Most people just want to use a computer, not learn all about it (just as they want to drive a car and not look under the hood).
Using things that you don't understand is suspicious, but I agree that most people do it, they sit in their Windows and don't know what they're doing. And there are a lot of problems rising from that. That's ok for me, so I have a lot of work to do, but in fact it's a direct consequence from the "user-orientated" design of Windows Explorer and Mac-OS Aqua and KDE, and, to a lesser extend, GNOME: these environments use a lot of abstraction to present the Computer like something that understands you, so you feel like home - at the same time, and as an inevitable spin-off, this hides the computers real functioning. And that may be good to sell these things, it may even be good to make a lot of money with cheap and uneducated workforce that sits in front of these things, but it's not a good approach to make a computer operative, that means a good OS. The popular approach is not about making the Computer operative for the people (and they know it, just read some science-fiction from the 70ties, or watch some movies about ai going evil - "HAL" from 2001 is the interface Windows still dreams of), it's exactly the other way round: it's an approach to make the people serve the computer. And that's what they do all day long in the offices around the world. And that doesn't come from what the people want, it's because they need to pay the rent and have nothing to sell but their lifetime. Plan9 can't do anything about that, but it is the better OS.
philosophic regards, Stefan
