Open-Source Software and "The Luxury of Ignorance"

Bootsy Collins writes "Using the recent experience of trying to configure CUPS on his home network, Eric Raymond has written an interesting new screed on poor design of user interfaces in general, and configuration interfaces in particular, in open source software, entitled The Luxury of Ignorance. A sample quote: 'This kind of fecklessness is endemic in open-source land. And it's what's keeping Microsoft in business -- because by Goddess, they may write crappy insecure overpriced shoddy software, but on this one issue their half-assed semi-competent best is an order of magnitude better than we usually manage.'"

In related news

JWZ was trying to get video to play on his box [jwz.org]. More than a year old, but still a good guide to interface design.

Re:In related news

A similar diatribe to ESR's could be written on trying to burn a backup DVD under RH9. Gave up; I just FTP my backup over to my Lose2003 box, where the driver worky-worky.

Re:In related news

The trick to gettting dvdrecord to work is to know that it only supports "-dao" on most drives.

I routinely bittorent avi's and recode them as mpegs and use dvdauthor and dvdrecord to carry neat videos back to my parent's DVD player to show them. It bridges a generational gap.

Re:In related news

I guess the person who modded me up didn't realize that the scenario I described above is using Dvd Shrink + Nero + Windows.

HINT: You can post on this thread to kill the points.

Re:In related news

I guess that you didn't realize that's pretty similar to K3B's DVD copy function (or a couple clicks shy of K3B's "make eMovix disk") - on Linux. :)

Why the arcana? Why not publish the knowledge?

The trick to getting dvdrecord to work is to know that it only supports "-dao" on most drives."

Why doesn't the software help file clearly state that? The insistence that Linux users ferret out these tidbits in order to get something to work is what is making people stay with MSFT. I installed SuSE 8.2 and discovered that it didn't install a functional DVD burner even though it was distributed on DVD... there was vague mention of some things I had to acquire and install and configure if I wanted to use a DVD burner. To hell with that ... Win2000 happened to be available and the DVD burner software that came with the drive works fine wiith it.

Re:Why the arcana? Why not publish the knowledge?

> The trick to getting dvdrecord to work is to know that it only supports "-dao" on most drives."

Why doesn't the software help file clearly state that?

I so agree with you, but I'd go even further: Why does the software not set this flag automatically if it's the only one that works?

The luxury of ignorance. If only one flag works, and/or is required for correct operation, then I should not need to know about it at all.

Unfortunately, writing such software is difficult and, most importantly, boring. It's not C00L to have written software which is trivial to use, and the FLOSS community is unfortunately still driven by the wish to become famous for having written something C00L.

So what we should ask ourselves is: how do we make it 1337 to write software that grandma could use?

Re:Why the arcana? Why not publish the knowledge?

Of course you have Windows XP Pro, Nero, and dvdrecord........ Which were all paid for, and legally licensed under your name. As your "copy" of autocad 2003, and all these beautiful softwares with EULA that to be ligitimatly use require you to PAY for the right to used them. Of course you did get all these legally. I know I miss the point.....

Yes, you TOTALLY missed the point, which was that SuSE distributed a version on DVD, and despite knowing that the users were going to have a DVD player and maybe even a burner, didn't bother to make sure that burner and player software were installed and configured. They took the easy way out and expected EVERY user to track down the necessary information and download other files to install and configure the DVD burner/player.

Implying that I am a software pirate helps Linux improve? How? I have a LEGAL copy of Win2000 and the DVD software that came with the burner is also legal. Looking at the Program files, everything I have on my system is legal: either FOSS or purchased.

What WAS your point, anyway?

Just modify the assembly sources and it'll work

A similar diatribe to ESR's could be written on trying to burn a backup DVD under RH9. Gave up; I just FTP my backup over to my Lose2003 box, where the driver worky-worky.

No, no! The driver works *perfectly*, it's just that it requires correct entry of hardware parameters in one of the assembly language sources! Yeesh! Don't blame the hard-working open-source developer for your MCSE-like lack of computer knowledge!

Seriously, though, I'm so glad to see ESR ranting about the state of userland GUI stuff. I've been doing it for a while [glowingplate.com], but it's often dismissed as a FUD campaign by people who don't like what I'm saying.

Re:In related news

I ran into this recently in Debian too. It seems that the open source software just doesn't quite cut it for my TDK drive. I could write cds fine with cdrecord, but it would fail with an "unrecognized media" or some such error when I tried to burn a dvd. I was using dvdrecord (based on cdrecord), but it doesn't work with a lot of drives. The really frustrating thing is that cdrecord supports writing dvds with my drive, just not in the opensource version. You can get the "pro" version here [berlios.de] it is free for non-commercial use and it works well (there is a readme file with more info).

Re:In related news

More than a year old, but still a good guide to interface design.

That isn't a 'good guide' at all! It's barely more than a rant if you can manage to read between the lines.
Here's some useful links to UI design concepts.
I got these from the default installation of Mozilla.
Bookmarks > Mozilla Project > Developer Information > User Interface Design:

Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines [apple.com]

IBM/Ease of Use/Design [ibm.com]

Microsoft User Experience and Interface Design Resources [microsoft.com]

KDE User Interface Guidelines [kde.org]

Since these links come from an older install of Mozilla, some may have changed.

Re:In related news

That isn't a 'good guide' at all! It's barely more than a rant if you can manage to read between the lines.

It would seem JWZ would agree with you:

Then in January, the jackasses over at Slashdot posted a link to it, calling it a "review" of Linux video software. I guess you could consider it a review, if you were to squint at it just right. But really what it is is a rant about how I had an evening stolen from me by crap software design.

It's a rant, pure and simple.

--Dan

Re:In related news

More fun : Interface Hall of Shame [libero.it]

Re:In related news

For completeness:
Gnome Hig [gnome.org]

Anyone remember the Steve Jobs of yesteryear?

He was obsessed with the Macintosh being a work of art. He was so picky about the look of the damn calculator app, the designer got tired of revising it and made a calculator interface designer for him. The final design Steve made stayed with MacOS up into the 90s. He even had the Mac designers sign their names on the inside of the mold for the casing. That's a mentality I like--the connection between emotion and computing. The creation of a computer that blendds into someone's life as a useful tool and portal to computing.

What happened to that melding of art and computing? OS X still has it, but without support for x86, it's not exploding like it should. That leaves Linux--and Linux is completely missing the ball here because it's been written by developers for developers, and still is. It's massively technical and powerful for dev-heads, but the other front--the one that Windows lacks--is the intuitive, artistic side.

But, I fully expect everyone to stick with crappy XFree86 for another 10 years and espouse how great their poorly designed "KDE" and "GNOME" interfaces are. Five years after Longhorn comes out, KDE will finally get around to attempting hardware acceleration and also speeding up the horribly shit-slow app-loading.

Nobody's artistic about computing anymore, except Apple. We should be too. Obviously, that means rethinking the way people are writing their apps/environments, which ain't gonna happen.

Re:Anyone remember the Steve Jobs of yesteryear?

What we really need to have happen is the folks who still have such values as those of the original macintosh form their own linux environment where thinking differently about apps/environments is accepted and where essential macintosh freedoms (e.g. the freedom to criticize the living hell out of bad and confusing software) are fully protected. People like us need to stop putting our faith in hopeless projects like KDE and GNOME that are dominated by traditional unix hackers, and to start putting faith in ourselves and our own work.

BTW, I've liked your previous posts regarding linux usability, for what it's worth.

Re:JWZ and usability

The fact that his made that mistake in the past makes him all the more qualified to critique the subject now.

Re:In related news

If you want good interface design, look no further than ESR's own beautifully [linuxjournal.com] designed [linuxjournal.com] fetchmailconf [linuxjournal.com].

Not to say that he doesn't make good points, but... well... just look at the screenshots.

-Mark

Re:In related news

Being pretty doesn't make it USABLE, and being ugly doesn't make in UNUSABLE. I was messing with fetchmailconf one day and had everything configured rather quickly. I had no previous fetchmail experience going in, and was pretty new to Linux in general. Usable, but ugly.

Re:In related news

It's not just ugly, it's pretty non-intuitive too.

For example, what's the difference between "Save" and "OK?" Why are "Save" and "OK" in the middle of the dialog, in a seprate sub-pane? Why not put them at the bottom? What do the sub-panes indicate, anyway? Why is there a list of accounts in the account options dialog? Surely the options here apply to only one account at a time. How do I add a New Server on the "Novice Controls" page - type in the name and then -- what? The "Protocols" section - are those check boxes or radio buttons? If they're radio buttons with zero explanitory text, why not just use a combo box? What is the relationship between users and servers - and shouldn't this be obvious from the interface?

The fact is, good user interface design is a discipline unto itself, and people who are good coders or good system architects aren't necessarily any good at UI design. It's hard, and it's full of trade-offs, like engineering is. It doesn't get the respect it deserves from anyone (with the possible exception of Apple, who still make a few horrifying blunders if you ask me). And I say this as someone who has been responsible for some UI design decisions, and who can see from that personal experience that he didn't (initially) appriciate the difficulty of the task and still isn't very good at it.

Re:In related news

It may be ugly, but in every case (save the shot behind the fetchmailconf link) there is a separate help button for every item. The "designed" link has a perfect example of a "probe for supported", as he is asking for in his article.

Here's where I cave a little... On the last screen shot, it did take me a little too long to figure out that the password being asked for is listed in the topmost sub-section. However, I'm confident that the help button would have told me what I'm looking for.

If anything, mrroach's post does point out smartly that the article is a plug to "do things more like I do". Yeah, not so "pretty", but sure as feces, it won't get Aunt Tilly too flustered.

Re:In related new

I submit that it *would* confuse an inexperienced user. I personally found it easier to sit down and read the man page for fetchmail. This is not because I love me a conf file, but becuase I tried fetchmailconf, and was confused by it.

Take a look again and tell me why

#1 There are ok/quit/save buttons at the top and what they apply to,

Re:In related new

Yes, the fact that the dialogs don't follow an established STANDARD does hurt the usability, but I don't think that they are BAD.

Yes, that is pretty much the definition of a bad GUI program.

Some of the most usable UIs don't conform to an established standard. For example, there are shopping cart apps that can be used by people who've never used a computer before, yet they don't get in the way of the expert user much either. Some custom-designed kiosk systems serve their purposes very well without following any standard other than "touch me".

Apple and Microsoft seem to throw out their own guidelines whenever they feel the need to "innovate". There's no hope of improving usability if no one's allowed to experiment.

Check out Alan Cooper's books [cooper.com] if you want some solid reasoning behind this (better than I could give you). Edward Tufte [edwardtufte.com] is also a classic.

Innovation != improvement

While I certainly agree with you that following standards may not lead to a good user interface for all applications, I would submit that (at least for end user applications on mainstream PCs) it is usually better than not following the standards, and that most attempts to "innovate" are usability failures. To wit:

Apple and Microsoft seem to throw out their own guidelines whenever they feel the need to "innovate".

This is true. And as a professional developer using Visual Studio .Net, I'd like to thank Microsoft personally for giving us:

• properties dialogs with non-standard, or effectively non-supported, keyboard navigation;
• properties dialogs that change focus behind your back if you switch to another application and then switch back again;
• "context-sensitive" features, particularly the help system, that make it far harder than it ever used to be to do things because the software is constantly second-guessing you;
• non-standard File Open dialogs that freeze your system for half a minute while they scan a directory with thousands of files in it, when the default dialog in any other app takes a second to populate;
• a macro system so powerful that my one-liner "There is a hack here" comment macro takes 30 seconds to load the first time I hit the shortcut key, when it used to be instant;

and all the other "innovations" that cost me several minutes of my valuable time every day.

To their credit, Microsoft's developers (at least those I've talked to) do seem to have a genuine interest in improving this, and their hearts are in the right place. Some of the nasty context-sensitive stuff can be disabled in the 2003 version, for example. But a lot of these "usability innovations" gain me nothing, while slowing me down and/or wasting valuable screen real estate.

Re:In related news

What are you talking about? Each one of those dialogs are HORRENDOUS!!! For instance, look at this one:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/modules/NS-artic les/HO WTO/6454f1.png

"Configurator novice Controls" with a "Save" "Help" "Quit" button underneath? What the HELL does that mean? Why isn't novice capitalized? What am I saving by clicking the Save button? A configurator novice controls? Why arent the buttons at the bottom like every other dialog box in the planet?

I won't even comment on this one:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/modules/NS-artic les/HO WTO/6454f3.png

Nail, head, hit right on there...

Absolutely, I can't believe ANYONE was holding them up as a pinnacle of good design. They truly are horrible.

Re:In related news

Maybe I can interest you in Maxis' latest, SarcaSIM?

I'd volunteer GUI designs...

But everytime I point out someone's interface flaws, someone in the OSS community screams at me "it's volunteer work" or "program your own version then."

Then I realize I don't want to work with a bunch of anti-social programmers.

Re:I'd volunteer GUI designs...

Maybe it has something to do with the way you point out those flaws...?

If you're a programmer working on something which scratches your itch, there a good chance that you already know how your own program works. Having someone come and say "Nonono, this interface is crap!" without actually providing suggestions for how to make it better is annoying at best.

Annoying as it may be, the "program your own version" may also be a valid argument from the programmer's perspective. If changing a UI is a lot of work, then the programmer may not actually have the time (or motivation; remember they've already scratched their own itch) to implement your set of changes. But you can still do it or get someone else to do it if you feel strongly enough about it. Remember, what you're getting is free (probably as in beer and freedom), so the programmer has no moral obligation to do anything for you.

But I've usually found that if you are polite and above all humble when you suggest fixes (be it UI fixes or regular bug fixes), then people will usually do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Btw, you might check this link:

How To Report Bugs Effectively [greenend.org.uk]

Most of it also applies to UI bugs.

No Migration Without Representation

The second the Free Software community started trying to push their stuff on schools, governments, and corporations, every Free Software developer earned a moral obligation to improve the usability of their stuff and they lost the right to say "Quit whining about what you're getting for free". The instant you put your software in areas where people don't have a choice in the software they use, you are no longer "just a volunteer".

Free Software Developers either need to make their usable or they need to stop their lobbying and go back to the server closet they came from.

We talk about world domination, but we'll neither have it nor deserve it until we learn to do better than this. A lot better.--ESR

Re:In related news

Well, nobody is stopping JWZ from switching to Windows or Macintosh. I think he'll find out that the grass is not greener.

On Windows, you get media players battling it out for control of your media. You get video playback that fails for no apparent reason. Something as simple as playing a hard disk mirror of a DVD can be nearly impossible (unless you install the same OSS s/w you'd run on Linux as well).

And on Macintosh, Apple likes to limit what you can and cannot do with video. Want to load clips into iMovie and assemble them? Sorry, no can do--pay a lot more $$$ to get the professional stuff. And "professional" means lots of messy, complex buttons and features that are harder to learn than the OSS command line switches.

It's simple: use what works best for you. Linux is popular because for many people, it simply works best. Windows is also popular because for many other people it works best. Those are depressing statements about the state of software.

Rather than ranting, JWZ could try to improve things for a change: he clearly has sufficient technical expertise, but he seems to lack the will and the GUI design skills to actually do anything.

Re:In related news

So what are these mystery Windows video files that don't work?

Here's one example of Windows video playing annoyances...

The newest Windows Media Player (that comes with W2k, 7.0) outputs DV video (the kind that comes from almost every digital camcorder, not exactly uncommon) in half size (360x288), which looks like crap. If you try to double the size, it just scales the 360x288 frames and the quality still sucks ass. You have to run "mplayer2", which starts the older version (6.4) (why the hell is it called "mplayer2"?), and there you can configure the DV codec to output the full resolution. It still won't work on the newer player, though. Now, if you want to play an DV encoded AVI, you'll have to remember to select "Open with->Windows Media Player", not "Open with->Microsoft(R) Windows Media Player" (which is the newer player that doesn't work right).

