Piestar

I am quite sure that everyone who has even thought about Linux has been directed to the in(famous) article ‘Linux Isn’t Windows’.  It’s the epitome of the classic FOSS response to criticism – It’s not Linux that has the problem, it’s you.

Fortunately, although voluminous, there is very little actually said.  So I’d like to summarise why he’s wrong in three statements.

1. A logical fallacy will not suddenly become truth if you provide two pages of analogies.
2. An outright wrong statement will not turn correct if you provide two pages of examples.
3. Those that shout the loudest have the most to hide.

And onwards…

3: Those that shout the loudest have the most to hide. (Start at the end)

So lets deal with 3. first.  This is hilarious, and cements my argument for the rest of this post.  Check it out:

1. Go to the aforementioned article
2. Click view->page source
3. Read and chuckle

Firstly, the whole page is generated – whoever made it knows zero about HTML and web development though – that much is clear, as proven by such gems as:

<b><span style=""></span></b><span style=""></span>

Bold, styled nothing. Which is the obvious result of a confused WYSIWYG editor.  And not even a good one.  Obviously the guy doesn’t know any HTML, which is fine.

But that’s not all, dig a bit further and you’ll find:

class="MsoNormal"

Liberally sprinkled all over the place.  A bit of digging reveals the class MsoNormal to belong to Microsoft Office.  That’s right, there is a very good chance this whole thing was made with Microsoft Word.  Despite the fact that only an idiot would use Word to make a webpage.  Isn’t that just hilarious?

This of course is the crux of the issue.  He has proven that people use technology, especially computers, to achieve goals while having to learn as little as possible.  Any idiot can make a webpage in Word or any other WYSIWYG app.  Want bold – just click the bold button, insert an image?  No problem!  The fact that the code puts in <span style=”font-style: italic;”> instead of <em> matters not – after all the writer only wants to be a living demonstration of irony, rather than having to spend a significant amount of time learning HTML and doing it the proper way.

1: A logical fallacy will not suddenly become truth if you provide two pages of analogies.

Lying with analogies is fun.  It goes like this:

1. Make a statement comparing two things
2. Create a (tenuous) analogy to a real-world situation
3. Prove that your ‘side’ is superior in the analogy, so must be in real life.

Check this shit out, here’s his first ‘Why Linux rocks’ analogy

OS’s are like cars (it’s traditional)

1. Windows is like a normal car
2. Linux is like a motorbike
3. Windows has doors (as it’s a car)
4. Linux has no doors (as it’s not a car)
5. Windows is more likely to get broken into (viruses)
6. Linux is safe as it has no doors!

Makes perfect sense!  And there was me thinking that this was a complicated issue with nuance and subtlety. And it continues on, and on, and on.  Again the main substance of his argument: Any problem you have is with you not Linux.  If you have a problem it’s because it’s not Windows.

2: An outright wrong statement will not turn correct if you provide two pages of examples.

Let’s look at his views on Usability:

So it is that in most “user-friendly” text editors & word processors, you Cut and Paste by using Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V. Totally unintuitive, but everybody’s used to these combinations, so they count as a “friendly” combination.

So when somebody comes to vi and finds that it’s “d” to cut, and “p” to paste, it’s not considered friendly: It’s not what anybody is used to.

Is it superior? Well, actually, yes.

With the Ctrl-X approach, how do you cut a word from the document you’re currently in? (No using the mouse!)
From the start of the word, Ctrl-Shift-Right to select the word.
Then Ctrl-X to cut it.

The vi approach? dw deletes the word.

How about cutting five words with a Ctrl-X application?
From the start of the words, Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-Shift-Right
Ctrl-X

And with vi?

d5w

The vi approach is far more versatile and actually more intuitive: “X” and “V” are not obvious or memorable “Cut” and “Paste” commands, whereas “dw” to delete a word, and “p” to put it back is perfectly straightforward. But “X” and “V” are what we all know, so whilst vi is clearly superior, it’s unfamiliar. Ergo, it is considered unfriendly. On no other basis, pure familiarity makes a Windows-like interface seem friendly. And as we learned in problem #1, Linux is necessarily different to Windows. Inescapably, Linux always appears less “user-friendly” than Windows.

