On Mon, 25 Jul, 2005 at 04:19PM -0400, Lee Revell spake thus: > On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 21:11 +0100, james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > I write my email in emacs. You can browse the web with it too, if you > > like. Personally, I've never wanted to, but who am I to tell people > > what Emacs shouldn't do? > > > > So, yes. C-S isn't silly at all. It makes perfect sense to the > > people most likely to use evolution. > > If your goal is to present a coherent desktop environment to the user > then you cannot require them to use Ctrl-S and Ctrl-F to do the same > thing depending on which app they are using. If we can't even agree on > that, then we have LONG way to go before the Linux desktop is usable. > > Since we have a more powerful underlying architecture than Windows and > at least as good as OSX, there's no reason we should not be able to > present the same level of usability. We are talking about taking a > small *subset* of the full functionality of a Unix-like system and > presenting it to the user as a coherent computing environment. It > should really be trivial. I agree with all this, but not when applied to everything, all of the time. A user friendly distro for new users would be great. Everything working as expected (that is, as Windows does) and no suprises or too many choices. But I think that that's just one small place for Linux. How many mail readers need to be written that work like a Windows app? What's wrong with ones that work like a Unix app? Newbies don't have to use them. I'll stick with emacs and mutt. They can use the mozilla thing (that I can't remember the name of, sorry) for reading mail. Everyone is happy. And I think the same thing applies to audio. Audacity works out of the box. If you want something more powerful, that isn't constrained by what the rest of the world demands because they want everything, right now and it has to be easy to use, then you have ardour. And nobody seems to complain about the total lack of adherence to de-facto interface standards that expensive apps like XSI, Maya, et al. all have in common. In fact, that seems to be pretty much the *only* thing they have in common - they are all different. But why should we complain? They work well. Get used to the interface (and come on, it's hardly rocket science) and there are rewards - you can work quickly, access more features easily, do things in new ways. So, like I say. I'm all for "ease of use" but not if it gets in the way of actually being useful. James > Lee > > -- "I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you." (By Vance Petree, Virginia Power)