This was on my laptop. On my desktop, DV audio codec has disappeared somewhere, dvd-compliant MPEG-2 files won't play (WMP goes looking for a suitable codec, doesn't find it), and DV avi files crash the WMP on exit, but this is just on my system, not a general issue. I'd just like to know what the hell broke these, and how to fix them. Currently I have to boot to Linux to play MPEG-2 files with mplayer...

Re:In related news

I don't think he's a has-been. Judging by his nightclub web site, I'm going to guess he's having a lot of fun, meeting a lot of people, and having some kind of love life, all traditional failings for geeks.

That being said, I wonder why he doesn't port xemacs himself.

He surely has the ability, if anyone does.

Unfortunately, I suppose he doesn't have the free time, considering his dedication to his nightclub -- but maybe if he took the time he was spending trying to get Linux to work and put it into the port, we'd all be a lot better off.

I know I would. I use MacOS X and sure would love an xemacs port. Sadly I simply don't have the knowledge or ability needed to do it, but I sure would love to have it :-(.

D

Re:In related news

XEmacs compiles with no problem on Mac OS X (assuming you have X11, the Developer Tools, and the X11 SDK). It's also available from DarwinPorts [opendarwin.org].

Re:In related news

If you configure emacs with '--with-carbon --without-x' you get a carbonised version of xemacs, which is absalutely the best emacs there is. Doesn't need X11 and looks great. You need to have texinfo installed beforehand. See 'http:/ /members.shaw.ca / akochoi-emacs /'.

Here's all he actually says

Here's all he actually says (it's at the end):

So, if you are out there writing GUI apps for Linux or BSD or whatever, here are some questions you need to be asking yourself:

1. What does my software look like to a non-technical user who has never seen it before?
2. Is there any screen in my GUI that is a dead end, without giving guidance further into the system?
3. The requirement that end-users read documentation is a sign of UI design failure. Is my UI design a failure?
4. For technical tasks that do require documentation, do they fail to mention critical defaults?
5. And, most importantly of all...do I allow my users the precious luxury of ignorance?

Re:Here's all he actually says

We'll never get to this point if every time two people disagree they split the project. Project forks are good to an extent - but I think that we lose a lot more than we gain because of it. At least MS has a meeting and decides how to continue - we, the OSS community, just get pissed off and branch.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Or just split the difference, keep everyone happy, and decide to do both proposals. Hence leading to configuration boxes from hell adorned with approximately seven thousand checkboxes.

Re:Here's all he actually says

"maybe a dictatorship in terms of final word or a democratic vote will work."

Linus.

Kernel.

The defense rests, your honour

Re:Here's all he actually says

Dictatorships work, so long as we all agree what the end result would be.

Hence why a gaggle of volunteers can put together and enterprise-worth OS in their spare time.

Unfortunately, pure R&D is never that clean. You often don't know in what direction a new technology is going to take you. In WWII, the answer both the Axis and the Allies had was to simply fund everything that had a glimmer of a chance, and research everything in parallel. Sure there were a lot of failures, but you also got a lot of radically different and paradigm changing designs. It is the era the brought us Jet powered aircraft, RADAR, cruise missiles, liquid fueled rockets, nuclear weapons, SONAR, and electronic computers. And that's ignoring massive new understanding in industrial production, chemistry, and materials.

When designing something new and unprecidented, you have to play the field and try alternatives. More productive than a complete fork would be to simply try an idea at a time, and fold the best of breed back into a common reference build.

Oh wait, the Linux kernel guys already do that. The wiley hackers!

The demotivator I have in my office

Meetings: None of us are as dumb as all of us.

Re:Here's all he actually says

You know, I get really tired of these broad generalizations about Windows nowadays without providing a single shred of proof to back it up? Even ESR did it in the article (the part about "maybe it blue-screened a lot but....").

Have any of you actually used Windows lately? I don't see any of this. I've had more RH9 and FBSD 4 & 5 boxes lock up on me lately than I've had XP or 2000 boxes lock up. Xzzy, can you provide an example of something that an end user would use (not any of their server offerings) that has more than 15 controls on the form? Why do you think they pioneered the use of WIZARDS! It's to provide a logical progression to a final software configuration state, rather than most OSS software which most of the time requires you to edit a config file (the equivalent of an essay question on an exam). Sorry, I don't feel like being tested on my reading comprehension today. I just want to get my box playing DVD's.

Really, it's the interface stupid.

Re:Here's all he actually says

LOL!

I suspect that I have ben 0wnz3r3d by a tr011, but I'll say it all the same: Windows is not the pinnacle of stability.

This opinion is likely to be popular here, but the rest of what I say is not.

Recently, I saw what I think is the best illustration of the difference between linux and windows. I have a box that was unstable in windows. Couldn't burn a CD for jack...loxor3d every time! Under linux I never had a coaster. I had other troubles, but not with that.

At some point, windows got so bjorked that I decided that it was a HW issue, and replaced my mobo & cpu. Since that time, windows has locked on me exactly zero times. Ditto for linux.

So what's my point? I find that on good solid hardware, they are about the same for stability (not security, mind you, but stability). However, on faulty hardware with perhaps a few problems, I found linux to be much more stable.

That, to me, is the difference in terms of the technical side. There are others, but that's the one that sells me.

On social issues, linux wins, hands down. This is from a convicted capitalist (and sometime republican/libertarian). I only bring this up to avoid some of the flames. M$ is socially irresponsible because they do everything they can to keep prices high, which hurts those who are not as economically stable as others. In the end, though, those who can't afford windows will win if they just use linux instead (free) of pirating winxp (like so many do).

Any questions?

Re:Here's all he actually says

The problem is that the folks who made this UI made things harder not easier for the average user. I don't care how my print queue works, I just want to be able to hit "Print" and have something (and the correct something) come out on paper. Idealy it should go out on my local network and see if there are any printers already there and offer to add them. Now If I'm running a department with 100 computers and 10 printers I may care about the details but if I have a home network with 2-4 computers I don't. Just make it work, I have better things to do with my time that fight with CUPS.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Or just split the difference, keep everyone happy, and decide to do both proposals. Hence leading to configuration boxes from hell adorned with approximately seven thousand checkboxes.

Ah, I see you have discovered KDE's design guidelines.

Re:Here's all he actually says

We'll see how this goes, but in my open source project, I'm planning on instrumenting the program to allow the users to (voluntarily and anonymously, of course) report to the project server which preferences they are twiddling and which commands (i.e., menu commands) they are actually using.

I'm hoping this will let me chop at the features and preferences and get away from "I'M A LOUD USER AND WHILE I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO TWIDDLES MY BAZZLES I'LL CRY IF IT'S REMOVED" by virtue of having hard numbers. (I made a Fruedian slip and typed "lout user", which works too.)

(You shouldn't have bad spoofing problems until the project is much larger, by then I'm hoping to have a better gestalt understanding.)

Feel free to snarf this idea, I'd love to see it more often.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Grandparent:
I'm planning on instrumenting the program to allow the users to (voluntarily and anonymously, of course) report to the project server...
Parent:
What you're doing is called "anonymous usage statistics."
When MS does it, it's "spyware." When you do it, it's modded up "Insightful."

And when he does it, it's voluntary, anonymous, and optional. That would be the big difference between his "OK" way and the Microsoft "spyware" way.

Re:Here's all he actually says

"...we, the OSS community, just get pissed off and branch."

And this is a bad thing how? In this business competition is almost always a good thing, especially when the source code is open. If the fork comes up with something better than the original, the original could incorporate it or mimic it. If either project dies, the stuff is still available for use or continued development.

I've tried to configure CUPS. I don't feel so bad about the lack of particular success now that I've heard of Eric Raymond's troubles. This is one project that might benefit from someone forking it and developing interface tools that allow it to work without being such a bane.

Re:Here's all he actually says

I've tried to configure CUPS. I don't feel so bad about the lack of particular success now that I've heard of Eric Raymond's troubles. This is one project that might benefit from someone forking it and developing interface tools that allow it to work without being such a bane.

I too have struggled through a configuration of CUPS, coupled with samba printer sharing for windows users no less. A couple weeks later, when OS X 10.3 came out, I was amazed at what Apple had done for a front end to CUPS. It's extremely intuitive, and a vast improvement to previous OS X printer configuration schemes.

It would be really nice if Apple's config utilities were released back to the open source community.

Re:Here's all he actually says

It would be really nice if Apple's config utilities were released back to the open source community.

If they just gave it back, then what would be the point of owning an Apple computer? By creating the extra value, they are able to charge a pretty penny for it and justify their existence. For that part of it, at least, they are fulfilling the promise of open-source: a level playing field for everyone that they add their own particular brand of value to.

Re:Here's all he actually says

I too have struggled through a configuration of CUPS, coupled with samba printer sharing for windows users no less. A couple weeks later, when OS X 10.3 came out, I was amazed at what Apple had done for a front end to CUPS. It's extremely intuitive, and a vast improvement to previous OS X printer configuration schemes.

And you know what? Apple keeps on doing this over and over again. People wonder why Macintosh users are so loyal, it's because you really can just sit down at the computer and do stuff, you hardly ever have to crack a manual or fiddle with weird configuration stuff.

I'm just as technically competent as the next geek but I have to work with hard to configure Windows and Unix stuff at work all day. When I sit down at home I don't want to have to fool around with that sort of stuff, I just want to get to work. For me that means a Mac.

Hey, a Mac might not be right for everyone and I'm always a proponent of using what works for YOU but I know so many people who were diehard Windows or Unix users who finally gave Macintosh an honest try and were blown away at the experience. Yeah, at first they were a bit clumsy because they were used to doing things a certain way but once those habits wore off they were much more productive.

Re:Here's all he actually says

And of course Aunt Sally and her dog know that pointing your browser to localhost:631 will bring you to the web-based admin tool to setup your printer, because that's the first thing to learn in school.

It's not his mistake to use the only "obvious" tool that's available on his box to setup the printer.

Re:Here's all he actually says

I know you're not supposed to read the article and all, but..

Quote:
...It redirected me to http://localhost:631/ which was OK, though the redirect went by too fast.

And I found myself looking at a web page that was not obviously useful for troubleshooting my problem. I tried clicking on the button marked "Administration" in hopes the tool behind it would be a bit more discoverable than the configuration. I got a password prompt.

Hello? How am I supposed to know what to do with this thing?

Re:Here's all he actually says

1 What is a non-technical user doing with Linux anyway? They need to crawl before they can walk.
2 Why not put in endless loops of windows that lead back to the same place over and over again. That would be funny.
3 Nobody likes documentation... except 4 n00bs
4 oh yeah... about those... er...
5 I like to think of Linux as a sort of technical boot camp. I started using it because I wanted to upgrade my status from "windozer coder of ascii art" to "codeNINJ4"

those are my thoughts.... anyone else?

Re:Here's all he actually says

Every year on slashdot people say it'll be Linux's big year. Yes, that means next year people will say it too. It's partly because of this thinking like yours, that you need to be l33t to even touch the machine, that linux's big year hasn't happened yet. You follow "What is a non-technical user doing with Linux anyway?" with "I like to think of Linux as a sort of technical boot camp." So which is it? Is Linux the end-all of nerdom, or is it just an educational experience on the way to... what?

The point is that a better UI isn't something that should be frowned on. Christ, I feel stupid for even having to say that.

Re:At its current rate, there won't be a "big year

Dude, I'm sorry but I have to reply...

About your "4 seconds to load home" thing. The problem is you aren't seeing the fact that Konquerer is ATLEAST 400% better than windows explorer.

You can't do ANYTHING with windows explorer - you have to load up a hundred different programs to get the same functionality. With konquerer you can quickly preview just about ANY file format. You can open most formats directly in the window. You have tabbed browsing, in your file manager! (which internet explorer doesn't even have).

You can connect to many different protocols (such as: smb://, http://, ftp://, nfs://, imap://, fish:// and a whole bunch more) and manipulate the files just as if they are on your local machine.

And a WHOLE BUNCH MORE!

Everyone keeps yelling at the KDE people because of startup times for opening the home folder. They keep comparing that time to opening My Computer. The problem is - that's like comparing the startup time between Windows 3.1 and Windows XP. Sure I could start 3.1 in .01 seconds - BUT WHAT THE HELL GOOD WOULD IT DO ME.

Quit ranting about shit you don't stop to think about first.

Derek

Re:Here's all he actually says

1 What is a non-technical user doing with Linux anyway? They need to crawl before they can walk.

well, if you LATFA, you see as the second sentence...

It has proved a textbook lesson in why nontechnical people run screaming from Unix.

IOW, if you want to even think of competing with the windows world at the desktop level, you actually have to reduce to the brain-dead level of explanation, support or general UI practice.

Even technical non-unix people struggle (a manager at work, skilled with Novell (stop laughing) is struggling a bit to learn linux.. and deadrat at that). if semi-competent people have some semi-major with what we, the unix-versed, understand (but may still be tasked by on occasion) how can we ever seriously expect Linux to prove its superiority at the joe-schmoe level?

-'fester (aix/tru64/hpux/linux geek.. that's in paying order, mind you :)

Re:Here's all he actually says

Specifically, as the author eloquently states (IMHO):

The thing to notice here is how far behind we have left Aunt Tillie. Rule 1 of writing software for nontechnical users is this: if they have to read documentation to use it you designed it wrong. The interface of the software should be all the documentation the user needs. You'd have lost the non-techie before the point in this troubleshooting sequence where a hacker like me even got fully engaged.

It's embarassing, even to me personally, but he's dead right. Not just for Aunt Tillie, but for you and me (can I get a humming of the Star Spangled Banner in the background now please, thanks) -- no one should have to stop to read man pages or html docs unless they are doing the most esoteric things with an app. Obviousness for everyone! We all know the basics -f -r, blah blah "standard" command line interface, and it works because (1) things act like they should and (2) we are experienced enough to know that "should" in the software/tool world expects a little more from us intellectually-wise than "should" in the normal day-to-day buy some bread rent a movie world.

The valid, relevant, even poignant point of this article, as I see it, is that it's not much work to go from where we are (which is comfy for us; a reasonable tradeoff 50/50 hassle for user/hassle for developer) to where we need to be to eat Microsoft's lunch (most hassle for developer, albeit 1-time hassle, and near-zero user hassle in most cases.)

We blow this stuff off because we want to make it workable for those smart enough to deserve to enjoy it then quickly move on to the Next Great Thing that Needs to be Made Now. We Peter principle ourselves out of making a real headache for MS, which is something we (ostensibly?) want.

Hmph. He said it well, and I for one am taking it to heart and thinking about how to make it better (with minimal effort, of course :) )

Now there's a good point:

"We blow this stuff off because we want to make it workable for those smart enough to deserve to enjoy it then quickly move on to the Next Great Thing that Needs to be Made Now."

I think you've hit the nail sharply on the head there... the problem with far, far too many nerds is that they are entirely utalitarian... if it works, well, dang it, that's good enough. I've proved I can get that to work, so I'm bored with it now.

There kind of needs to be a whole set of other 'design nerds' who come along after the 'worker nerds' have done their bit, and make it all pretty and sensible to use... these 'design nerds' would have a good understanding of what the 'average Joe' is comfortable with in an interface.

Re:Now there's a good point:

I'm a design nerd, when can I start? I think the problem is no programmers will like newbie-friendly interfaces. My experience is that programmers think it takes too many clicks and too much extra work. I'm not talking about "Wizard" guides here, but basic interfaces. Programmers want direct control, beginners want user friendly interfaces. The programmers will have to stand back, they can use the command-line interface.

Design nerds need to hit it first

The problem with having the "worker nerds" do their thing first is that the very architecture of their system may preclude (or make difficult) some necessary newbie functionality. To paraphrase Alan Cooper, code is to design like concrete is to architecture: once the concrete is poured, it's REALLY hard to change it, no matter what changes you make on the pretty blue paper.

