On Friday 04 March 2011 12:25, Andrew C wrote: > Command line isn't not n00b friendly, It isn't merely "not n00b friendly". It's n00b-hostile. Many such users, probably most of them, literally think command prompts are error messages, that they did something wrong to be presented with a featureless black rectangle that does nothing when you click it. You can say they just need education, but the thought processes involved in choosing something from a menu of options versus actively deciding what to type into an otherwise blank window are completely different, actually using different parts of the brain. I prefer the command line for most administrative tasks, but I haven't been either a n00b or a normal user since about 1983, and I'd guess few if any on this list are. Even then, I remember wishing for a couple of months that I'd gotten more console games instead of a computer, because the learning curve was a bitch. I've set up family members with Linux (Mandrake/Mandriva, and then Ubuntu) without them ever running a terminal app or typing anything but emails. I carefully chose which hardware I recommended to them based on how well it played with Linux, and made sure they were no more than two clicks away from anything they wanted to do. I stopped bothering with doing that several years ago, not because of the command line, but because my family lives hours away from me, and whenever they'd seek help from closer relatives because they didn't realize I could ssh into their systems and do what they needed done remotely, they'd end up with a pirated XP install and the next thing they'd be asking me was "Do I have a virus?" Advocating Linux audio to new, non-technical users (not people who live with you and therefore can get the benefit of your constant tweaking to fake a seamless experience, but people whose machines are outside of your control) isn't served by assertions like "it's not worse, it's just different". What would help would be flawless hardware detection, automatic system configuration, and everything needed to make music already running in the background when the user decides to get to work by making a selection from a menu or clicking an icon on the desktop. Even then, getting their computers to boot from a USB key or CD/DVD will likely involve more technical ability than most of them possess. I'm more optimistic about people buying Android phones than about the chances of getting them to run Linux on anything else. Many people involved in Linux audio seem to think it's a feature to have a separate low-latency kernel, or that the user has to launch an audio server and manually set up connections before running most audio applications. Far be it from me to argue with that... or to ever recommend such a setup to someone who just wants to record some professional-sounding music. Given all that, making statements like "the command line isn't n00b friendly" amount to little more than a state of denial, and it's not helpful. Not only has the user interface world moved on, but it moved on about 25 years ago. And this applies to creative users and multimedia applications about ten times more than it does to general computing tasks. Rob _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
