[Another recycled mailing list post]
I was asked what options there were for blind people who wish to use Linux.
The answer is simple but fairly depressing: basically every blind person I know personally or via friends of friends who is a computer user, uses Windows or Mac. There is a significant move from Windows to Mac.
Younger computer users -- by which I mean people who started using computers since the 1990s and widespread internet usage, i.e. most of them -- tend to expect graphical user interfaces, menus and so on, and not to be happy with command-line-driven programs.
This applies every bit as much to blind users.
Linux can work very well for blind users
if they use the terminal. The Linux shell is the richest and most powerful command-line environment there is or ever has been, and one can accomplish almost anything one wants to do using it.
But it's still a command line, and a notably unfriendly and unhelpful one at that.
In my experience, for a lot of GUI users, that is just too much.
For instance, a decade or so back, the Register ran some articles I wrote on switching to Linux. They were, completely intentionally, what is sometimes today called "opinionated" -- that is, I did not try to present balance or a spread of options. Instead I presented what was, IMHO, the best choices.
Multiple readers complained that I included a handful of commands to type in. "This is why Linux is not usable! This is why it is not ready for the real world! Ordinary people can't do this weird arcane stuff!" And so on.
Probably some of these remarks are still there in the comments pages.
In vain did some others try to reason with them.
But it was 10x quicker to copy-and-paste these commands!
-> No, it's too hard.
He could give GUI steps but it would take pages.
-> Then that's what he should have done, because we don't do this weird terminal nonsense.
But then the article would have been 10x longer and you wouldn't read it.
-> Well then the OS is not ready, it's not suitable for normal people.
If you just copy-and-paste, it's like 3 mouse clicks and you can't make a typing error.
-> But it's still weird and scary and I DON'T LIKE IT.
You can't win.
This is why Linux Mint succeeded -- partly because when Ubuntu introduced its non-Windows-like desktop after Microsoft threatened to sue, Mint hoovered up those users who wanted it Windows-like.
But also because Mint didn't make you install the optional extras. It bundled them, and so what if that makes it illegal to distribute in some countries? It Just Worked out of the box, and it looked familiar, and that won them millions of fans.
Mac OS X has done extremely well partly because users never
ever need to go need a command line, for anything, ever. You can if you want, but you never, ever need to.
If that means you can't move your swap file to another drive, so be it. If that means that a tonne of the classic Unix configuration files are gone, replaced by a networked configuration database, so be it.
Apple is not afraid to break things in order to make something better.
The result has been to become the first trillion-dollar computer company, and hundreds of millions of happy customers.
Linux gives you choices, lets you pick what you want, work the way you want... and despite offering the results for free, the result has been about 1% of the desktop market and basically zero of the tablet and smartphone markets.
Ubuntu made a valiant effort to make a desktop of Mac-like simplicity, and it successfully went from a new entrant in a busy marketplace in 2004 to being the #1 desktop Linux within a decade. It has made virtually no dent on the non-Linux world, though.
After 20 years of this, Google (after *bitter* internal argument) introduced ChromeOS, a Linux which takes away
all your choices. It only runs on Google hardware, has no apps, no desktop, no package management, no choices at all. It gives you a dead cheap, virus-proof computer that gets you on the Web.
In less time than Ubuntu took to win about 1% of the Windows market over to Linux, ChromeBooks persuaded about one third of the world laptop buying market to switch to Linux. More Chromebooks sell every year -- tens of millions -- than Ubuntu users
in total since it lauched.
What effect has this had on desktop Linux? Zero. None at all. If that is the price of success, they are not willing to pay it. What Google has done is so unspeakable foul, so wrong, so blasphemous, they don't even talk about it.
What effect has it had on Microsoft? A lot. Cheaper Windows laptops than ever, new low-end editions of Windows, serious efforts to reduce the disk and memory usage...
And little success. The cheap editions lose what makes Windows desirable, and ultra-cheap Windows laptops make poorer slower Chromebooks than actual Chromebooks.
Apple isn't playing. It makes its money in the high-end.
Unfortunately a lot of people are very technologically conservative. Once they find something they like, they will stay with it at all costs.
This attitude is what has kept Microsoft immensely profitable.
A similar one is what has kept Linux as the most successful server OS in the world. It is just a modernised version of a quick and dirty hack of an OS from the 1960s, but it's capable and it's free. "Good enough" is the enemy of better.
There are hundreds of other operating systems out there. I listed
25 non-Linux FOSS OSes in this piece, and yes, FreeDOS was included.
There are dozens that are better in various ways than Unix and Linux.
- Minix 3 is a better FOSS Unix than Linux: a true microkernel which can cope with parts of itself failing without crashing the computer.
- Plan 9 is a better UNIX than Unix. Everything really is a file and the network is the computer.
- Inferno is a better Plan 9 than Plan 9: the network is your computer, with full processor and OS-independence.
- Plan 9's UI is based on Oberon: an entire mouse-driven OS in 10,000 lines of rigorous, type-safe code, including the compiler and IDE.
- A2 is the modern descendant of Oberon: real-time capable, a full GUI, multiprocessor-aware, internet- and Web-capable.
(And before anyone snarks at me: they are all niche projects, direly lacking polish and not ready for the mass market. So was Linux until the 21st century. So was Windows until version 3. So was the Mac until at the very least the Mac Plus with a hard disk. None of this in any way invalidates their potential.)
But almost everyone is too invested in the way they know and like to be willing to start over.
So we are trapped, the monkey with its hand stuck in a coconut shell full of rice, even though it can see the grinning hunter coming to kill and eat it.
We are facing catastrophic climate change that will kill most of humanity and most species of life on Earth, this century. To find any solutions, we need better computers that can help us to think better and work out better ways to live, better cleaner technologies, better systems of employment and housing and everything else.
But we can't let go of the single lousy handful of rice that we are clutching. We can't let go of our broken political and economic and military-industrial systems. We can't even let go of our broken 1960s and 1970s computer operating systems.
And every day, the hunter gets closer and his smile gets bigger.
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