Ideally, you let the design nerds do some user research before you start coding at all. Who is the target audience? What design metaphors are the already used to using? How much (usually, how little) experience can we assume?

Then you prototype. Prototyping isn't much different from coding: prototype your designs (on paper for starters), find out where they crash (i.e. where people get "hung"), debug, rinse, repeat. You won't work all the bugs out with a paper prototype, but you can nail an awful lot of them.

THEN you start coding. And you test and refine as you go, since some things (scrolling, for example) can be hard to simulate with paper. But you can get so much information if you just take a couple of weeks at the beginning and put some thought into your design, and then find some people who are representative of your target audience, and say "You have a printer attached to a different computer on your home network. You want to be able to print from this computer to the printer on the other machine. Here is the first screen..."

(Spoken, by the way, as someone with a foot in both worlds -- a design nerd who has also co-written a C compiler).

Re:Here's all he actually says

We blow this stuff off because we want to make it workable for those smart enough to deserve to enjoy it then quickly move on to the Next Great Thing that Needs to be Made Now. We Peter principle ourselves out of making a real headache for MS, which is something we (ostensibly?) want.

Speak for yourself. The (open source) code I write is written for first and foremost for myself. I'm open to suggestions and feature requests, and even more so to patches, but I'm not going to go out of my way thinking about how to make it fit to the lowest common denominator of users.

Note: it's not because I'm trying to specifically exclude stupid users, it's just that it takes a hell of a lot more work to create a dumbed-down interface, and that these type of interfaces often make things slower ... and I'd imagine many other OSS coders feel the same way.

Mind you, I should also add that I have never had the aim of "making a real headache for MS" when programming, and I think that that is a terrible reason for writing code.

Re:Here's all he actually says

"What is a non-technical user doing with Linux anyway? They need to crawl before they can walk."

I hope you're not one of those same people who's predicting that 2004 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop... Face it, most computer users (myself included, sometimes) have no interest in learning the nuts and bolts of the system and every application that comes with it. Until Linux embraces those kinds of people, it's always going to remain a niche OS and never be widely accepted in turn.

Re:Here's all he actually says

3 Nobody likes documentation... except 4 n00bs

For the last couple years, I've been citing that attitude as the #1 reason linux isn't growing like it should as a desktop. Coming from an OS/2 culture in the last half of the '90s where people were supportive and at least one survey found a decidely middle-aged demographic, the "only newbies need documentation" attitude strikes me as juvenile, unproductive, and, unfortunately, really common in linux culture. Look:

Is price the problem? Duh
Hardware compatibility? Naw
Installation difficulty? The major distros are as easy as Windows now.

No, it's use and maintenance. Where does a person learn how to use and maintain something if not from the documentation? Believe it or not, some people don't enjoy doing a half-hour Google search among various sites each time they need to have this-or-that setup explained competently and professionally.

Those are my thoughts.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Actually, newbies are the ones who need documentation the least. As has been said before, if your user interface needs documentation it is too confusing. On the other hand, experts who are doing something unusual or complex need documentation on how to do those things. Documentation written for newbies is useless because newbies can't find it and don't want to spend time reading it, while experts won't get any benefit from it.

Re:Here's all he actually says

This post (and its parent), albeit humorous enough, go straight to the underlying problem with Linux at present: a wilfull disdain for the non-savvy user. "Joe Sixpack" should be embraced rather than disdained (figuratively, of course).

This is the underlying problem with the interface issue discussed in this thread and it is why M$ continues to prevail in spite of a generally inferior core product.

When *X finally evolves from an exclusive clique into a user-focused OS for the people (not merely the nerds) it will truly prevail. Currently, IMO, its the percieved pricing ("free" as in beer) and general non-Microsoftness of Linux that drives it at all. The user experience and level of effort required to achieve proficiency is generally thought to be a big negative at ground level.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Here is a wierd thought:

Maybe Microsoft's usability design benefits from the fact that they have a bunch of pointy haired guys around, while the open-source projects exclusively consist of collections of Dilberts?

Scary, but it would justify the pointy-haired bosses existence. At absolute minimum all open-source projects should have (pet) lamas assigned to them, and a continuously rotating basis (to prevent tainting them with knowledge) and their whining should be taken as the word of authority...

Re:Here's all he actually says

Yeah, when you have "computer people" who don't want to take the time to mess with Linux cause it is a bigger pain than windows to get to do anything, then you can understand why the average user won't use it.

I'm a pretty computer savvy person. I'm in my 4th year of college in CIS, and I have taken Sysadmin classes using Linux exclusevly. I have bulit my own computers and computers for other people. I've done networking with routers in Internetworking Classes. I've even done some programming.

Compared to the average user, I'm the person they come to when something breaks on their computer.

I loved Redhat Linux for running DNS servers in class, it was great for a mail server or FTP server. It was great for scripting. It was fast, and stable - the multiple user features were head and showlders above home windows offerings in my experiances.

I don't use Linux at home. I've tried, multiple times, multiple distros. It is simply TOO MUCH TROUBLE. I don't want to fight through dialog boxes that don't seem to do anything after I hit apply. I don't want to deal with install issues, like how do I install this today? I recently played around with mandrake 9.2 I believe. This time I didn't want to totally dual boot etc, so I was using VMWare. I don't know if this is a VMware problem, or a linux problem, but let me tell you - Windows 98 virtual machine... click on file in VM ware, and install VMware tools... bam standard windows installer in the virtual machine, and bam, done, installed. I still haven't gotten the linux script to work right. I've given up. I've since heard that maybe I don't need to install that anyway cause newer versions have automatic support for VMWare.

The point of my rant there is that until software vendors and developers come up with a clear consistant UI, with things like install programs that you can double click on in KDE and have work,I don't see linux catching on on the desktop.

The sad thing is I like to play around with linux - to keep up with what's happening, and to stay in *nix mode for servers.

But when I need to get some classwork done, like write a paper or do a spreadsheet, or when I want to play online - I use WinXP. It's just easier.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Recent ASUS motherboard in computer at work. Plug a device into one of the soundcard ports, brings up a dialog box that checks you've plugged when you have into the right hole, and gives you option to work the way that you've done it, or to unplug and reuse the correct hole.

Saved pulling the computer out from under desk as I accidently used the wrong hole (found it by feel) then I knew what I'd done wrong.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Saved pulling the computer out from under desk as I accidently used the wrong hole (found it by feel) then I knew what I'd done wrong.

Taken out of context, this has quite a different meaning.

Re:Here's all he actually says

Programmers should definitely code with these questions in mind, but I think it's even more important to recruit people who are skilled in UI design so they can knock some sense into the coders every once in a while. Coders can't, and shouldn't, be expected to always focus on usability--for most engineers it's not their area of expertise. Likewise, UI people shouldn't be expected to have to code just to get a feature implemented the Right Way.

There's plenty of graphic designers and UI experts in the employ of Apple and Microsoft who probably couldn't code their way out of an infinite loop. I don't know that the same can be said of most open source projects.

yours

Re:Here's all he actually says

That's the problem. I can't stand the UI requirements we have to meet at work, but I try to accept them anyway, because I know I'm not the end user and my understanding of how a tool I'm building is "supposed to work" has nothing to do with how it will be used. It's like QA'ing an app you've built. You can't do it, at least not well, because it's so natural to stay inside the accept ranges of what you've built.

I don't know the answer. The only reason I give into UI requirements at work is because I have to to get paid. That incentive isn't there for open source projects, so there is the danger projects will fork off. I know some comments above don't see that as a danger at all, but it is a waste of resources if two teams are building the exact same things instead of moving forward on other pieces.

Re:Here's all he actually says

There's plenty of graphic designers and UI experts....

mistake one in interface design is thinking its graphic design! Better looking buttons lead to user interface improvement with about the same frequencey that a new paintjob fixes your car's transmission.

Re:Here's all he actually says

mistake one in interface design is thinking its graphic design! Better looking buttons lead to user interface improvement with about the same frequencey that a new paintjob fixes your car's transmission.

You are correct, pretty buttons does not a good UI make, however, UI design -- user-centered UI design (layout, workflow, etc., etc.) is VERY important. To continue with your analogy, your car has power-steering. But, human-interface designers made it so you get some tactile feedback from your car's steering wheel at speed (as opposed to the 60's Caddies which you could steer at 65 with your pinkie).

It's the "design" process that's important. 1. What is this "thing" supposed to do. 2. What does the user(s) expect/know. 3. How's the user(s) going to act/react based on #2. 4. What's the simplest, most effecient and effective way to get to the desired end result given #1 #2 and #3 for as many cases as possible.

Photoshop doesn't make you a graphic designer; programming skills don't make you a UI deisigner.

Do what you do. Engineers engineer, programmers program, and designers design, but just like you wouldn't have a electical engineer engineer a bridge, or a web developer programming embedded system, you shouldn't have a graphic designer designing a UI... IMO.

Coding is an art, GUI design another...

Please just remember that part...

I happen to have recently installed a Laserjet on my gf computer, and it's Win2000, and the whole process took me 5 minutes (1 config failure, 5 seconds of intensive neuronal action and then the right click on the right button)

I simply used KDE printing tool that came with the nice Knoppix-Cluster cd, and took 5 seconds before hitting buttons.

Also, please remember :

COMPUTER WEREN'T MADE FOR PEOPLE !!! Computers were made for experts in companies, the fact that windows is "easy to use" (damn, it hurts !) or even "intuitive" (I actually wrote that ?) has been the main cause of problems, because the configuration was a "One-Size-Fits-All" solution.

=> Most Windows computer are configured almost all the same, default, and so more or less all exposed to the same problems. They work "perfectly" (my hands start shaking) as long as everything is in the "Normal Scope" (everything open and accessible from anywhere, except if you change it, which users don't)

=> Microsoft made 2000 and XP. One is clearly a server Os, where even access to cdwriter for users has to be configured by hand. Many things are accessible, but you have to RTFM a bit and you can get it almost secure (MS notwhistanding)

XP, on the other hand, is a nice "plug-and-play" thingy with lotsa grease and help so that even Aunt Milly can do it herself (or pester her nephew/son/grandson, as in the 99.99% of real life cases)

You want an easy to use OS ? get a playstation.
You want a desktop computer that just works ? get XP.
You want a hard, rugged and stable server ? get linux.
You want a nice Linux desktop easily running in no time ? be ready to lose most of your security, or wait some more time... MS had 20 years to learn how an UI should look, and they do extensive usability tests, have specialists, teams, and so on dedicated to the problem.

It will come in time, but Linux wasn't thought for the desktop, so the transition will take some time. The poor guys making cups did an excellent job as the server works 100% (for me). If you dislike the UI, please follow usual Open source procedure :
1 / Email the dev and tell him (gently) what's wrong in your opinion and what should be done. If he has the time, he'll fix it. (99% of real life cases ?)
2 / DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP COMPLAINING FOR CHRIS'SAKE !!! you are a guru Linux wizard, so get emacs runing and do your conf files, or write a better UI.

Ahh ! No point in this post, but I somehow feel better 8)

Linux is about choice and RTFMing : always had, server-side, never will, desktop-side...

If Users knew how to do it, they would be sysadmins...

User Interface Design is hard!

Listen up everybody out there in Geek Land! User interface design is hard . Read Landauer's The Trouble With Computers [mit.edu].
I like "free as in freedom" software, and I fear the society that will be created by proprietary stuff like Windows, but we won't get the freedom we want if we can't deliver the benefits of freedom to the average user. If you can't be bothered to read the book, remember this: test, test and re-test. For really important stuff, borrow the most clueless of your relatives and friends, and have them try to use it while you are watching (keep your damn mouth shut, though). If you do this, you will create easy-to-use software, and if you believe in the political value of F/LOSS, you need to take this seriously.

Windows isn't much better

Eric has some excellent points, but just to muddy the waters a bit, Windows often isn't any better.

For example, I have to set up printing to JetDirect network printers at work under Windows, and it's horribly unintuitive.

1 Run the printer setup wizard
2 Say you're setting up a LOCAL printer, not a network printer
3 Un-click "Detect automatically" and press Next
4 Say you want to create a new port. Selecct TCP/IP port from the dropdown. A new TCP/IP port wizard pops up. Type in the IP address of your printer
5 Select the printer make and model.

It would probably be easier to set up CUPS on a JetDirect printer than Windows, based on the menus Eric cites. Too bad that wasn't what he had.

D

Re:Windows isn't much better

That's still a lot better than CUPS. At least you didn't have to become root, read files in /etc, guess which options to change, and restart the CUPS server from the command-line. My experiences with CUPS, and Linux printing in general, are the most harrowing I've had with computers.

Why aren't macs more popular?

Well, if ease-of-use is paramount, why aren't Macs more popular?

Re:Why aren't macs more popular?

Marketing. People think Macs don't work as well - not as much software, etc. It's just marketing - that's what Bill is good at, after all :)

Re:Why aren't macs more popular?

I don't think its marketing as much as its lack of marketing by Apple. Sure, they are flooding the airwaves with iPod and iTunes commercials, but they have never run a commercial showing what OS X is capable of. Or iLife. Most people I talk to have no idea when it comes to Apple. They are amazed at how well the software is integrated together and that Microsoft Office can run on a Mac and that they can surf the internet as well. I get so tired of doing Apple's job for them. I really should send them an invoice for all of my PR work.

Re:Why aren't macs more popular?

Marketing, but also price. Consider that you can buy PC parts from a bunch of manufacturers, vendors, etc. and the price competition involved there. I think I'd be really tempted to spend $100+ on OS X if I could run it on my "cheap" PC hardware.

Re:Your ignorance answers the question

For most people out there, price is the ONLY factor. Why do you think that stores like Wal-Mart does so well?

Re:Your ignorance answers the question

That would be news to the vast majority of businesses out there -- who do NOT compete solely on price. If your statement were true, most people would be driving a bunch of Korean compact cars. I don't see the majority driving Kias yet. Would you care to revise your simplistic and and obviously wrong statement?

Re:Why aren't macs more popular?

I don't know a general answer to your qauestion, but here's an anecdote. The first time I used a computer was in 1990, in a computer lab at a university in the US where I studied for some time. I needed to type up an essay, and I had never before so much as touched a computer keyboard.

I entered the lab. To my right, a bank of smaller, friendly-looking Mac Classics (but I didn't know what they were). Menus, icons, mice. To my left, a bank of foreboding but somehow more powerful looking IBM ATs. Green screens with text-mode commands, one of which would launch WordPerfect 5.0. I had to make a choice, and a completely uninformed choice, mind. In really had no idea what was what there.

I picked an IBM. Someone instructed me to press F3 for help and F7 to exit. I took it from there, and loved it. By the time I left, I must have known much of WordPerfect's help system by heart. I did try the Macs once or twice while there, but I went back to the IBMs every time. I wish I knew why, but I don't. Maybe theys looked more serious, more powerful. Maybe they adhered better to my uninformed mental image of what a computer was supposed to be like. Today I can list all sorts of reasons why I prefer one to the other, but it's mere rationalizing after the choice was made. I guess Macs looked too much like toys to me, while those text-mode DOS screens looked inscrutable, and hence they looked fascinating.

Re:Why aren't macs more popular?

And, suprise surprise, Mac OS X uses CUPS under the cover for printing. All you have to do is select "printer sharing" on the sharing preference pane and the printer shows up on other people's machines. You may not like Macs, I really don't care if you do or not. But there's a lesson here.

KDEPrint not CUPS

Your comment about the Mac using CUPS and yet being easy to configure for printer sharing goes right to a point Eric Raymond completely missed. His problem is primarily with the KDEPrint user interface and not with the CUPS print server. The Art of UNIX Programming, written by a very bright guy, does a good job of explaining the desired separation between the UI and the server.

