything because I don't know what or how to do with it.
>
>
> --
> Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
> Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
> Chinese Proverb
>
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Received on Wed Dec 17 09:35:40 2008