On GNOME advocacy
Jul. 23rd, 2022 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liam_on_linuxThe 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.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 03:17 am (UTC)I've had bad vision issues for the longest time (-20 nearsightedness, cataracts, some other stuff, yadda yadda), and somewhere along the way of using the mac I got addicted to the pinch-screen zoom function (screen magnifier or whatever, everyone calls it something different). I owe my career to that one function because it was so dead simple to keybind. and flick on to zoom.
Right before i switched to Ubuntu, I was trying out a few different laptops and dabbled for like, a month with Windows to see if there was any real competition there. You know what the straw was that broke the camel's back? the absolute "useless" zoom functionality on there. There was only one "level "of zoom, it didn't follow the mouse cursor around, and there was no keyboard shortcut to toggle it back and forth.
Imagine the look on my face when I realized Ubuntu natively ran essentially the mac's version of that zoom function. Didn't look back after that.
Anyway all that to say I deeply enjoyed your post but I must say I'm puzzled at your blind friends saying they prefer windows. I wonder if it's compatibility with screen readers that might be doing it; can see a software mismatch being the issue.
no subject
Date: 2022-07-28 04:57 pm (UTC)I am glad you liked the story.
I have a friend who used to occasionally comment on my blog who could talk about why he finds Windows so much better, but I think he's kinda tired of the subject now and has moved on. He stopped updating his Livejournal a decade or more ago and never moved over to Dreamwidth.
One thing puzzles me: you say that you use pinch to zoom on Macs.
But not a single model of Mac has a touchscreen, or ever has had. Pinch-to-zoom is an iOS feature for iPhones and iPads.
Do you mean you're using pinch-to-zoom on the trackpad in order to zoom the screen? I don't like trackpads and don't have one on any of my Macs so I can't try this. I sold my Magic Trackpad to a friend.
The people I've talked to about this stuff are mostly totally non-light-sensing and so they can't use any kind of pointing device or do anything much with graphics. They are 100% screen-reader based. I think that's a very different world of usability experience.
no subject
Date: 2022-08-02 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-02 10:15 am (UTC)Oh right!
Now I'm with you.
Like I said, I don't use a Mac with a trackpad myself, but my fiancée has a 2009 MacBook Pro I gave her. So there is one in the house.
I don't think either of us ever used screen zooming, but I know it supports using the trackpad for scrolling.
I think what you're describing is two-finger scrolling. You can use scrolling (including a mouse or trackball with a scroll wheel) to adjust the zoom in most desktop web browsers on all platforms, Mac and Windows and Linux. I do it myself regularly.
TBH I didn't know that you could do that with the desktop or other apps, but I'm glad to learn it's possible.
(I am -6 or so prescription myself, and use Varilux trifocals all the time. She is only -1 or so. May I ask: is there a reason you've not gone for cataract surgery? My impression is it's pretty straightforward these days.)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-04 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-04 08:39 am (UTC)Oh excellent!
That sounds like a massive improvement and I hope it works out well for you.
I speak from personal experience when I say that -6 vision is not great, especially unaided, but it means things like affordable contact lenses that make swimming a lot more fun... and spectacles that are cheaper, lighter, and bigger if you want. :-)