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Date:      Tue, 11 Dec 2001 21:49:43 +0100
From:      Nils Holland <nils@tisys.org>
To:        Robert Hough <rch@acidpit.org>
Cc:        Paul Robinson <paul@akita.co.uk>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: EzBSD aint for me! Was: A breath of fresh air..
Message-ID:  <20011211214943.A4489@tisys.org>
In-Reply-To: <20011211144049.A14693@acidpit.org>; from rch@acidpit.org on Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 02:40:49PM -0500
References:  <0112071641320B.01380@stinky.akitanet.co.uk> <01121010202100.00345@stinky.akitanet.co.uk> <20011211144049.A14693@acidpit.org>

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On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 02:40:49PM -0500, Robert Hough stood up and spoke:
> 
> Since when is -CURRENT about making the OS easier to use? I don't want
> FreeBSD to be "easier" to use. I want it to be secure, reliable,
> responsive and robust. In my opinion, when you make things so easy to
> use, that even the clueless can do -- you start attracting a whole lot
> of clueless people.

Well, I'd like to dig into this once again, but I have already done so
before. Anyway, let me tell you that I believe that there is no such thing
as "easy to use". I don't know who started wanting to make computers "easy
to use", but these words are really not much more than marketting phrases.

Generally, my long experience tells me that there are two kinds of systems:

1) Those that claim the most to be "easy to use". These are generally
called Windows, but reach to a certain extend even into the UNIX field
(KDE, Gnome). The isse is that these systems look good first - they claim
that you only need to make sure your computer is connected to the mains,
and instantly you can start working. There's no need to learn much - you do
just have to point-and-click a little.
The issue with these systems is that they get you up and running quickly,
but you will outgrow them very fast. Right from the beginning everything
that can be done with such a system is visible to you, and that is, most of
the time, not too much.

2) Those systems that do not claim to be easy to use but probably are. This
included FreeBSD. You will have to spend some time to get familiar with it,
but this time couldn't be spent any better, because once you learnt about
it, you know that you do indeed have a rather powerful tool at your
disposal that is about unlimited. A tool of this category will actually
work the way you want to (and doesn't make you work the way it wants to).

A few examples, randomly chosen: Compare KDE to FVWM. With KDE, you
instantly get a Windows-like desktop, which you can customize via a
point-and-click interface. For FVWM, however, you'd first of all have to
learn how to properly write a configuration file. Once you have done that,
you will notice that FVWM is much more flexibe than KDE, and if you are
really familiar with the configuration file syntax, it will allow you to
make customizations much faster than KDE. So, in the end FVWM could well be
"more effective to use": You need *more* time to get started, but you will
probably take less time for your normal work, and that's probably what is
more important in the end.

Another real world example: The pine email software is supposed to be easy
to use (that is the goal of the pine project). So, until recently I used
pine, for historical reaons (it was the first ever UNIX MUA I used and I
didn't bother to switch). However, telling pine to correctly filter my mail
was a kind of hard. For this mailing list, for example, messages can be
sent to freebsd-chat@freebsd.org or chat@freebsd.org. Furthermore, that
address may appear either in the To: or CC: header field. In order not to
any messages, I would probably have needed for separate filters. Now, with
mutt and procmail (undoubtedly these are supposed to be harder to use), I
simply put this short thing in my .procmailrc:

:0:
* ^TO*chat@freebsd.org
freebsd-chat

Now, what is easier, or more effective, to use? Of course, every idiot can
set up a mail filter in pine without much learning. Procmail, on the other
hand, is a little harder to learn. Once learnt, however, my work becomes
much more effective and less time consuming than if I used pine.

The morale of this story: As I said in the beginning, defining something as
"easy to use" is entirely relative. Furthermore, I doubt that today's
"Plug-And-Play" anticipation is worth much: There is software you don't
have to learn, thus you save a few hours of learning it. But what if
something that requires learning costs you 5 hours to learn, and then saves
you 30 minutes a day? In the long run, this will probably be the better
thing.

My own experience furthermore tells me that people who come to FreeBSD are
well aware of the learning they will have to do, and some (most?) even seem
to enjoy it. As other systems get "easier to use" (you know why I put that
into quotation marks), more and more people will come to look fomr
something more flexible, powerful and - in the end - effective. I guess
that's where the strength of FreeBSD is, for we can give them just what
they are looking for.

Greetings
Nils


-- 
Nils Holland
Ti Systems - FreeBSD in Tiddische, Germany
http://www.tisys.org * nils@tisys.org

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