On Monday 17 February 2003 02:18, Charles Philip Chan wrote: [...]
The wizards in the control Panel drove me nuts until I turned it back to Classic mode. I kid you not, it took 5 times longer to do things with the wizards.
And you know about this stuff, and how to do it efficiently because you installed or setup your PC once, in 1996 and once in 1999 and once in 2002, and you remembered all the techy bits from just those few occasions? Of course not. You have far more frequent and recent experience of the command-line and the screw-driver. But that's not the experience of a Windows user in an office. If the IT department even LET them do their own install/upgrade, they sweat it out every few years and then they don't change anything. If, like the majority of people who bought home computers, they had it pre-installed, or they just did a very basic install on a basic behind-the-curve machine, put in the office suite and then didn't change anything for the next several years, cuz all they are doing is some light office-y stuff, surfing, e-mailing, and maybe tweaking the pictures of the kids that they send to all their similar friends... then they never have any reason to develop your facility with any OS or device managers and drivers and maybe network config, etc. The box to them is as much of an appliance as possible, and they have no use for dicking around with the innards, unless something breaks. No more so than they would dick around inside their TV, just for fun. THAT is the market that Linux-for-the-desktop is now courting. Linux already HAD you, when it wasn't trying to be anything more than geek-joy. But now, it's looking for some real market- mind-share. Y'know, if Linux evangelists really wanted to educate the average Joe... , somebody would have come up with a GUI app that would accompany an upgrade utility (like YOU or apt or whatever). What it would do is TALK to the user as s/he installed or upgraded/ updated some software. It would show the contents of every config file that was being automatically modified, and it would show the contents of every config file that wanted to be manually modified, with before-and-after views and a bit of explanation that showed why the change was made, and why/how one file points at another, points at another... "Oh, and here's where we've stored the backup files, in case you want to reverse what we've just done. And if you are accustomed to the arcane Windows registry, don't worry. These are just text files.... see? Like building blocks. Fear not." "And by the way, the foregoing activity has been logged in *this* file, and if something goes wrong when you reboot (which you probably won't need to do, but...) then the boot logs are stored here, and the wonderful people on the mailing lists will want to ask you about them in order to help you help yourself." Or maybe I'm dreamin'. /kevin