CUPS is an amazing print server full of options that can be configured to suit a particular environment. It is the best print server in the Linux/UNIX world and, I would argue, the best all around print server in existence. (Bonus points because, in the finest Linux tradition, it is an active open source project being led by a uniquely talented individual)

KDEPrint is also a very nice piece of software, but it suffers from a failing common to many Linux/UNIX user interface programs: it presents too many options to the user. Rather than presenting a few simplifying assumptions to the user, these programs try to present the full power of the server. This is great for the advanced user but it floods the general user with too many choices.

The Mac user interface on top of CUPS is a counter example. When the user hits the "Share my printers with other computers" button the cupsd.conf file is altered to broadcast the availability of printers and to accept jobs from machines on the local subnet. The print server is then restarted. This one simple button takes several steps that are very useful for most users; it does not however provide access to many of the more powerful, less common features of CUPS.

And so, at the end of the day, I think Eric Raymond is noting that KDEPrint does not "dumb down" the presentation of CUPS options enough for the typical user.

Well there's yer problem..

There's your problem right there "I have a desktop machine named 'snark'."

Not neccessarily true

That's not necessarily true. Mandrake [mandrakelinux.com] set up CUPS and just about everything else I've needed with no problems at all. It's all about what you're doing. For some programs under some distros you need to be a programmer to install and / or set them up. Under other distros, and with other programs, it can be a breeze. (Just look at how well Knoppix does!)

Re:Not neccessarily true

The fact that he mentions using Fedora core kind of discredits his whole argument against the "open source community" and the "CUPS Team" when what he is really denouncing is his linux vendor. It's been kind of an understanding for a long time that it was for the OSS community to build, and for the Commercial distro vendors to "clean up" for Joe and Jane End-User. It's a shame that he never makes that clear, and I'm sure if I were on the CUPS team I would be a little offended at the way ESR is explaining away his^H^H^H aunt tillie's failure to read the dox, search the list, and otherwise be completely "luxuriously" ignorant. Go buy windows. OSS isn't really a fair proposition if you don't have something to contribute.... or at least meet the developer half-way.

Re:Not neccessarily true

It was easy for you because you know what the heck you're doing already. I've got over a dozen years of UNIX printing experience, and every single bozo trap that Eric mentioned is a real flaw in the CUPS design, including the Mandrake installation. I got past them because I'm a flipping expert, but for newbies they're a nightmare.

In fact, for Mandrake, did the CUPS installation mention that you have to set up xinetd by hand to run the cups-lpd daemon to even *run* the admin interface, or did Mandrake add it to the RPMS by hand themselves? It's most certainly a stage never mentioned in the source tarball nor is it included in the RPM spec file that comes with the tarball.

I built and tested it last week to try new printer drivers, and no, it's not there. And the addition of new printer drivers is pretty damned secret, too....

Re:Not neccessarily true

1. xinetd isn't enabled by default on the "normal" settings because it's assumed if you need it you're saavy enough to set it up and edit the config files.
2. Mandrake comes with webmin, so you don't need to go through the process of editing files by hand if you install the webmin RPM.
3. If you use the mandrake "printer drake" it is relatively straightforward to set up new printers

Re:Not neccessarily true

(Just look at how well Knoppix does!)

The funny thing to me about ESR's rant is that I tried running Knoppix [knoppix.com] 3.x (it's a version of Debian that runs entirely off of CD) on my computer and my wife's computer at the same time, and, lo and behold, her laser printer showed up in KDE's Printing Manager on my computer automagically. (The two computers are networked through a router.) I didn't have to lift a finger. So either Klaus Knopper, who put Knoppix together, made sure it was configured correctly, or the version of Debian he used was configured correctly.

Actually, the advent of CUPS made printing on Linux much easier. I remember trying to get LPRng working on an older version of Red Hat with absolutely no success. (There was this nice GUI-based printer setup wizard that evidently did less than was necessary.) Fortunately CUPS had just come out, and it worked with my inkjet.

(Of course, Aunt Tillie isn't going to know how to download, unarchive, compile, make, and "make install" CUPS.)

- e2g

Exactly!

That's the big problem. The bashers (and even though I usually respect ESR, this time it's him, too) try out one server distribution (like Fedora where RedHat's managers even said themselves it wasn't targetted at the desktop!) and conclude that "Linux sucks".

I agree with ESR's analysis, but not with the conclusion: What he found out was the usability problems in Fedora.

I've set up network printers in SuSE many times for years and it has never been a problem.

But what is a problem is that this mindless bashing discourages any improvement. So SuSE and Mandrake solved the issues. Do they get any kudos from ESR? Nope. To the contrary, they are lumped into the same category and it is claimed that they are as unfit as Fedora for the desktop. So those who have worked those usability problems are punished, too and get bad PR for mistakes they didn't make.

This is really sickening.

Nobody expects ESR to try out every distribution, but he should be honest enough to make conclusions and claims only about Fedora and not "Linux".

My experience

I had a very hard time configuring cups for the first time, but after I learned how to do it, it proved to be '''much''' easier to administer and manage than it is in windows. It was also easier to change configurations without breaking multiple user's print settings. This is true with a lot of open source things. Hard at first, but once you get the hang of it, there is no going back.

Re:My experience

The problem is that not everyone can get it working. I'm a CS major and a Linux geek. Definitely not an advanced Linux user, but I know how to setup and use Gentoo, which I do, but I simply could not get CUPS to work on my system. I'm sure if I spent a good deal more time reading the documentation and playing with it, it would be easier in the future, but I, like most computer users, won't NEED to set it up more than once. I should have an easy time getting it setup and working so that I don't have to dick around with it ever again.

Re:My experience

Don't feel bad. I've spent a lot of time running linux boxes (started back in 96 or so) and my share of HP-UX and Solaris boxes as well. And I'm a software engineer who does firmware and drivers. I know my Unix pretty well. And I'll be damned if I could ever get CUPS to work with my old USB DeskJet 895CSe in anything but the most horrible, chunky, layered-colors-as-black print quality I've ever seen.

It was litereally so bad that I wasn't comfortable turning in papers (I was in college then) that were printed with it. No, instead I had to print my output to PDF and take it over to my roommate's Windows machine and print it there.

The drivers and print settings were just horribly archaic. Fine, keep all the crazy stuff, but hide it in an "advanced" tab. All I want is to select my printer type and then "draft", "medium", and "best" print quality and paper type/size. I always had to fight it to convince it that I also didn't want it to default to A4 paper. I don't have A4 paper, I don't want A4 paper, I've never even *seen* A4 paper. It would've been nice if it had noticed I was on an en-US system and figured I probably would want "US Letter"...

Maybe things have gotten better recently (this was a couple years ago), but I'm pretty jaded about trying to use an inkjet on Linux now. I haven't even tried since.

That said, I've never had a problem with a LaserJet. As long as it speaks PostScript I've done ok.

Re:My experience

I don't have A4 paper, I don't want A4 paper, I've never even *seen* A4 paper.
Well I've never *seen* 'US Letter' paper. But I now know why it's set as default on my LaserJet 4 Plus and in Konqeror's 'Print Properties' dialog.

-1 Troll

What a rant! Im going to send mod points to Eric Raymond's house by mail.

Igorance and the double edged sword

Ignorance and the user won't step out of their bounds beyond their Internet Explorer and Outlook. Unfortunately, others like Gator and BetterInternet will do it on their behalf.

In the end, a computer is more like a car than an oven, capable of great power but requiring a good deal of knowledge to use (and not run over people in the process).

Re:Igorance and the double edged sword

True, and a computer takes some skill to use. It's not fair to expect the average user to be an expert just to do some simple configuration.

Hell, I'm a half decent tech geek, and I struggle to do many config tasks even on user-friendly distros like Fedora.

Should it require significant skill to update the kernel (and know what you're doing?) ? Sure. But to install simple hardware? Hell no.

Re:Igorance and the double edged sword

But programs like CUPS are WAY more difficult than a car.

See, with computers and cars there is both generalized and specialized knowledge. You need a deceant bit of generalized knowledge to operate both.

In the case of the car you need to know what all the standard wheels, pedals, levels and the like do. You need to know traffic law, you need to understand how vehicles handle, you need to know to have it services regularly, etc. Basically, all the stuff you learn in traffic school and need to pass your test. Computers are similar in respect to general knowledge. You need to understand how UIs work, you need to know not to open random attachments, you need to know to patch your system, etc.

The problem is that many programs, like CUPS, and many Linux people, think that people should have lots of SPECIFIC and indepth knowledge. That's not good design. Just as I shouldn't need to be able to rebuild my engine to drive a car I shouldn't need to have indepth knowledge of the workings of a computer to operate it.

Some people choose to gain great knowledge, and that's fine. They are the technicians or mechanics or engineers or programmers that fix/maintain/design/build/etc a car or computer. However the average user should be able to get along with their general knowledge and for the most part never be required to become more of an expert.

As he alludes to, the Windows and Mac worlds are much better at that. Far from perfect, I can list hundreds of problematic Mac and Windows programs. However, on a whole, they do a much better job of helping the user out. They pick acceptable defaults, they walk you through choices, they have intelligent interfaces, etc.

This is what is needed. Espically since many programs themselves require learning. Like an audio editor. You need to learn how to operate it properly to do what you want with audio or a game where you need to learn the rules and controls to play. Well this is made much more difficult, often to the point normal people will give up, if while you are trying to do that you are also being required to learn new things about your computer.

Apps really need to do their best to just walk a user through setup and install. Let them get going and using and learning the app, not getting stuck on just trying to get the damn thing to work right in the first place. Geeks can hack it, most non-techie people can't.

In other news....

...ESR was found beaten severely, with the names of several CUPS developers found tatoo'd on his forehead....

Re:In other news....

they would have just left a note but they couldn't configure the software right....

Re:Yeah, a real surprise

submit a patch or shut up. Identifying a problem we all know exists isn't that amazing.

on the other hand, the "squeaky wheel gets the grease"

i think the more noise everybody makes about a particular shortcoming, the more the entire community will pay attention to that particular shortcoming. yeah, it might be annoying that people keep harping on this, but in it's own way, it will help get things done

just a thought

Re:Yeah, a real surprise

And who are the (l)users? The persons who use a computer as a tool to get their job done? The persons who don't think of their OS as a religion? The persons who given in and try Open Source software only to find that a good deal of software isn't as usable as it could be? When they ask or comment they are thrown to the wolves.

OMG..imagine a guy who has done a good deal of visible work for the Open Source cause, points out a weakness or simply an area that needs some improvement, and the most visible and shocking comments on /. are the ones knocking the guy. Very little in the way of, "yeah things could be better...How do we fix this? How do we help?"

Re:Yeah, a real surprise

Well, as a matter of fact CUPS is one of the few projects which actually put some effort into making a GUI. It's not that it would have taken significantly more skills/code/time to make a much better GUI. After all, all the auto-detect code is there. It's just that the programmer didn't think too hard about the interface, and -- most problematically -- didn't think with the user in mind. It's not like it would have taken more than 2 extra minutes of programmer time to put in short explanations of what each option does. That's what ESR is really getting at.

Re:Yeah, a real surprise

Then why keep saying Linux is ready for the desktop? Why WHY WHY?

I write code for a living. I can code in Perl, C++, C, VB6, .Net, ASP, Javascript, HTML, VBS, PHP, SQL, VBA. The only commonly used languages (scripting and other) that I haven't write code in that I am aware of are Java and python and I've read a fair bit about java. I write my utilities to manage my computer, for example I coded a quick C++ app to manage my backups recently and I coded a perl utility to find duplicate bookmarks in my mozilla. I'm trying to establish here that I'm pretty technically oriented.

Guess what? I don't run linux. There are two reasons:
1. I write code generally for windows and occasionally I take work home.
2. I don't have hours on end to spare learning how to use Linux effectively.

I love the idea of Linux and at times have made the attempt to migrate my desktop to Linux, with the plan of starting by dual booting, and migrating my environment across bit by bit. Well guess what: each time the GUIs didn't work and I spent half my time hacking around in RC files. You get *awfully* tired of that after a while (or I did).

I might think about running Linux for servers, but I want to see a lot more work of the quality of knoppix done before I consider it with making the effort. Unless of course I get fired and have a lot of spare time on my hands.

If you want linux to achieve market acceptance it must be written to work for the dumb home users and it has a hell of a long way to come.

PS I'm not interested in being told that Ruby, D, ALGOL, Brainf**k or $favorite_language are commonly used languages.

Its really interesting .....

How Important developers of the GNU and Open Source Movement are living the obscure land of kernel hacking and going to write some userland code. Many times, in Free Software, the underlying system, the lower level development is made by the most competent developers, and so is robust, stable, actually the best out there, but the front ends, well, they just don't have the same quality, so, for the unexperienced user, it looks like crap. I think it's time that we change this, and start showing that GNU can also be reliable on the Desktop, not only showing how fast it is, but also good end-user interfaces. It's not that i don't like KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc,etc, they are ok, but i think that if we put the best people to work on it, they will be even better.
Linus has been talking about this recently, are we going to start seeing things like Linusorganizer, Linword??, hehe, that would be nice.

Not only coders!

It's true that the OSS community needs to beef up many area of the developpement process.

Software isn't just about the code the same way that a car isn't just about the engine.

For people to want to use it in the first place, to enjoy it once they've started using it and to stay with it, a "product" needs many qualities.

This (often) explains why an inferior design can becomes the norm.

So lets get cracking with artists, GUI/interface designers and and documentation writers!

I will anticipate the "Well, why don't you do something! Where's the patch?" posts and answer:

I'm doing what I can with the talents that I have (often amounts to writing suggestions to developpers, bug-reports, spreading the word on new stuff and donations).

Fecklessness?!?

I honestly have not ever heard someone use that term outside of The Clash. I shall use it tomorrow a minimum of twice.

Typical

With closed source the responsibility lies solely with the company to solve the problems.

With open souce, problems are just an excuse to try to force people who find problems to "join the cause" or you can just ignore any problems they find.

Here's a crazy idea members of the Open Source community such as yourself need to get through your thick skull: take responsibility for the crap you write. If you write the code, it's YOUR responsibility to fix the problems. No one else is obligated to fix a line of code and is more than free to point out the flaws.

He didn't write CUPS so why should he feel obligated to fix it? He's a USER. He didn't write the code. He didn't design the interface. As a USER he's in a position to criticize. It's what users do.

Whinning he doesn't treat you like a king and kiss your feet for blessing him with what he sees as crap, is not going to do anything to win support for the project.

This is why I choose what Open Source projects I use very carefully and rarely recommend them and never because they are Open Source.

Ben

indeed

And a sure way to guarantee malfunctioning, piss poor quality code is to come in the middle of the project with little knowledge of the surrounding project.

This is especially true if its a non-trivial piece of software. Several times new programmers have come into software packages I've been working on, don't bother to read the structural documentation or even the useful other code that serves as examples for how to improve and extend upon the existing structure.

Instead they try and do things their own way, often end up doing things redundantly or breaking something else and just otherwise fouling more than they contribute.

The best person to improve upon software is the person who designed in the first place! Or someone who's worked on it extensively enough to know the quirks, the reasoning behind non-obvious parts and knows the rest of package throughout.

Telling a user to fix a poor piece of software is incredibly frustrating and lame to those of us who, god forbid, have other things to do in our lives.

Re:Eric, we love you but...

You missed the point of the article. He's speaking about Open Source projects in general, and he has a very good point. I only started using Linux and other open-source software about three years ago, and I've gone through the exact same process with at least a dozen different packages. Most of this could and should be fixed on the documentation level - if someone like myself with 20+ years of computer (coding x86 and TMS9900 assembly at age 10) experience gets frustrated, there is a serious problem.

It's all well and good to put out an excellent piece of software like CUPS, but it's also important to communicate its workings (and CUPS is just an example; we could go down a list if we wanted to). Even though I have extensive coding experience, I think the best way I could contribute to Open Source is on the documentation side... if I can just figure out what I'm doing first :). Even then, the other Eric and myself can't fix everything.

