On GNOME advocacy

The odd things for me, having tried more or less every single Linux desktop under the sun, including several that no longer exist, is that there's no one definition of "user friendly" that holds true for everyone.

 

In this story's comments, there are people saying Windows is the best, others saying certain particular versions are best, others saying they find it unusable or at least hard.

 

Yet this has been the best-selling desktop OS in history for about 35 years now, used by _billions_ of people, so it must be getting *something* right. 

 

Counter to that, there are also people castigating Macs and macOS. That's normal; there are as many biased fanboys *against* as there are *for*.

 

And yet, again, for nearly 40 years now, Apple has been *THE ONE COMPANY* to resist the rise of Microsoft, and has a fantastically loyal fan base and makes a lot of money.

 

I also have a number of blind friends, and they mostly tell me that Windows is the most accessible OS there is, that it has the best selection of assistive tech, that the apps are more accessible, and so on.

 

Some favour macOS. What macOS provides out of the box is *way* better, it's true. If you're a casual computer user -- bit of surfing, bit of online chat, very occasionally write a letter -- it's better for blind users than Windows.

 

If you have a job to do, in business, and need rich powerful apps, and need them to be accessible, my working blind mates tell me Windows easily trounces the Mac.

 

I am not blind so I must take their word for it.

 

But I can make Windows and macOS and my preferred Linux desktops, Unity and Xfce, stand on their heads and do back handsprings for me. I regularly read people telling me that any of these OSes just can't do X or can't do Y, when X and Y are things I do on a daily basis. 

 

What this really means is: they don't know how to do X or Y, and they haven't bothered to look for instructions or guidance. It doesn't do it -- whatever "it" is, it varies a lot -- and so they decide it can't, it doesn't work, and they move on.

 

Don't believe me? Look on Quora for the dozens of idiots asking "why can't Macs do cut and paste?"

 

In terms of the mass market, outside Xerox PARC, Apple *invented* the industry-standard method of C&P and defined the keystrokes every other OS now uses... for the Lisa and the Mac.  Of *course* they can.

 

What the idiots mean, but are too dim to know they mean, is that the *Finder* doesn't do cut and paste. No, it doesn't, for excellent very solid UI and HCI reasons that cause millions of dollars of data loss every year on Windows and have done since 1995. 

 

But it's symptomatic. 

 

People mostly don't know how to drive Windows and Windows-like interfaces with the standard keystrokes. They don't know how to search it, how to manage windows with the keyboard, how to manage virtual desktops, stuff like that. 

 

Because they don't know, most don't do it. 

 

Therefore most of the desktops for Linux are half-baked rip-offs of Windows that don't implement the clever stuff, because the people that implemented it didn't know the clever stuff. 

 

So it doesn't work. 

 

Along came GNOME and ripped all that out. If most people don't use it, then clearly, it's unnecessary so let's bin it. So it *forced* users into accessing the limited remaining functionality via defined keystrokes and gestures.

 

As a result, people have to learn the commands, and they can because there aren't many. 

 

And the end result of that is that they then praise GNOME for being "powerful" and "efficient" because they were forced to learn stuff.

 

Windows did that better 27 years ago, but because of good design -- and I am no MS fanboy! -- you didn't have to learn it. You could point and click your way and stumble across a way to do it.

 

It's sort of Perl vs Python. One gives you a dozen ways to accomplish something; the other has one way that's encouraged as being "natural" or "pythonic".

 

Perl fans loved it for its power as a result... but they can't read their own code, let alone anyone else's. In the end that's doomed the language.

 

Python is easy enough for almost anyone with Clue № 1 but many already-skilled people hate it as a result of its enforced rules.

 

Programmers know this stuff and accept it. They rail about it, but they accept it.

 

Programmers typically do not know desktop tech well. I lived with 2 and was engaged to one. They could out-program me drunk, but they were not techies. It's a different skill.

 

So when someone comes along and says "hey, you know what, I am an expert in this stuff and environments A, B and C have this large feature set and cover 75% or 80% of the functionality of the OS they were copied from," they are probably right.

 

Then someone who knows just 10% of that functionality uses Desktop D, which *only does that 10%* but forced them to learn how to use it properly, and they say "no, Desktop D is better because it works and it's really efficient and has 100% of the functionality I need, and I'm a programmer, I know this stuff, so this is all anyone needs!"

 

It is amazingly frustrating to head this kind of advocacy, *know* that you know far better than the person doing it, but not be able to explain to Mr Loud-Confident-And-Wrong that there is stuff he hasn't considered and the big picture is a lot more complicated than that.

 

But what's worse than that is when the advocates of Desktop D are *so* loud and *so* confident that they persuade billion-dollar corporations to standardize on their fairly poor product... then they throw conferences where they pat each other on the back for their cleverness, and they patronize people online for being stupid from their position of smug, entrenched ignorance.

 

That is really infuriating.