Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2000 05:56:59 -0600 (CST) From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Tim McMillen <timcm@umich.edu>, "Rino Mardo" <helixfish@gmx.net> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: beginners with bsd Message-ID: <14848.1291.185314.131884@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <115781882@toto.iv>
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The single most important thing is that you have people handy who are able and willing to help you over the initial hurdles. For Open Source systems, that largely means the net, or books if you can find them. For Mac/Windows, that probably means the store you bought the computer at, and once again books if you can find them. [The rest is rant. You should probably ignore it.] Rino Mardo <helixfish@gmx.net> types: > With Linux, I feel it's becoming the M$ of the *NIX world as GOOEY here and > there are making the kernel bloated. I guess it's just me coming from the > old school of *NIX. Well, not all Linux's feels that way. I installed TurboLinux, and it actually let me do it the way I wanted without doing a custom install. It felt like doing something that was a Unix install, not a Windows install (and some Linux systems give me the latter feeling). Tim McMillen <timcm@umich.edu> types: > On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Chip wrote: > > I wouldn't give you any flak, I'm just curious why you would > > recommend the > > Mac. Why would it be better than any custom 'pc'? I will admit, I > > have never > > used a Mac and know basicaly nothing about them. > Well Basically because there are whole teams of people at apple > whose job is to make the OS easy to use. [Sore Toes Mode] Well, the original goal was to make it easy for *casual users* to use. They were justifiable quite proud of the results. For people who use a computer a couple of hours every other day or so, it's really, really straightforward. Unfortunately, it's a *nightmare* for people who need to use the thing most of the day, 5 or more days a week. Having only one mouse button means the casual user never has to figure out which one to press. For the power use, it means that half (or 2/3rds, if you're used to a three-button mouse) the things that should be a mouse click away now require a trip to the menu, or are lost among the many <keyboard-key-down>-click actions that the Mac has. I could go for any number of features, but I think that makes the point. > They also have proffesional > interface designers whose job is to study how people interface with the > computer. And these people's opinions are listened to unlike other > places. When trying to get the same task done in windows and Mac, the > mac task is much easier. Often when using Mac OS, I find myself saying > 'man, somebody was thinking there' Personally, I find the Mac and Windows to be nearly indistinguishable. Neither is user friendly enough to behave the way I want it to. Both have lots of "features" whose primary purpose seems to be to make me curse at the machine. Both systems tend to crash when I start running software on them the way I run it on Unix systems. > Mac OS X, coming out soon (Beta already of course) will combine > that ease of use and well thought out interface with a solid unix core. > See www.apple.com/macosx/ if you dig around enough you can find some > details. I haven't looked at Mac OS X. I've seen at least one long time Mac user whose primary reaction was "Apple has screwed up big time". They fit the Mac user profile you provided - they don't care about the OS, or why things work they way they do. They just want them to work. The beef was apparently that Apple changed the *default* behavior, so that it's now suitable for a power users instead of that typical Mac user. You can get the old behaviors back, but it requires resetting all the preferences. > And I would have to politely disagree with Igor and say that ease > of use (for a beginner; ease meaning: does not have to learn too much to > get something done) does pretty much equate with GUI. Now efficiency and > getting a lot done in a short time (power) are a different story. A GUI > cannot do that well. I agree with igor. There is as much to learn with a GUI as with a CLI. The difference is that a GUI displays a partial list of things to try, instead of having an unknown list of command names. In one case, you have to learn what each of the funky buttons does (and I've *never* seen a GUI that was intuitively obvious to someone who's never used one before), in the other you have to learn the funky words and what they do. The GUI makes simple things easy to get to, but that's only useful if your definition of "simple things" and the designers happen to coincide. If they don't, then you're probably going to wind lost in a maze of buttons and menus, trying to find what you need. That's much more painful than being lost in a maze of directories. [Ok, end of rant] <mike To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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