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Wed, 30 Jul 2008

10:10 – The price of the bleeding edge

Lionel reports that his fancy Ubuntu toy is starting to suck more and more. It won't surprise anyone that the words I told you so are on my lips.

As I've blogged before (at length!) Ubuntu is not a very good operating system. It completely ignores decades of proven Unixy technology (like the command line and the toolbox approach) and presents users with complicated experimental solutions to simple problems which have already been adequately fixed ages ago.

The predictable result is that in an overwhelming number of use-cases Ubuntu simply does not work. The only way to get it to do anything at all, is to forget everything you know about computers and to perform a lot of counterintuitive jumping-through-hoops. Hours of frustrating mouse-clicking and trying to figure out what fuzzy (friendly) messages and prompts actually mean.

Engineers have a very good description for software like this: the bleeding edge.

The price of the bleeding edge is blood. Engineers know this. They also know that if bleeding edge software breaks and extracts blood, they get to keep the pieces and they're on their own for restoring their blood volume.

Not-very-amusingly, Ubuntu targets their bleeding edge software to novice users. Weren't novices in particular best served with tried and trusted technology? Nobody in their right mind would throw bleeding edge software at novices!

I guess this says something about the Ubuntu mindset. Do they realize that the more they diverge from the path of tried and trusted technology, the more blood they will extract? I expect to see many more blogs like Lionel's in the coming months.

Play with fire. Get burnt.

The sad thing, of course, is that innocent novices who have been told that Ubuntu is Linux, will now blame Linux for all the suckage.

[ category: /Linux | 8 comments on this entry ]

I don't always agree with you, but now I do for 100%. IT has grown up and people (including novices) expect things to work, even new things. I'm not saying old=good and I definitely don't want to start a distro war, but imho the various distros that have slower release cycles (centos, debian e.g.) are better candidates to service as a novice user OS than 'bleeding edge'. Even Microsoft experienced it with Vista: users don't want eye-candy, they want a system that works - and they're right to as for it.

Posted by Bruno De Wolf at Wed Jul 30 16:42:10 2008
I do like Linux, but I also do agree with your opinion about the dangers of dumbing down at all cost. It is disenfranchising the users.

I switched from one of the clicka-did-doo-dah OSes and learned the hard way.

Dumbing down is bad, but so is ubergeeky arrogance. More people would start using FOSS if the OSes would offer structured guidance to noobs that empowers them to use the classic tools to their full potential.

Know why I came to use Vim? Because of vim-tutor! This type of hands-on introduction could be applied to an entire OS if somebody in the ubergeek department came down of his/her throne and extended a hand to noobs.

The people who write documentation should begin to understand that on a standalone home PC the user IS the admin. Man pages with nowt but a synopsis in extended Backus-Knaur and a line that says "Ask your admin..." are so 1970s it hurts.

Posted by Bernhard at Wed Jul 30 22:35:35 2008
Berhard: I fully agree that documentation is key.  And I also agree that some manual pages need to evolve a bit.  But manual pages are only a start.  The audience of manual pages is "people wanting to get stuff done".  We don't want to tune those down to novice level, or the target audience will complain.

More novice documentation is needed.

The FreeBSD handbook, for what it's worth, is an excellent resource for people wanting to learn.  I am not very good at teaching anything other than very arcane technical subjects, but I do understand that teaching the "why" in addition to the "how" is vital.  And giving examples!

Posted by Philip Paeps at Wed Jul 30 22:55:41 2008
Oh yes, there's the solution, let's all just go back to the command line...

I'll just print a cheat sheet for my mom!

Posted by Anon at Thu Jul 31 18:36:38 2008
Back?

Posted by Philip Paeps at Thu Jul 31 23:00:28 2008
My 69-year-old mom is doing nicely on pure Debian stable, thank you. She's never used a computer and I didn't teach her anything. No cheat sheets required even.
Now, this is how you want a new user to behave: http://xkcd.com/456/ ;-)

Posted by Zombie at Sat Aug 2 03:24:10 2008
Good news: Two weeks ago I finally had some time to do what I wanted to do for more than a year: ditch Ubuntu. I'm not much further on the path of enlightenment, because I'm using OpenSuse 11.0. But as long as I can avoid using that nasty Yast-contraption, I'm happy.


captcha: The Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog.

Posted by Amedee at Thu Aug 7 10:15:03 2008
I exchanged Ubuntu for Arch Linux. :)

Posted by phar0z at Fri Oct 9 20:24:43 2009

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