On 9/6/05, Holly Bostick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <SNIP> > The solution would seem to be to either not make the software available > until it has been sufficiently tested so that it does "JustWork" under > all possible > conditions (which the trained greed of users will not allow), or teach > the user > that sometimes they may have to do something a bit more complicated than > just click 'Send' (which means that the user cannot be a pure user anymore). > > I don't see any middle ground here, but maybe I'm missing something. > > Holly <SNIP>
I don't think you're missing anything but I do think there are options. None of what I say below is necessarily for Gentoo folks to do. It's just comments, none of which are original: 1) Having this 'Just Work' is important for end users. End users aren't interested in what's under the hood. They just want to drive. 'Just Works' is the most important thing. Nothing else matters unless you're ready to make a commitment. 2) The 'trained greed' mode is really with, IMO, coming from CS and IT types and other such folks who like living in the 'Wild West'. At my advanced age I personally don't care much if things are really up to date or not, unless they don't 'Just Work'. Unfortunately for folks like me portage keeps me far more updated than I really think I need to be. All my desktop and laptop machines (5 PCs) are almost constantly doing compiles. On the other hand my 4 MythTV frontend machines haven't been touched in 1-2 months. Of course, at this point they 'Just Work', so why touch them? 3) Releases could be more layered, such that consumer ready apps that do 'Just Work' are what's available and the stuff I'm emerging this morning isn't made so easily available to non-CS/IT types like me. In my mind this would probably end up looking more like a 'desktop release' instead of just the difference between stable and ~x86/~amd64. Of course, that's pretty much Fedora/Suse, Debian, but I want Gentoo's stability and I want an environment where it's really easy to do the few things I do that require me to compile and administer code. (Ardour & Linux Sampler mostly, but a few other audio apps also.) 4) Some set of apps, like the web-based CUPS manager, could be set up, documented and maintained better for end-user types like me. These apps should be able to administer all aspect of networking, video setup, sound, etc., so that the end-user type doesn't need to know how to use an editor. no more nano, vi, etc., for end-user types. Over time they will learn it, but in the beginning they should be able to set up a machine without it. (Maybe these already exist. I've heard of Webmin but the one time I tried it I ended up with problems on my Redhat box so I stopped.) All in all it's a big job, and I think a huge portion of what Microsoft appears to offer people. It's sad that underneath their offering is so little stability, so many viruses and so little control, but folks jump in, get set up, spend their money and then find the way out of that mess is not easy. To you Holly, thanks for all your inputs and insights. you've got lots of good stuff to say. Cheers, Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