Beyond that, open source developers need to develop the mindset (pun semi-intended) that their user knows either little-to-nothing for desktop applications, or basic server administration for daemons. Each piece of documentation should begin with something like "In order to comprehend this documentation, we suggest you be knowledgeable about: (shell scripting, OpenSSL CA management, installing CPAN modules, etc)." Pointing to some good references would be a bonus. Listing knowledge dependencies is every bit as important as listing library/package dependencies.

Once that's out of the way, you have to communicate everything necessary to configure and run the software. Writing documentation from a naive (in terms of program functionality) perspective is difficult and tedious, but it is doable. You just have to ask yourself "If I didn't write this, would I know what the hell I'm talking about?" after eveyr paragraph.

And that's just to be "reasonably" useable. If we really want to "take over the desktop," then we need perfectly polished wizards and other GUI tools to help those users that are are not inclined to RTFM, spend a few hours with Google, or (shudder) RTFS. The bottom line: it's wonderful to put out a really cool and useful piece of software, but the job isn't done until it's documented (daemons) and / or idiot-proof (end-user software).

I hate this answer

Come on, are you telling me when something ticks you off about a piece of code you download the tarball or cvs the code and learn the whole thing and dedicate yourself to its betterment??? I hope nothing about the kernel or Mozilla or Mysql tick you off or you are looking at six months of hard study.

Because he's a USER

If the user interfaces are so poor, why don't you help fix them? Instead of approaching this in a manner designed to piss people off and create enemies, why don't you say things like

Why? Because he's a USER. Not a programmer. Developers have a responsibility to listen to their userbase. If you want market-share, then when your users say "I don't understand X", you DO NOT say "well, FINE, fix it yourself!" That is ENTIRELY the wrong attitude. ESR may be confrontational, but you're even more so.

Why doesn't your approach work? Because they're simply going to walk away. Software is so complex these days that many people, even programmers, couldn't possibly contribute without investing a serious amount of time. Hmm, which is a better use of resources- 12 hours of a user messing around learning your functions, conventions, library calls etc(and probably introducing more bugs than features)- or 15 minutes for you to add the button yourself?

I know -exactly- how he feels. Countless times I've found software that has a super-spiffy web page, touts how damn good it is to anyone who's reading- but you unpack the source and Jeeeeesuschriiiiiist you can't figure out which way is up- and I've been building and compiling unix packages for almost 10 years(when i was yer age, we had to edit makefile library paths ourselves! None of this automake...) Then, if you get it built, you run it and menus have confusing names, there's no help file, there are secret options nobody mentions that are in the ~/.myprogram directory, and so on.

The mldonkey p2p client was an excellent example. The developers continuously worked on all sorts of weird theoretical schemes for this and that, while the userbase clamored for a manual(there was none), a description of what each setting did(ditto- the developers would cheerfully add some oddly-named option and not explain to ANYONE what it did), or for features that were common in other clients. Such as the ability to share a file without having to restart the client(shocking!) But hey, you got three different algorithms to pick from for how it managed sources for files. Yaaaay!

This one time

Talk about luxury of ignorance. I pitch open source software to family/friends/bosses every chance I get. Now this one time, I was telling my boss about OpenOffice when MSOffice bailed out on him.

Boss: Damn. This MSWord thingy sucks.
Me: You should try using Open Office once. Its a good sub and its free!
Boss: Free? I am telling you one more time. Stop downloading things off of KaZaA damnit
Me: No. No. No. You got me all wrong. Its free as in 'free as a beer' free.
Boss: Does it have Clippy?
Me: What?
Boss: I looovvvvee Clippy. He is so cute
Me: Well, it doesn't really have a Clippy per se but...
Boss: Oh common. How do you expect me to use it if it doesn't have Clippy. I am a PHB
Me: What?
Boss: I am a pointy handed boss
Me: Handed? Ohhh well. Nevermind.

At that point I just walked away defeated by clippy and luxury of ignorance.

Thats fedora, not CUPS

The problem is in Fedora, not Cups. Cups works just fine, and more or less like he wants it to, if that is all you ever use. Fedora, using whatever configuration system it uses placed some unuseable stuff there.

Granted Cups could use a lot of help, but he wasn't using a Cups configurator, he was using some other configurator that can work with not only Cups, but also SMB, LPR, and a bunch of other stuff. I don't know the solution, but bashing the Cups guys won't get you any closer to it.

Doesn't matter

Fedora, CUPS, whatever...

PC here. Printer there. Make it so.
In clear, precise, EASY directions.

Flame???

Initially, I was about to flame this guy and then I remembered. I still can't get my Linux box to print on a printer (through Samba).

Either I can take his side and be called an idiot because I'm sure someone will claim to have an easy solution to my problem. That's what someone claimed the last time I mentioned I couldn't get MPlayer working and then of course the suggested solution didn't work. Or, I can stay out of the discussion entirely. I think I'll do the latter instead.

no no no no no!

The way to get help with your linux problems is to troll and say "Linux is teh suxx0rz because XYZ doesn't work!"

Then 4,000 penguin-fanboys will come out of the wood work, each with a distinct solution to your problem!
Now had you asked for help, they would have said "Read the man page! n00b!"

As for me, I can't really help you. I run AIX. And some other window'd operating system that allows to to remotely access my AIX boxes.

Re:no no no no no!

As for me, I can't really help you. I run AIX.

I would say you're beyond assistance there.

the user is the bridesmaid, the admin gets laid

First of all, as a self-taught Linux user I am delighted that someone as talented as ESR can have a hair-pulling session doing something like setting up CUPS. I have had many an evening like this. Excruciatingly close to getting something done, something that should be simple, and instead spending hours feeling stupid and incompetent. He's right, and he's right about the fact that this is why there are countless unused Linux install discs littering desk drawers under Windows machines, tried and abandoned by people who hate Micorosft, hate Windows, who would LOVE to support an alternative, but can't make it work.

The user is the loser. There's a clubby, exclusive, snotty attitude among user's groups. The online resources are hopelessly disorganized or relentlessly dinged with ads. The vision that Stallman has of software as knowledge, rather than product, is lost among the throng of sociopaths that spout RTFM at users that ask the same questions over and over.

Well, you know why people have the same questions over and over? Because the software is obscure and the documentation is unhelpful. GNU is based on people solving their own problems and then giving other people an opportunity to use thier solutions. Documentation, at best, is an afterthought. Once you have solved a problem, there's no need to go back and explain it to yourself, any documentation that does exist arises purely from the virture of developers, not because they need it themselves.

The fact that the most useful thing you can have with this enormously powerful gem of human progress (the computer) when trying to use Linux is a printed-out HOW-TO, probably downloaded and printed from a Windows box, is more than ironic, it is shameful. The tools for providing context-sensitive help are there, they just are unused. The developers don't care about the user, they've solved thier problem by this time.

If OSS developers needed robust documentation in order to distribute their product, they would either develop it or not distribute their code. But they don't. There's no reward for the developer.

This brings me around again to the notion of licensing software developers and then making them accountable for the usability of the product. Not as an avenue for exclusion, but to build a community of developers devoted to the user, a Mr. Goodwrench sort of certification standards, that tests it's releases against naive and novice users. How you make this work I have no idea.

Red Hat should be doing this already, but they've clearly left the home user at the altar.

He's right

I always try and get an open source-coding friend of mine to understand this, and it never seems to sink in.

Interface design is an incredibly important part of any software project - it's like the clothes you wear to a job interview. Sure, you *might* get the job if you wear your regular jeans and t-shirt, but if you take the time to dress up, you will create a much more favourable impression on the potential employer you are meeting.

Similarly, taking the time to make your user interface polished and intuitive is one of the best ways to end up with happy end users who tell other people how great your software is. It lets them know that you care enough about the software you create to spend a few extra hours making it look nice instead of shoving it out the door as fast as possible.

but he's right

You're all missing the point. Trying to configure CUPS does suck if you're on your own trying to figure it out. Anything with Linux is this way. I'm not a college-aged dork sitting in a dorm not getting laid with 20 other dorks playing EQ. I'm trying to figure out how to use this powerful tool, and if I have to spend 3 days studying dusty man pages to set up a frickin' printer - forget it. Takes me 10 minutes to write a script to install a queued novell printer when I click on a NAL - and then leverage that against 10,000 machines that I don't have to touch. Will Linux do this one day? I hope so.

Re:but he's right

... if you're on your own...

(+1, Spelling/Grammar)

Yep

And then when you (humbly) send an email or post a suggestion about how to (possibly) make [insert technology] a bit more friendly, the responses tend to go like this:

• [no response. evar]
• This is different from Windoze - I know that! I don't want "Windoze" (how cute, BTW) I want to tell you that your fucking design sucks rocks!
• If you want stupid, use Windoze instead - Again, very cute. Also arrogant and stupid.
• This is how it's done in Linux - Well shiieet, of course it is. That doesn't mean it's correct.
• Did you RTFM|Google? - Well of course, for the last fucking 4 hours, just.
• The next version will have... - That's great except that if I Google for what you said about this version I see the same thing. Wow, Usenet is great, eh?
• We're not going to add that, that's stupid - Of course!
• Use [x] instead - Yeah, except that [x] has been in alpha for the past nine years.
• Check out [this page] - Fantastic. If that's not a 404 I guess I'll have to learn Japanese! Weee!
• You're welcome to ask for a refund - Wahahaha!!!

It takes a rant from ESR (who despite his pretensions doesn't know much about human interaction) to get people to do things right? Wow.

I always get a chuckle when people compare Linux to OS X or Windows in usability terms. KDE looks absolutely fantastic after I log in, but the fun stops there. If I actually want to do anything else I have to fire up vi and edit 1,000 conf files. Give me a break.

And yes, ESR is right. This is one of the things that keep Windows users in Windows and perpetuate what you folks call "monoculture". Whining about it and blaming everything on "M$" won't fix anything. Great software ultimately sucks if I can't use it.

Dream system

Here's my idea of a dream setup: the best of both worlds. The consistent GUI of Windows or Mac OSX, and then the rest of it consisting of all that is good from linux(stability, etc).

I envision mullet computing. Windows/Mac in the front, Linux in the back.

I love how I have some nice GUI configuration options for Samba(in Fedora), but to completely configure it, you still have to dig in the .conf file. Why would you only have a few configuration options?

Network Printing != Aunt Tillie

The configuration problem is simple. I have a desktop machine named 'snark'. It is connected, via the house Ethernet, to my wife Cathy's machine, which is named 'minx'. Minx has a LaserJet 6MP attached to it via parallel port. Both machines are running Fedora Core 1, and Cathy can print locally from minx. I can ssh minx from snark, so the network is known good.

(my emphasis)

He's given up his right to claim newbie ignorance right there. Aunt Tillie couldn't even conceive printing through a network.

Re:Network Printing != Aunt Tillie

It takes all of two sentences to explain networked printing to Aunt Tillie. "You hook the printer up to this computer over here, and you can print to it from this computer over there. Just be sure and shoo the cat off the printer before you hit 'print.'" If you'll notice, the second sentence is a bit gratuitous.

ESR never claimed to be an ignorant newbie. In fact, he's pretty computer literate, and this was the only thing that allowed him to beat it into submission. His point is correct: if Linux is going to make inroads on the desktop, the learning curve has to be flattened enormously.

Damn...

So, let's review. In order for the nice, user-friendly autoconfiguration stuff to work, you have to first edit an /etc file. On a different machine than the one you're trying to s set up. You have to read the comments in configuration file to know that you need to do this ubn the first place.

He got so pissed he couldn't type straight!

Insightful article, but...

The article was insightful, and it contains some things I still did not know after wrestling with integrating CUPS, Turboprint (crappy Canon printer) and Samba, but to be fair to the CUPS developer, they did not write redhat-config-printer; Red Hat did.

CUPS and Turboprint works well, as it turns out, the problem is that printing from OOo (Linux), printing from OOo (Win) using CUPS' postscript driver, and printing from OOo (Win) to a Windows printer results in different page margins being used. Bummer. At least the fonts look identical if the same fonts are used on both ends.

And for those people with new Winprinters wondering why raw printing from Samba does not work anymore, you need to add the Windows user as a printer admin. Not documented *anywhere*.

Predicatable Failure vs, Random Success

Perhaps Mr. Raymonds' problem is that he EXPECTS all open source stuff to work flawlessly first time out of the box instantly just BECAUSE it's open source.

In the Windows world it's always a little like being a landmine tester by hitting it with a hammer. So we expect that the configuration dialog for the printer device will just hang or crash for no obvious reason. We expect that MS common UI design isn't and most of the critical functions are never in the same place.

Predictable Failure. We hope for a minimal effort, at best. But in the OS world we think sheer brilliance will save us all no matter how obscure. So when it doesn't we experience a level of frustration and disappointment we're not accustomed to.

Yeah Yeah

Designing a user interface to your application, especially if it's just configuration of a back-end server is boring. Most of us are quite happy just to rattle out a simple parser for a simple config file whose sole jobs is to allow us as small a measure of flexibility as we absolutely need in order to get on with the interesting problem of the itch we're trying to scratch today.

Why does Microsoft do GUI design better? Because if you pay a programmer a lot of money, he'll do whatever boring work you want him to. They may even have some folks who find GUI layout and design interesting.

There's the problem. Anyone know how to make GUI programming more interesting?

It's a valid point

Far too many open source apps are designed by geeks for geeks. Maybe every one here on ./ can make sense of them but I flatter myself/ourselves that we are somewhat special. Every one in the open source community dreams of the day when open source over throws the evil empire of Lord Gates, but that won't happen until open source apps are as easy to use as the competition.

My mom and dad have a computer (but 10 years ago they wouldn't touch mine) and there's no way in hell they'd figure out how to configure Linux to print, or network or even change the display resolution. The number of people with personal computers today is astronomically higher than it was 10 years ago and one of the core reasons for that is that they are no longer intimidating to the uninitiated; if you take all those people and throw them back to the usability of ten years ago they'll just give up on computers like they did back then.

You can shout RTFM all you want, Joe Blow doesn't want to read it. So if you want Joe Blow to use your wares make them as easy to use as the competition.

Good Article but...

All in all a pretty decent article.
I agree with many of his points, if there is one thing I dislike in the *nix culture it is the elitism, and holier than thou attitude that many people in said culture have towards users. This is just one more sign of that elitism, we spend hours and hours making very good stable, well designed software, and then we demand that you read a 1500 page book to be able to use it... That's stupid, now you can say "if they don't want to learn they shouldn't be using this software" but that's dumb too... my dad is an attorney, he wants to work on cases, and do legal research and the like, thats what he's interested in, he doesn't want to spend an hour a day figuring out how to share printers/files and send emails, and he doesn't want to have to pay someone $150/hr every time he needs to add a printer to his network. My wife is a psychologist, she wants to care for her patients, and work on her book, she doesn't want to be bothered with figuring out how to configure her computer, and she shouldn't have to be... That said, the author shouldn't have been bashing the CUPS guys, the configurator in question is an inhouse product by redhat/fedora, no other distribution uses it, and the default setting of having the broadcast turned off was also a decision by redhat/fedora not the CUPS programmers (well it might have been made by the CUPS devs, but redhat/fedora had every opportunity to change that default behavior). I appreciate the article though because he is right on in critisizing the community for their lack of vision in this regard. (btw, I admin a 7000 node network, and the entire thing is controlled by linux and unix servers, there are windows nodes, but I would never run windows on the server side, and I rarely use it on the desktop either so don't count me as some MS apologist)

OSS Fanboys Can't Take Criticism

It's really easy to jump on the Anti-Microsoft bandwagon when it's time, and say "Linux is ready for the desktop, it's high-quality and easy to use, why doesn't it overtake that crap from Redmond". But, when push comes to shove and sombody points out the things that scare off non-technical users from using Linux, OSS "advocates" really seem to have a hard time accepting constructive criticism.
Look -- if it's just a hobby OS, fine, this criticism is totally baseless and cruel. But, if you all want to see your labor of love have a real shot at the desktop market, you're going to have to take criticism like that and work with it -- if it seems angry, it's because end-users get frustrated when they're promised an easy-to-use system, and they have to spend more time wrestling with configuration than actually doing what they need the OS to do.
Either take the criticism as advice and use it to add value to your software so it can be accessible to a larger audience, or accept that your OSS project is just a hobby.

