Biking Annoyance

I understand (sort of -- it's still frustrating) when motorists think they have the exclusive right to the road (hint: legally, NO) and honk/yell at bicyclists going slower-than-car-speed in front of them. But when a public bus honks at me to get out of the way when I'm riding down Mass Ave, exercising my rights as vehicular traffic -- well, I'd have hoped the MBTA would train their drivers more thoroughly in the rules of the road.

"Girlfriend Linux"

So with the release of Hardy Heron, an Ubuntu-using blogger puts the new system to the "girlfriend test" -- he gives his Windows-familiar but Ubuntu-n00b girlfriend a list of tasks to accomplish, and watches her try to accomplish them (she's able to do most, but not all, of the tasks without any instruction).

This blog post has gotten a lot of attention in just a few days, and with good reason -- it touches on a lot of hot-button issues regarding Linux and Ubuntu. The blogger says, "Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do" -- and he considers his intelligent, tech-savvy girlfriend's failure at a few of the tasks to be a sign that this isn't the case. This is a problematic assessment -- many of the tasks he chose are the kinds of things only power users even think to do (Photoshop a picture, download a torrent). A truly computer-illiterate user or even an ordinary non-power-user would be interested in much more basic tasks -- e.g. I installed Ubuntu on my mom's laptop a few months ago (hi, Mom!), and she hasn't had to ask me for tech support, presumably because she only uses her computer for a handful of things and those things are easy to do.

That said, this type of test is definitely a useful way to see what aspects of the interface are more and less user-friendly; for example, installing Flash, which is one of the first few things I do on any new installation, is completely non-obvious and requires command-line usage -- not a good idea for something many non-savvy users will want to do right away.

Of course, there's always going to be the double-standard folks who will use any non-user-friendly aspect of a Linux distro as an example of how "Linux is too hard", while ignoring any program that's buggy, interface that's confusing, or task that requires the command line on another OS. Their counterparts are the "Linux isn't Windows!!!" people ("Linux isn't Windows, so don't expect someone used to Windows to be able to use it easily") -- I agree, Linux isn't and shouldn't be a clone of Windows, but if you want Windows users to switch to Linux, you should care about making Linux easy to use for people used to Windows, just like if you want new computer users to be able to start out on Linux you should care about making it easy to use for people who haven't used a computer before. Fortunately we've seen a lot of progress in these areas in the past few years, and I'm confident that Linux developers will continue to produce distros that are easier and easier for all levels of users.

Oh, and for the "Linux users don't have girlfriends"(/"girls don't use Linux"/"there are no girls on the internet") people? Get over yourselves. It's not funny, it's not original, and it's not true... in fact, I happen to live with a Linux user who not only has a girlfriend but had her install Flash for him :).