New article in the Economist criticizing Linux usability

[Christopher Browne]

On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 10:10 PM, charles chris <cccharlz-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hey!  Linux is for people who live on Facebook and YouTube.  They download
> videos, songs, copy and make DVD, burn audio CD, perform basic picture and
> video editing, create resume, etc. Conduct research on the Internet
>
> They may need Skype to work with an internal webcam:  We need hacks here!
>
> Linux is NOT for graphic artists/desktop publishers/printers, video editors
> Linux is NOT for tax preparers, financial services people
> Linux is NOT for engineers who use Autocad
> Linux is NOT for doctors and lawyers
> Linux is NOT for the near blind who need ZoomText!

Well, Linux was created by and for people that wanted to hack around
with UNIX but didn't want to buy a VAX 11/780 to do so.  (I remember
using Ultrix with MFCF extensions on watdragon once upon a time!)

The Debian project expresses a pretty massive extension of this, in
that it is the "stone soup" of 'here's eight thousand and one packages
that contributors wanted as part of their UNIX environment."

Fedora expresses a somewhat similar notion, with a not-inconsiderable
degree of "and we'll entrust some central engineering infrastructure
to Red Hat Software."

Android is rather more "for people who live on Facebook and YouTube
and Skype", allowing people to download videos and songs.  The
infrastructure doesn't nearly so much lend itself to more 'techie'
aspects; there are vastly, vastly fewer people contributing to the
"Android distribution", proportionately, to the point that it makes it
pretty clearly a "class structure" of People That Produce Software
versus People That Consume Software.

Getting people from one group of Persons Of Linux Interest into some
other such group seems like a pretty challenging problem.

At one level, people often self-identify based on preferred
distribution (Fedora, Debian, SuSE, Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo), which
is something of a cultural preference.

Kinds of skills lead to a different "slicing" of interests.  Those
with kernel coding skills represent a particularly "deep" level.
Those with enough comfort with C that they might work on some
infrastructure represent another level.  Those that tend to 'script
stuff' are a third level.  Those that need something to click on with
their mouse have a fundamentally more shallow kind of access.

Those different "levels" get engaged in fundamentally different ways,
and if you assume "The Community" as being representative of a
particular slice, there's a considerable risk of missing what's
important about other slices.

You can't *HAVE* Linux without there being a set of kernel developers,
and there are thousands of those around, which means their preferences
matter.

You can't *HAVE* distributions like Ubuntu without already having
Debian and the communities of developers that surround infrastructure
pieces such as FSF, Apache, GNOME, KDE, Postgres, Perl, Python, and
such.  Their desires matter, and there's a lotta thousands of them.

In contrast, I'm not certain that the desires of Android users
"matter" in any important sense, as those desires don't necessarily
guide development in meaningful ways.  Clicking on "like" on an
application doesn't make new features come about.  Those folk are
using a pretty "embedded" version of Linux that they don't get to
control in any more meaningful way than they could control iOS or
Symbian or WinMo.

>From "what does GTALUG need to care about?" perspective, I think we're
way closer to those Communities Of Developers than we are to the users
of embedded systems.  Trying to satisfy the users of embedded systems
seems like a bigger challenge than we are likely to be able to much
cope with.
-- 
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question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
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