I wonder if the distro isn't the problem

It seems to me that at least one major locus of the problem is being missed here. ESR says:

I'm reading the manual, and I find a reference to "BrowseAddress" and /etc/cups/cupsd.conf which begins to unfold for me the mystery of how the autoconfiguration is supposed to work. It seems that CUPS instances periodically send broadcast packets advertising their status and available printers to a broadcast address to be picked up by other CUPS instances. Smart design! But...bugger me with a chainsaw, the broadcast facility is turned off by default and the documentation doesn't tell you that!

One of the autoconfiguration features that CUPS provides to make life easier for the user was disabled! Now, maybe off should be the default, as a security measure, but from the point of view of ease of use, either the default should be on, or the user should be provided the opportunity to enable it during installation. I don't know whether the default was set by the CUPS people or the people who put together the distribution, but it seems to me that handling this kind of thing is exactly the role of the people who create distributions.

MS network printer setup worse

Well, in fact, setting up a network printer in Windows is certainly not better.

You have the choice between "Local printer" and "Network printer". If you do have a network printer like an HP with a JetDirect card, the correct choice is NOT "Network printer". It is "Local printer", and later you have to add a "Standard TCP/IP port". ("Network printer" is only to add a printer shared over SMB by another computer)

So while he has a good point on a bad interface, and while it is true that for some things Windows may have a better interface, it certainly doesn't for networked printers.

Re:What the hell are you using, Windows for Workgr

Bzzzzzzt. Wrong. This guy was talking about setting up a network printer. You know, a printer you plug into a router that is *NOT HOOKED UP TO ANY COMPUTER*. He's right, you know. After you click "local printer", it gives you the option of specifying an IP address directly to the printer itself. What the fuck is that doing there? That should be in "Network Printers", except that Microsoft considers a network printer a printer configured locally on another computer accessible via SMB.

So, I guess TCP/IP is not considered a network, according to Microsoft.

So true

I remember trying to get fetchmail to work. What a nightmare.

Remember CML2?

For those suggesting ESR should fix this himself, those of you with long memories might remember CML2, Eric's attempt to fix kernel configuration (for the purposes of compiling a kernel from source).

The kernel configuration system back in 2.4 was crufty and not very user-friendly. So Eric decided to build a new system, CML2. It ended up not going in for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was probably a lot of people don't like him all that much. However, in that case he was practising exactly he is preaching here - making software easier for non-gurus to use.

Re:Remember CML2?

CML2 didn't go in because it added a mountain of new requirements to the kernel, not because "a lot of people don't like him all that much".

Although, it is true that a lot of people don't like him all that much. With good reason.

Remember fetchmail, then?

ESR also did fetchmail. Fetchmail has an *excellent* configuration interface.

* First, the config file is simple and small. A typical configuration should be simple and small. Take a look at the difference between the size of a basic sendmail and a basic postfix installation, and you'll notice an astonishing size difference -- thousands and thousands of lines.

* Second, fetchmail enjoys good defaults. If you enter the minimal set of options in the config file, it generally works properly.

* Third, and this is the biggie, fetchmailconf is an excellent GUI config tool. It can autodetect most of the configuration, and if there are multiple supported protocols/auth methods, it uses the "best", which is really better than most commercial email clients can do. Note that one *still* has full access to the simple, readable output that it produces. It doesn't hide anything from you at all, so it doesn't hurt power users that know exactly what they want the software to do, but it makes things much easier for new users.

OSS developers often miss the point

It's fine to say RTFM to a spotty student who spends his entire free time in front of his Linux box, but ESR is making a valid point that no-one seems to pick up on:

Most of us don't have the time

I work from 9am to 3am every day, including weekends. I would love to run Linux, purely because Microsoft's pricing and attitudes bother me, but the last time I tried to set up Red Hat, it took me 4 days to get the system to even recognise my video card.

We're not just talking about Aunt Tillie, we're talking about Joe B. Power User, who may have the skills to work it out eventually but simply does not have the time.

Wheras, I plug my Windows XP machine (and yes, I know this is only a recent thing) into the network and Universal Plug and Play makes network printers accessible without my having to so much as touch the PC. Now that's what we want from a Linux distro, and it's not even hard to implement. Why should I have to wade through a dozen .conf files to get Linux working, only to attract abuse from the same people who encouraged me to use it in the first place?

Re:OSS developers often miss the point

All developers miss the point in my experience. However, I think ER is shooting off at a straw man applying this solely to the OSS community.

My recent experience with Mandrake 9.1 and 9.2 on two computers were an exemplorary experience in point and click installs. DVD Player, digital camera, modem, video card office network, printer, you name it it all seemed to go. Email, office tools spell checker (non-US non-German) works.

I am sure I could have gotten into trouble if something had not been recognised or I hit the wrong button or was trying to get a printer server running. In that case I would have done what I used to do when Windows stuffed up - asked an expert.

for every designer an interface

I've held a fairly obvious view for a long time with regards to interface design (be it computer or otherwise):

Unless you're working under a predefined framework, chances are, your design is going to differ from someone elses when you both attempt an identical solution.
This isn't an answer on how to deal with this issue, as the answer(s) are everywhere, it's more of a thought process that keeps me from going crazy.
How many times have you worked with a piece of software or hardware only to move on to another one that was similar in concept, but totally different in execution? It's gotten to the point that I've stopped trying to become an expert at everything, and simply want things to work (maybe I'm just getting older, and have less time and/or memory).
Maybe that's why companies like Apple have a strong following, with a mantra of "it just works".

The next time that Joe Administrator is getting cocky with "oh, you didn't know how to configure file XYZ for ABC", remember, they're just being programmed to use an arbitrary interface, thought up arbitarily by some designer.

And that folks is why I'm working to get out of System Administration, and into programming ;)
[end rant]

Windows printer setup is just as bad

Last I checked to print to a network printer under Windows using IPP or LPR you don't choose Network, but instead choose Local. Network printing really means print server printing under Windows, but esr somehow holds that up as an example of a standard to live up to? No thanks. CUPS may be a little rough, but at least when I connect to a printer using ethernet I don't have to choose non-network as the printer type. Of course really it is a print device under windows since according to Microsoft Introduction to Network Printing [microsoft.com] "The printer is the software interface between a print device and the print clients". Yeah right.

Interface Design 101

I notice that most of the comments thus far seem to be along the lines of "We don't need to improve the interface, the users need to get better because they're too dumb to use it right, and they should just learn cause then they'll realize how much better it is!"

This is a common mistake made by programmers. The problem is that not that users are actually all that stupid. The problem is that we tend to think of things in terms of how they're doing something, whereas users want to think of them in terms of what they're doing. For example, I want to set up DHCP to distribute IPs to my OSX box so I can use SMB to pull MP3s off my XP box. This is not the way a user thinks; the average user wants to hook his Compaq to his Mac so he can move around his music. He doesn't want to know what any of those acronyms stand for. He just wants to accomplish a simple task.

Bottom line: the best way to write a good interface is not to think in terms of "what is my software doing" but rather in terms of "what is my user doing." Like my human interface design professor used to say, if people can't use your software, it's not because they're stupid, it's because you designed it poorly. Users prefer usable software to powerful software, when given the choice.

Another point to consider is that, in the eyes of the Managers of potential corporate users of your system, any time employees spent learning all the details of your software is time taken away from getting actual work done. Not to mention that sloppy interfaces that haven't been properly checked often actually COST most companies money, since their employees actually often take longer than it would have otherwise. Good interface design is not a luxury, it is a mandate.

For Once ESR is Dead On The Money

I generally take ESR's rantings with a pinch of salt. I understand where he is coming from but I think sometimes he has a tendency to go over the top. However in this piece he is right on.

I am a geek. Not only do I know a shitload about computers I actually work in the industry as a field troubleshooter technician. I have to say though, that although I use Linux on a daily basis on my work PC as my main OS, it still throws me for a loop sometimes when I go through what ESR went through with whatever piece of technologically advanced, functional but ultimately borked UI software I happen to be trying to set up at the time.

He is right - this IS keeping Microsoft in business. Case in point - I get customers constantly asking me if there is a better alternative to Windows. There is of course, but I would NEVER recommend Linux to an end user who just needs to get on with the business of running a business simply because of the lack of intuitive UI's for Linux apps.

There are great, shining examples - K3B, Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Openoffice, Evolution, KDE control centre etc. Let these apps serve as an example to UI designers for other projects.

It's one thing to have all the functionality in the world, but that amounts to sweet FA in the eyes of a gumby user that would rather give money to Microsoft than learn what /etc/rc0.d is for.

god damnit this guy is 100 percent right

Seriously.

Try having your grandma setting up a printer with gnome or kde. Better yet try a usb printer.

Send grandma a small video and watch her try and figure out how to play it on linux.

Or best yet watch grandma try and use xcdroast.

Try reading through man pages for stuff like ssh keygen, or X, or any other sort of technical software. Is it really that hard to give human readable description of how to use the shit?

this is what will do, here is an example, here is another example, dont try and use it to do instead should be used.

instead of stuff like this

-e Convert OpenSSH to IETF SECSH key file

?????

seriously documentation is so damn important, and so easy to make. If you write some software, you know what you wrote, so just write a paragraph for each feature, it only takes like 5 minuets and then your software might acually get used.

The same principals go for graphical interface as well as command line interface. Think of a gui as just a extention of cli. This doesn't apply for all software, obviously things like openoffice dont have a cli. But these apps are pretty rare, and the few that exist work pretty good, browsers and office and stuff.

Bottom line, this guy is right. We need better quality apps and configuration utilities for linux.

Adam

Re:god damnit this guy is 100 percent right

seriously documentation is so damn important, and so easy to make. If you write some software, you know what you wrote, so just write a paragraph for each feature, it only takes like 5 minuets and then your software might acually get used.

That's the sort of documentation you see in man pages, not the

this is what will do, here is an example, here is another example, dont try and use it to do instead should be used.


kind that is actually useful. Writing good documentation is hard. It is so easy to just give a list of a hundred things --- who wants to read that? You need to be a good writer to figure out what the user will want to know, and make it easy to find that.

Writing good documentation is just as hard as other parts of UI design.

Not true

seriously documentation is so damn important, and so easy to make.

Either you are one of the few technical writers or you never developed a software project.

Writing a good manual is damned hard. In many ways even harder then coding itself. Why?

Compare it with being an expert in your field and being an expert teacher in your field. Wich would you say is harder? The latter really needs to be good at three things. A good coder, a good writer and able to imagine how someone not intimatly familiar with the subject would look at it.

Maybe you are a natural at this but most are not.

For a laugh ask say a doctor to explain a complex medical condition in layman terms or a lawyer to explain SCO vs IBM in english. Now why should coders be any better?

Re:foomatic

Okay, so let's play a game. You tell me what you have to do to install a printer on any flavor of Linux you want, and I'll tell you what you need to do to install the same printer on WinXP.

Let's use a HP Photosmartt 7350 (semi-random printer make and model I happen to be familiar with, since I just set one up for my mother. It's also USB, which is getting more and more common nowadays)

I'll go first:

1) Plug in printer power
2) Connect printer to computer
3) Turn printer on
4) Wait about 30 seconds for Windows to detect the printer
5) Click "Okay" a few times (about 4 times I think...)

Sure, you won't have the super-duper software (which you'ld have to install seperately), but you can hit "print" and it'll print. For fairness I'll exclude the software because there's no Linux version anyway.

Okay, your turn!
=Smidge=

Something about printing

I think there's just something about printing that turns the minds of otherwise competent developers into applesauce. Printing on unix has been a quagmire for, what, decades? And yet what is it besides 1) converting a document from a standard format to a printer-specific format, 2) sending the document to the device, and 3) (which is really gravy) getting a bit of status back. As ESR says, it's not rocket science.

My recent experience was trying to print to an inkjet connected to a windows machine. Since it was remote, I decided I didn't need a spooler, so I didn't install cups. Instead, I found foomatic, which is supposed to cut through the many layers of drivers in one slice. Through no efforts (reading several confusing and inconsistent tutorials) could I get foomatic to produce a file in my printer's format. Nor did it give me intelligible error messages. I finally posted to the main list at linuxprinting.org (lp.general); but in the weeks I've been subscribed, I've not seen a single useful reply to anyone's question!

Oh, I finally got the printer working. I just have to run gs -DSAFER -sDEVICE=ijs -sIjsServer=ijsgimpprint -sDeviceManufacturer=EPSON -sDeviceModel='escp2-c82' -sOutputFile=out -DNOPAUSE -- file.ps , and send the result with smbclient.

CUPS is only decent...

... a decent try at best. At first glance it alienates me a _LOT_ less than lprng, which is fully managed with an arcane /etc file that lists configuration directives in no particular order.

But that doesn't mean that CUPS is all peaches and roses. I had to discover what `foomatic' was in order to figure out how to extract a driver for my Epson Stylus C42UX from a large xml file. Its wizard to create the printers was rather friendly, although a belaguering dropdown box full of stuff I didn't have asked me where my printer was. Luckily it identified itself as USB PRINTER #1 (EPSON C42) so I could choose that - but most wouldn't have the slightest idea of what to choose and just stare at the screen glaze-eyed...

Really, all I wanted to do was print a school assignment. I fully agree with esr on this issue. This whole CUPS ordeal should have taken me 10 minutes, not 10 hours (on and off) to get working. And it still doesn't fully work, for example with printing to a SAMBA host.

But CUPS is the best we've got for Unix now. Isn't that sad?

I Applaud Raymond's Admission of Difficulty

It takes a real man-geek to admit "issues" when installing new software or configuring devices. He loses points for his longish rant though.

However, I found myself nodding in affirmative at EVERY single step he took during his trouble shooting. I made a lot of the same assumptions (wrongly). The funniest was when he finally figured out he had to configure the server machine to broadcast, and then he couldn't connect to it. HAHA, it took at least 15 minutes of loud swearing for me to figure out how to configure the &*#&#((#&$&^ /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file.

You know you're in trouble when the first like in the man page is RTFM.

I swear, if I have to configure another CUPS network, I'll go postal. It works... ssssh, don't touch it, and speak in hushed tones when in the vicinity.

Submit a patch

The biggest problem I've seen with open source programs is that when you do get end-users to test things out, be it a UI issue, or some other functional issue, is giving feedback.

Most of the times it seems that they don't want to look into issues or fix items. The advice is always "what does the debug output say?" or "submit a patch for it". Neither is something that the end user, who we are trying to convice that Linux is so much better than windows, is going to be able to do.

Raymond said it himself

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

The developers of CUPS have scratched their itch. I personally have no desire to scratch Aunt Tillie's itch. She isn't paying me. Neither is Raymond.

My printer works. If Aunt Tillie wants hers to work, she can pay me to set it up for her, or she can pay me to write software that makes it easier.

Why the hell is it CUPS's (or anyone else's) responsiblity to do this? If IBM and Red Hat are going to profit from easy printer sharing, let them write good config utilities. The CUPS team got the reward they were after. Their printers work.

When someone gives you a gift, try not to kick them in the nuts and ask for more. They have every right to stop giving.

100% correct and nicely said.

Opensource is written by geeks for geeks. What people forget this is NOT "by geeks for OTHER geeks" but more "by Joe the geek for Joe the geek and if anyone else finds it helpfull then that is nice". Read the original usenet post on the linux kernel for the perfect example.

