Thanks for the info.

The first problem is that Linux has a lot of wizards, but not a lot of power-users. Wizards are the sort that Linux attracted from the get-go, and are those that will always use the command line. For help with the graphical interfaces, you will need help from the relatively few ‘power users’ that can accomplish tasks without delving into the command-line. I do see that there is an increase in power-users… I see a lot of people giving terrible advice on forums — this is a good sign that there is an increasing number of users that know just enough to be dangerous, but not so knowledgeable as to be incapable of understanding and relating to newbies. I think power users, as dangerous as they can be, do serve a purpose in assisting newbies in a way that more advanced users simply cannot.

The second problem is that the security separations in Linux mean that it is more difficult for the creation of power users. If a user is forbidden from altering his network settings, he will never learn how to do this and will never become a power user. This is a great thing, security-wise, but it can have long-reaching effects for the creation and nurturing of the power-user. Interestingly, Richard Stallman, one of the visionaries behind “GNU/Linux” would like nothing better than to live in a world without any security at all, maybe he has a point… though, I think that if Microsoft Windows has taught us anything, it is that security cannot be ignored.

Thirdly, there is a lack of consistency with graphical tools. There are multiple sets of graphical tools depending in your desktop environment, distribution vendor, and the versions of the above. Worse, a lot of these tools are buggy, such as network-manager, which I’ve found to be completely useless and have had to disable on all my machines in order to have consistently functional Wifi. In comparison, the command-line tools are generally rooted in 30+ year-old Unix and BSD toolchains and are defined by the UNIX and Posix standards. It is difficult for any power user to be intimately familiar with all the variations of graphical tools available, and to estimate what tools the user may have available to them. Instead, it is much more reliable to depend on the command-line tools that are guaranteed to work on all systems, with all configurations.

I think that Ubuntu is coming a long way in resolving these problems, and that nothing but good can come from having distributions settle on standards such as LSB (Linux Standards Base), and ditching their proprietary management applications (like YaST) for generic ones (Gnome System Tools).

Personally, I haven’t touched a Linux desktop in about 8 months now, instead using MacOS. I’ve got my share of annoyances with MacOS, but usability-wise I’m about equally satisfied with it and Linux. My biggest annoyances in MacOS are with performance and reliability — my OS X applications are slow and crashing all the time. Under Linux, I’ve found much better performance, and in terms of reliability the applications crash just as frequently but at least the system recovers a lot faster and cleaner.

Thanks for the info. By the way, I am a big fan of your site. Keep up the great work….

I’m really missing having a working QuickTime since Apple broke it around the time of the Leopard release.

Incidentally the VLC {curly brackets} are interesting as it lets you see translation comments. I’m beginning to look at that as a feature as there are quite a few interesting notes hidden in things I watch that I never realised was there until recently. It will be too bad when they finally “fix” that “bug”.