But of course that doesn't sit well with those who have an agenda to get Linux to fight their crusade. Or even worse to get them to not to have to pay Microsoft anymore.

But it is a sign of the time we life in. Give someone dying of a heart attack in the street CPR and they will sue you if you break a rib. Write an excellent printer sharing protocol and people will only bitch about how they need to read the manual.

Opensource doesn't just work with developers on one side and users on the other. If it is going to work then we need manual writers, forum guru's, gui designers, beta testers, patch submittrs.

Users are like customers. MS loves customers because they pay. Opensource is free. What do we care how many customers we have? 1 * $0 is the same as 1000 * $0 but it costs a hell of a lot more to have 1000 people asking stupid questions.

Rant: Old saying is there are no stupid questions only stupid answers. This was true before the invention of the net. Read any forum and you will see time and time again the same question being asked because the asker can't be bothered to first look. Then they will bitch that noone helps them. Obviously their time is more important then everyone elses. Recently saw the worst of all. 9 pages down a ***** said "I am not going to read all those pages give me the answer". ARGH!

End rant.

Fine, then...

Fine, then don't bitch about "M$" being the dominant monoculture when you're to lazy to bother making your software usable for other people. If you only want to scratch YOUR itch, keep your software on your private network and don't let major distros pick it up. Understood, Mr. I'm-the-poor-unpaid-volunteer-developer?

Guess what? Users don't care either. They'll drop your shit like a bad habit and go back to what works.

Look at Apple

Here is my quick account of setting up a Mac (10.3.2) to print to a Brother MFC-8820D.

I plugged one end of there ethernet cable into the printer and the other into my laptop. So far so good.

Being a highly competent user, I then went straight to the Printer Setup Menu and click add printer. I chose IPP printing. Then I turned to the sales guy and asked for the default IP address of the printer. He didn't know. I didn't know. It wasn't in the manual either.

I cursed. I yelled. I was annoyed. I sent two people off the go and find out the default IP of the network card.

While sitting there quietly spouting profanity I looked in my list of currently configured printers. Well buff my nuts and serve me a milkshake! There, in the list was the Brother printer all configured and ready to go. I didn't have to do anything.

I selected it and pressed the "Configure" button. It launched a web browser and brought up the configuration page.

I fell off my chair.

I later learned that the printer supports ZeroConf [zeroconf.org] network discovery. Apple takes that further by selecting the correct driver automatically. It work just as well via USB, only if I think want to share it to other Macs I then have to follow the very complex task of clicking the "Share Printer" box in the System Prefs.

He's exactly right. Here's how to fix it.

Much to my surprise, ESR is exactly right, as others have pointed out. Here's how to fix it.

First, if you have't read the original Macintosh user interface guide, do so. There are some strict rules, which today even Apple forgets, but which all competent programmers must know.

One of the basic rules in that manual is this:

• You should never have to tell the computer something it already knows.

What this means, in terms a programmer can understand, is this:

• If a program needs some piece of information, and there's some way the program can find it out without asking the user, the program MUST find it out by itself. Even if it's more work for the programmer. Asking the user is not an option. Period. If you don't like that, you shouldn't be programming for end users, and somebody in Bangalore will be taking your job next month. Please clean out your cubicle when you leave.
• If a program needs some piece of information from the user which it cannot find out by itself, but which must be consistent with something the computer already knows, the system must present a set of valid options to the user. Providing a blank which the user must fill in correctly is grounds for dismissal.
• If the system is in an inconsistent state, it must detect that it is in an inconsistent state. It's not the user's job to validate the internal consistency of the system's tables.

From a design perspective, it's useful to divide information the system knows into "definitions", "references", and "caches". "This printer is called FOO" is a definition. "BAR normally prints on FOO" is a reference. "FOO is a PostScript printer" on BAR is a cache item. Caches must be regeneratable. References must be checkable. Definitions should be protected against inadvertent change.

One of the big problems of the Windows registry is that it mixes all three types of information. This is also true of the contents of "/etc" in the UNIX world.

Once you start thinking of the problem in these terms, it's much clearer what to do. For the printer case, it's obvious that the system should find the printers in the neighborhood by itself, and should probe them to find out what they are and whether they will let you use them. It's also clear that if something changes (a printer is replaced, for example), the system must notice this and do something reasonable.

Once all the heavy machinery for that is in place, the user interface for "configuring a printer" should go away entirely. The ordinary print dialog can do the work. It might need a "search for more printers" button. But there's no real reason from a user perspective to have to configure printers at all.

We will now hear from the "just edit the /etc/xxx file with 'vi' and send a SIGHUP signal to the daemon" people. You guys are dinosaurs. Give it up.

Lost me...

I hate the CUPS UI also, but the writer lost me here:

If the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows programers) they'd probe the local network neighborhood and omit the impossible entries.

This is exactly what I would expect from Windows, and what I don't want in Linux. Because eventually a) something will be greyed out when I know it shouldn't be, or b) something will be greyed out when I think it shouldn't be, or c) I know something SHOULD be impossible, but I want to select it anyway for troubleshooting or experimentation. Who's to say I don't want to configure my print queue before I go down the elevator to bring the printer host online?

apparently...

ESR has little experience with configuring printers under Windows. It can be an absolute nightmare: networked printers are installed by making them local printers and then entering an IP address for the port number, local printers plugged into USB fail to be recognized, you have to select from zillions of nearly identical printer models, etc.

The way Aunt Tillie gets this to work on Windows is that she calls up Johnny, the good little nerd, treats him to her chocolate cookies, and has him suffer through this problem.

CUPS itself, for all its internal messiness, can easily presented with a better UI: Apple is using CUPS for OSX (even Apple's GUI is somewhat confusing for non-geeks), and how easy or difficult printer installation is on Linux depends more on the distribution and the UI it has chosen than on whether you use CUPS or LPRNG. CUPS also comes with an internal GUI (web-based) that is semi-decent.

Sounds like the distribution ESR uses (RedHat?) has a bad printer installation GUI, one that actually is worse than what CUPS comes with; he should complain to his distribution vendor--that has nothing to do with CUPS or OSS.

I understand the frustration with a lot of OSS GUIs, but in my experience, Windows GUIs are no better, and often worse.

There are two kind of vegetarians.

Disclaimer: this is not about vegetarians I am just using it as an example. Nor is this a judgement merely an observation

The ones who eat meat substitutes and those who don't. If you go into your local supermarket you will probabaly see veggie burgers trying to come as close to meat without being meat. I thought this was what vegetarians ate and had great admiration for being able to stomach that stuff. Turns out this is not the case for all of them. Some never borther with trying to create a non-meat hamburger and instead eat dishes made out of vegetables.

The first group basically wants to eat hamburgers but without it being made out of meat. The others simply don't want to eat meat at all and can live without having hamburger like products.

Some people seem to want to run windows but without it being Microsoft. Others just don't want anything to do with MS or similar at all and can live with it not being easy to use.

Sadly these two groups often seem to get in each others way. I myself must really control myself to not call Eric Raymond a whining kid. Oops. Others will applaud him for saying what they are thinking. Point is neither of us is right. We just want different things out of our software.

Problem is that most of the developers can't really be asked to cater for the first group. Why? Because to them it seems logical and easy. It reminds me of a dentist who can't understand why patients fear him more then constant tootache. Choose between cups and lpd? I find it hard to imagine a single cups developer not being able to give the correct answer any time of the day. So they think it is obvious for everyone. People that easily adjust to the fact that others do not know what they know are called teachers. Good teachers. How many have you met in your life?

Basically you would need the interface and manuals co-designed by someone without a clue. These people are of course kinda hard to find for anyone who can't afford to hire them. Only companies like Red hat/Mandrake/Suse/IBM/HP will be able to spend the money that would be needed to truly make easy consitent configuration tools.

The cups people can't really do this. To them the subject matter is too well known to realize where the users hand needs to be held. At the same time at least half their users will be wanting them to concentrate on improving the core program and not to waste time fannying about with useless gui wich they never use anyway.

I think it is called being caught between a rock and a hard place. Now if only somone would start an opensource configuration project. But that is the problem isn't it. Those who could build that don't need it and those who need it can't build it.

This dillema is usually solved by the exchange of money.

ESR is Right

I've been using Linux as my main OS at both work and home for about 7 years.

Here's a list of my recent hardware config experiences on my home machine, which dual-boots Gentoo and Windows XP:

1. Canon Powershot A40 digital camera. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. On Linux, it required two kernel recompiles, and searches through several sources of information (gphoto2 manual, message boards, Google) before I finally got the command-line interface to gphoto2 to work. Never got any GUI front-end working.

2. Creative Webcam Pro NX. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Despite hours spent banging my head on the problem, it has yet to function under Linux.

3. Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200. WinXP detected and configured it in about 25 seconds. Linux: kernel recompile, install additional Xfree86 module, tweak, retweak, and re-retweak /etc/X11/Xf86Config. All accompanied by extremely liberal doses of docu searching online, of course.

I love Linux like my brother, but seriously, hardware config on it is a huge PITFA, and provides the single largest contrast to the Windows world.

I long for the day when I get a new gizmo, plug it into my box, and it "just works". Man, that would be so cool.

Re:ESR is Right

Get a Mac. It really, honestly, truly does just work. And you get UNIX along for the ride.

Someone had to say it. :)

Mod this -1: The truth hurts.

There are lots of people out there who can design an attractive interface, and lots of people who can design a informative one. There are also people out there who can't do either.

Why isn't the OSS community looking at those with proven interfaces? Apple, of course comes right to mind, as well as BeOS. The thing is, programmers could have all the graphic designers working on their projects that they needed - IF the graphic designers had a way of creating a GUI without having to learn some new esoteric scripting language!

Do I (as a graphic artist and layout guy) expect a programmer to:

1) Come up with a fantastic, beautiful, informative interface to their software?
2) Spend a year on the GIMP or Photoshop or Illustrator to learn how to make one?
3) Understand that the super-cool lens-flare skull with glowing eyes might be a cool T-shirt for a poor high school metal band, and not for the interface to his software?

No. Just like I'm not going to learn the ins and outs of C, ruby, python, perl, etc. I don't want to. I'm good at what I do. I'm good at what I know. I'm getting better at the things that interest me.

Listen. Make it easy for artists to submit interfaces. A plugin. A skinner. A template. I don't know, IANAProgrammer. I do know that I was able to build an interface in 5 minutes with Apple's tools. Again, I know NOTHING about programming.

The point I'm making is this: You (the programmer) make it possible (read: easy) for me (the artist) to make visual GUI changes, and I'll do it! For nothing! We like to do stuff like this! [216.239.39.104]. Make it possible and together we can get this linux thing on everyone's desktop.

Continue to avoid/ignore/and deny this issue, and it'll be a short time to Longhorn, which from what I've seen, has the worst Winamp skinners already sewn up.

Usability is HARD!

Designing a useable interface is difficult and the skills required for it are dramatically different from those needed to implement the back-end software. The CUPS wizard that ESR described was designed by programmers. Microsoft's equivalent was designed by usability experts.

The thing is, most people think of software development as just writing code. It's not. Writing a useful program requires first understanding the problem and its possible solutions. It requires experts in the problem domain. That's why all of the really successful OSS projects have been things like programming languages, libraries, development tools and operating systems--those are all are things that programmers are already experts in.

It's possible that a naive-user friendly Linux is beyond the abilities of the open-source community. Maybe there are no good usability experts willing to volunteer their time on some of these projects. In that case, somebody is going to have to pay for the work. So far, some of the distributions have already done just that and I keep having less trouble with Mandrake on each new release, so there's hope. Maybe in the future, different Linux distributions will be compatible but completely different in look and feel, each targeted toward a different market segment. That wouldn't be so bad.

However, if the OSS community wants to solve this problem in an open-source way, we need to take it more seriously than just telling the programmers to smarten up. Linux is infrastructure, written by infrastructure experts. The configuration tools need to be designed by usuability experts and implemented separately from the things they are configuring.

We need, in other words, a collection of UI geeks, a group of people who know how to deal with non-technical users and by programmers who will listen to them. This is the group that will write the control panels and configuration wizards and spend their time and energy making them better and more usable.

The CUPS team (to pick one) isn't going to do that and shouldn't have to. Their job is to understand printing. Usability is a different problem entirely.

What is an easy way to setup printing?

My question is - How can *I* easily setup a printer in Linux? Without the easier GUI offered by KDE or GNOME, I've found CUPS and other printing systems virtually impossible to configure. I have an HP5L printer. I'm really happy to see ESR write about this.

I'm a fairly adept technical user. I prefer to use Slackware and a bare minimum Window Manager ie Window Maker. KDE and GNOME offer nice GUIs to configure CUPS but its overkill to install either to setup a printer.

I've been planning on switching all my essay writing to Linux for practical reasons. One of the only reasons I'm using Windows to do work on is that printing is really hard to setup on 'Nix. I'm not using a lot of fancy fonts - mostly Times - but I do all my writing in either OO or AbiWord. My understanding is that of the older printer daemons don't work/output.

What options do I have?

Is Windows any better in this regard?

Every non-technical user I know has similar sounding Windows troubles. And me, who rarely uses Windows, has to figure it out, and let me tell you right now - it isn't intuitive or easy to use in any way for the non-initiatied into "One Microsoft Way". This whole rant could well have been about any number of Windows sub-systems I've had to struggle with over the years.

Honestly, this problem is pretty much endemic in all software. And that's not a good thing - it's a important lesson for *every* software developer to learn.

My take on the "click OK to click OK" disease.

Despite a degree in Computer Science and a few years of experience managing networks of all descriptions, like all people, I still find myself stumped by the occasional yes/no question in a program. Some of the time, I try to read the associated help, if there is one. All too often, I find that the help is a slight variation of the following:

"To accept this choice, click OK. To cancel, click CANCEL".

Well fucking duh. You know what I'm talking about: For an example, enter your computer BIOS (press 'Del' on most PCs during boot), and read the "help" for any of the entries. Do you know what every single setting there means? Quickly, what's Spread Spectrum Modulation? What are its effects and side-effects? What are the potential dangers? When would you want to use it? Can you answer any of these questions by looking at a UI that is packed with acronym laden yes/no choices? Probably not. I doubt most people outside of a motherboard design company could explain in detail what every single option does.

Users aren't all stupid, even the non-computer literate ones. It's the user interface that is at fault, for not providing all of the information required to make a decision. Given sufficient information, most people can make the right decision. Given a yes/no question full of acronyms with no other information, even programmers and computer scientists can be stumped.

A great example of how effective providing information can be, think back to the original Norton Disk Doctor for DOS. The dialog boxes in that program usually had several paragraphs of text, and asked one question. The text usually explained:

• What the program will do in response to every choice.
• What the pros & cons are of every choice
• And, if applicable, the potential risks (eg: data loss) of your choices.

Now, I clearly remember relatively computer illiterate people running that program, and making highly technical decisions without even realizing it. My father could easily decide whether he wanted to mark a sector bad, what kind of surface scan he wanted, and how he wanted to treat corrupted files.

While Windows is in general mediocre (not great, just mediocre) in its UI design, at times it has glaring flaws. My favourite examples are applications that ask for a DSN connection string. Do you know how to construct a DSN connection string by hand? I don't, and I've been programming with databases for years. However, the doubly stupid thing is that the ODBC control panel already includes a dialog box that automates the process! So why do some applications, including some written by Microsoft, still ask for a DSN string?

Command-line software (open source, or otherwise) is particularly prone to exhibit this problem, often to the same extent as the BIOS example. When executed with a "-?" option (or whatever), most programs will give a list of options, but rarely tell the user anything other than the existence of the option. This is no better than a dialog box asking a yes/no question with no further explanation.

Grandmother sucking eggs

Ok, personal OSS rant.

RMS says that coders should give code away. You work as a waiter, or do something else for a living. I don't want to be a waiter. I want to write code. So, "something else" has become service and support.

Here's the rub -- when you make your pennies on service and support, you have no economic motivation to make it easy and self explanitory! You make MONEY when it's hard to use.

This I think is the downfall of the current OSS business models, and I haven't found a way out of it. OSS projects are destined to remain difficult as long as there is no economic motivation (and we've already established that there's no artistic/ego motivation) to make it beautiful and easy.

I'm not saying that Windows is right or that Mac drool-proof design is right, or that OSS is fundamentally wrong. But I'd like people to understand the motivations that their choices steer them to. I feel bad when I get harangued by OSS types for making non-OSS products. Just understand that not everything is as cut and dried, and that most OSS business models have yet to be proven successful.

Let the GNU/GPL/RMS/OSS/ESR flaming begin. I'm ready for it. I've thought this out for a long time, and I make a living writing software. And no, my software is not a paradigm of simplicity, but I'm not having delusions of taking the desktop away from Bill G by conquest.

Dear god, the writer needs to get a clue

ESR needs to get a clue. It's evident by his initial environment description that he's quite out of it in terms of what "Aunt Tillie" will be doing with her computer.

Aunt Tillie will not have multiple systems, let alone have a small personal LAN. She will have a boxed Gateway or Dell that comes preocnfigured with a printer. If she needs anything more done than plugging in cables, she will call you, her dear nephiew/niece, to come "fix her printer" for her.

What's more, most detect such things on install just fine. There's not much of a chance she'd not have her stuff set up physically prior to installing the software, if she ever felt so bold to try Linux.

The only people claiming that Linux is ready for the desktop of mere mortals - or will be anytime soon - need to get out more and meet some common folk. Computers in general aren't really ready for common folk, but they're lucradive enough for companies to sell them, and cool enough to make commoners want them anyway.

I digress.

printing is a PITA. film at 11.

here's my experience with setting up a HP Color LaserJet 4600:

win 2k/XP - find way to add printer->select local printer->turn off probe for PnP printers->create new port->select standard tcp/ip port->enter printer ip number->click custom device type and then settings->click raw protocol and enter port 9100->enter printer driver info->click a few more next/finish buttons->print test page

linux (RH9 & FC1) - go to system settings->go to printing->enter root password->click forward->enter desired name and description->select networked jetdirect->type in printer hostname->click on printer manufacturer and then model->click finish and then print test page

OS X - go to the printer configuration utility and find the printer already detected, configured, and set to be the default

sure, the linux config could be worded somewhat more intuitively, but windows is a complete disaster for any non-SMB networked printer. the whole having to select 'local printer' to do it is just hysterical. at least linux refers to it as networked.... my only real niggle so far with the RH/fedora printer config tool is that the sharing properties are hidden under the Actions menu and it doesn't let you configure sharing on a per queue basis.

that all said, the rendezvous support in the HP printer is pretty damn sexy. any mac on the network sees it automatically and understands everything it can do. that's the way it's supposed to be. once i enabled the printer's CUPS support, then the linux boxes were almost there, too. poor windows users still need to go through that long drill, though....

tim

In case you missed it...

This line in the article, for me, is the key issue: "Where might I find some guidance on this, and why is this already taking too freaking long?"

I'm busy. I have things to do. I don't have time to fiddle with someone else's idea of cleverness, or a badly designed interface that can't decide on how to assign command key functions consistently, or which lacks any useful help (the CUPS example is just a case in point). Nor am I interested in solving puzzles or pondering the greater mysteries of my Inner Tux. I just want to get the damn thing up and running so I can get on with what I wanted to do in the first place.

Perhaps it's a matter of perspective: If the computer is an end unto itself, then things like usability for a wider audience aren't really relevant. But for a lot of folks, myself included, the computer is nothing more than a tool with which I hope to get some useful work accomplished. I'll use whatever works, even if it is Windows. Occasional crashes and lock-ups aside, Windows does help me get the job done and I don't have to spend half a day reading man pages and badly written "manuals" trying to figure out how to install and configure something, and that's what really counts for me.

The bottom line is that I'll rm -rf a badly written tool's source tree just as fast as I'll pitch a cheap pair of pliers into the trashcan. They're both useless to me if they waste my time and impede my progress.

Eric Raymond sums it up nicely with the statement that "the problem is that these simple things never occurred to developers who bring huge amounts of already-acquired knowledge to bear every time they look at their user interfaces."

So the next time you look down your nose at some poor slob who just can't figure out how to install and configure something that you could do in your sleep, just keep in mind that there's a reason MS still rules the desktop, and it has a lot to do with millions of those poor clueless slobs.

On Grey'd out menu items

"If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out, signifying..."

Greying out menu items is one area open source can actually surpass Mac OSX and Windows. When I try and use a new desktop app I have never used before I am always puzzled why some menu options are greyed out. Everything else I find intuitive. Greyed out items confuse me.

Why is is greyed out? How do I get to it? Why can't I get to it now?

What would be really nifty is some tool-tip text saying something like "This menu item is only available when you are in xyz mode."

Am I the only one who experiences this difficulty?

Why couldn't OSDL do usability testing?

OSDL is possibly the one organization that could help various projects test their usability. It would be expensive, and we would really need to squeeze large corporations like IBM, Novell/SuSE and Oracle to provide some serious funding. Perhaps the reason they don't is because the developers could still simply ignore suggestions or demands for improvements. Of course, perhaps the major distributions could choose not to include programs that don't meet some minimal level of usability or conform to one of the guidelines listed above. That might provide some incentive.

I didn't find CUPS that hard to install.

I'm a grain farmer. I don't know the first thing about programming anything and didn't have a computer until Windows 95. My tractor was built in 1967. I'm not even close to being a techie kind of guy, but I had zero trouble getting CUPS going and I kind of liked the GUI setup tool.

Actually I've never had any trouble getting printing going on linux and I've been using linux since RH 4.2. I never did upgrade from windows95, don't like it. Might boot windows two, three times a year now max.

No wonder

Software is bound to be hard to use as long as the developers is making their interfaces. Its also very easy to be blinded since you work on the application a long time and you think things are easy because they are logical to you. KISS is not enough, there need to be a layer of logic ontop of the application in most cases, shielding the user from the computer logic and making things make sense.

Perhaps its time to invite designers into the developing process?

That said i dont really agree with Eric Raymond. I work as an admin all day and i more often find Windows harder to use than linux. Windows is very quirky and backwards in so many levels. Try installing a TCP/IP printer in Windows XP and you get the picture, not something for the mere mortals. Linux is in my opinion better than Windows but there are room for improvement. I dont think people should embrace usability Wizard style like windows. Make the apps easy enough from the start instead so you wont need a wizard to be able to do your stuff ey?

What matters most

Without having read the article, I'll put in my 2 cents worth on what matters most to the average joe-user:

1. It installs easily.
2. It works properly (for the most part).

They don't care enough about security to do anything. They don't care about the license agreement (open source, what's that?).

The only thing that matters is they can install it and it does what it's supposed to do.

Open source programs usually covers point 2 extremely well. Point 1, however, is a serious issue with far too many otherwise excellent programs.

"./configure; make; make install" is easy enough for us WHEN IT WORKS. A few too many times, however, I've run into dependency problems that caused some headaches. Using RPM has the same problem. It works great if the dependencies are already installed, but falls flat on its face when something is missing.

Debian's apt-get is a huge leap forward, but because of old programs, is nearly useless if you use a default woody installation. Yes, I know Debian's premise is stability. What does that have to do with anything? The average joe is running Windows, so stability isn't an important issue!

What is needed? Something based on Debian's apt-get, but GUI driven, and specifically designed for new software (as opposed to Debians stability mantra). Shiny buttons that let the user choose the "stable" versions , a specific version, or "the latest" would help. It should automatically grab dependencies unless specifically told not to.

Lastly, a database of package locations (distributed, of course). The tool would query the database to find out where to get the packages that are needed. The database might also return dependency information, or it could delegate that responsibility to the actual location. This could be almost DNS-like.

Just a few random ideas off the top of my head. Feel free to shoot huge holes into it.

The truth

The truth is, that despite the intensity of the point, the point still holds truth. I love linux, I have used it for almost 10 years now, and have done everything from kernel hacking, to my own C programming etc.

However, what began as an enthusiasts project, became an essential part of my work, has now become to some degree tiresome, and laboured. It's simply because binary distribution and configuration designs between OS's varies so much, that it becomes difficult to release software that easily integrates into ANY environment. Permeatations on OS's means many more for the software.

However, it is up to successful programmers to fix this, and trust me, if it can happen, it will happen with linux, and open source, if not demonstrated by the current wave of self booting, nice looking Linux distro's, the installation menu's these days, etc....sure it needs more work, but it will have it shortly.

Just think of the next wave of Linux Distro's in 12 months time, how much easier even still they will be to use, install or download software.

Now imagine 24 months.

Now compare that to Longhorn?

Microsoft knows it's coming....

Developers: Answer, but also fix

When you're reading a mailing list and someone emails "how do I do X", the usual response, as ESR has pointed out, is to simply answer them. If the problem comes up a couple of times, perhaps it goes into a FAQ. There is one missing thing, though, that doesn't happen. The author should ask "what could I change in the *software*, not the documentation or FAQ or whatnot, that would keep users from coming to ask me about this again."

An end-user's perspective

I'm a longtime reader of Slashdot, longtime observer of the open-source community, never posted before, hope someone takes my opinion seriously.

I use some open-source applications and have installed Linux a few times. The reason I don't use it now is because of the exact problems ESR mentioned. Obscure problems, poor documentation, and having to wade through a zillion man pages just to get an idea of what the problem is.

Far be it from me to tell any programmer how to do their job, but most of us in the Real World don't have time for this stuff. We just want the bloody thing to work without too much trouble, so we can get on with our jobs and/or lives. Microsoft, for all its many and fundamental shortcomings, understands this. Far too few Linux developers do. Ergo, when an end-user encounters a problem like ESR's and can't muddle his way through it, he's just going to shrug his shoulders and take the path of least resistance, which means Windows.

I hate Microsoft, I hate their shoddy software, I hate their security problems, I hate their handholding, I hate their interfaces. I've been saying for years that if I ever meet Bill Gates, I'm gonna smack him. But I keep using his software, because if nothing else, at least I know it's going to do what I need it to do, dangnabit, and I won't need a computer science degree to make it work.

Thats where money comes into picture!!!!

When it comes to documentation and making things more intuitive, you just cant blame the FLOSS developers,

they are developing all that software because of their love for writing software, when that software is in a proper functional state(according to their expectations) they start losing interest in that(and thats natural as their first love is writing software, not documenting it), they just want to handle complex programming problems instead of firing an editor and writing about how the whole thing works.

To them "Documentation" is kind of "shitty" work which no one wants to do, and thats where money comes in picture, in closed source or professional organizations you have to write documentation, you like it or not. and often you have dedicated guys who are responsible for that, also enough thought goes into look and feel of software along with core functionality of software.

I remember reading Linus statement somewhere where he said companies like RedHat did what he never wanted to do like documentation and i think that clearly conveys the point.

Damn good screed...

I am SO happy Eric Raymond wrote this... just a few days ago I too was trying to set up my printer via CUPS, and ended up giving up/swearing up a storm. Bitchy comments from some Slashdot readers aside, we ought to listen to this man... Linux's main strength AND disadvantage is that the majority of the code writers/users are (like moi) tech-savvy geeks. But, the UI should not force us to become a full-fledge sysadmin every time we want to install a damn printer (or plugin, or etc...) Believe it or not, even though I am a geek, sometimes I just want to use the printer without giving a rat's ass how it happens as long as it happens. It's one of the few times that I don't hate MicroBarf or (cr)Apple. What many of the open source projects need is to recruit a local WinDoze/Macinosh weenie (their boss for example), and have them run through the projects' UI. If the user finds the UI easy, then great! Otherwise, it should be back to the (G)UI drawing board. Obscurity does not lead to usability, people!

He's damn right

While his style is, as usual, not quite professional, the points he makes are right on target. Usability is sorely lacking in most Unix/Linux setups.

But instead of pointing to various short user-friendliness rants and mini-howtos, I suggest reading a few books, to see what the current state of the art is.

I suggest the following two, which I am using for my thesis work on this subject as well:

Donald A. Norman: The Design of Everyday Things [amazon.com]
This book focuses on everday gadgets and appliances instead of computer interfaces, but the advice Norman gives is perfectly applicable to our field of work. Highly recommended.

Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann: About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design [amazon.com]
Now this book is pure gold. Excellent advice on user research, goal-oriented design and lots of insight on GUI design as well. Yes, Microsoft gets some praise for parts of their efforts - where they deserve it. They also are criticized properly - just like everybody else - where they failed. If developers would apply at least a little of this stuff, we would have vastly better software.

Who's being igno-rant here?

Although I happily agree that most OSS leaves lots to be desired in terms of user-friedliness, I don't like ESR's rant much. Here's why:

He criticizes CUPS for having a subobtimal configuration interface. I am impressed that it even has such an interface at all. A friend of mine once said that hackers often stop where the product becomes almost usable. This is very true, and the CUPS developers probably just focus on the implementation, rather than the interface, which, IMO, is the Right Thing to do.

Secondly, what he tried to do should have required no action on his part, as it says in the documentation. It's not CUPS's fault that the Fedora Core team decided to ship their system with the required feature turned off. There are good reasons for turning the feature off, e.g. security considerations: don't run services that are not required, and remote printing certainly isn't required for everyone. Sure, they should have mentioned this and provided instructions for re-enabling it, but remember that all this is under development; there is room for improvement.

Finally, I have to say that I have had both good and bad experiences with CUPS, but finally quit using it because it is much too heavy and complex for my needs. I just want to print, locally, and magicfilter takes care of this just fine.

Problem with the programmers

The problem with bad GUIs and guides in open source software comes from the fact that creating a good user interface is the most boring and tedious programming task there is. One has to handle all the possible wrong uses (there are about 100 per correct usage) in a way that gives good feedbackt to the user.
Since most people developing software for Linux work for free and out of their own will there usually isn't enough incentive to do the boring stuff. An employee for a software company however could lose his job if he didn't do it.

again shows developer focus

There was earlier article that compared *nix and Windows programmers...

*nix programmers write programs for other programs to use (hence command line arguements that are easy to parse/create etc). Ie they do the guts first, then bolt on an interface later.

windows programmers write programs for users. ie they write the interface first, then the guts.

Would be interesting to see how the Mac guys concentrate their efforts.

It's not CUP's fault

It was meerly defending its self from the threat of use with a dot matrix printer!

So, it wasn't just me!!!

I have repeatedly had the same problem ... whoever writes the help files and user documentation has NEVER follwed it step by step or watched a novice do it. They don't realize where their experience is filling in a critical gap in the information.

Central repository

Maybe OSS needs a central repository of OSS development "best practice".

A collection of technical howtos (subversion/cvs, patches etc), articles on UI design, documentation writing, managing distributed volunteer teams, handling users. Things like "Dos and Donts", articles from experienced OSS developers and users - maybe a little less inflammatory than ESR's, though. A Wiki maybe?
All this information must be out there, distributed in mailing lists, forums and developers' memories. Surely it would improve OSS quality if new developers sent a few hours reading through that sort of material before starting to contribute.

This is the issue with open source, I'm afraid

I agree wholeheartedly with the article, and it's not just CUPS. It's pretty much everything open source. Guys like me are very open to pushing open source into the workplace, but until these problems are solved, it will not happen. Period.

An example of a good product made correctly is Mozilla.

Mozilla was easy to roll out, starting with the development teams. I just told them, "run the installer". Then I show them tabbed browsing, javascript debugging and error description, and better W3C support...and BANG...50% of the developers are now using some flavor of Mozilla and/or Firefox.

This is the ONE THING keeping OSS from real influence.