To avoid #5a problems, all you can really do is try and remember that “user-friendly” doesn’t mean “What I’m used to”: Try doing things your usual way, and if it doesn’t work, try and work out what a total novice would do.

Well we know what a total novice would do, the writer of this article demonstrated it fine.  He’d use Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V to create a website using MS Word.

d5w, intuitive, really?  The only way you would ever know that is if you read the whole vi manual cover-to-cover multiple times.  It’s simply not guessable which is the very point of the word intuitive.  Edit->Cut is intuitive.  Ctrl-X is then intuitive as it told you the shortcut when you did it the long way.  It requires no prior knowledge.  That is intuitive.

The thing is most users don’t know about Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V, they don’t realise that Ctrl-Shift selects words.  Fundamentally 99% of computer users, when using Word, have read no manuals, have asked no questions and have no documentation.  I’ve seen people using Word who don’t even know about word wrap and press ‘Enter’ at the end of each line as you would in a manual typewriter.  Yet in the article writers mind somehow vi would be just as easy for them if they sat down in front of it rather than Word?!?  Of course, again, his argument is impenetrable – It’s not Windows.

But the insanity (and inanity) doesn’t stop there:

Subproblem #5b: Inefficient is friendly

This is a sad but inescapable fact. Paradoxically, the harder you make it to access an application’s functionality, the friendlier it can seem to be.

This is because friendliness is added to an interface by using simple, visible ‘clues’ – the more, the better. After all, if a complete novice to computers is put in front of a WYSIWYG word processor and asked to make a bit of text bold, which is more likely:

* He’ll guess that “Ctrl-B” is the usual standard

* He’ll look for clues, and try clicking on the “Edit” menu. Unsuccessful, he’ll try the next likely one along the row of menus: “Format”. The new menu has a “Font” option, which seems promising. And Hey! There’s our “Bold” option. Success!

Next time you do any processing, try doing every job via the menus: No shortcut keys, and no toolbar icons. Menus all the way. You’ll find you slow to a crawl, as every task suddenly demands a multitude of keystrokes/mouseclicks.
Making software “user-friendly” in this fashion is like putting training wheels on a bicycle: It lets you get up & running immediately, without any skill or experience needed. It’s perfect for a beginner. But nobody out there thinks that all bicycles should be sold with training wheels: If you were given such a bicycle today, I’ll wager the first thing you’d do is remove them for being unnecessary encumbrances: Once you know how to ride a bike, training wheels are unnecessary.

And in the same way, a great deal of Linux software is designed without “training wheels” – it’s designed for users who already have some basic skills in place. After all, nobody’s a permanent novice: Ignorance is short-lived, and knowledge is forever. So the software is designed with the majority in mind.

This might seem an excuse: After all, MS Word has all the friendly menus, and it has toolbar buttons, and it has shortcut keys. . . Best of all worlds, surely? Friendly and efficient.

However, this has to be put into perspective: Firstly, the practicalities: having menus and toolbars and shortcuts and all would mean a lot of coding, and it’s not like Linux developers all get paid for their time. Secondly, it still doesn’t really take into account serious power-users: Very few professional wordsmiths use MS Word. Ever meet a coder who used MS Word? Compare that to how many use emacs & vi.

“Ever meet a coder who used MS Word?” – no, but I’ve read a few articles by one.

The mind boggles at the stupidity of this.  He is basically arguing for software to take away the shortcuts and basically massively increasing the barrier of entry.  I though one of the main aims of modern computing is to bring the benefits to the masses, after all you don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car, a plumber to flush the toilet or an electrician to use a lightbulb.  Sure, he may think that forcing people to study for hours before being able to do the slightest thing is advantageous, but the fact that just about everyone (including him) would rather use software, rather than learn software, says it all.  If he actually believed what he said he would have learned HTML, rather than just used the ‘training wheels’.

PSA: If you use some arcane shortcut key or in-obvious key sequence it does not give you a better quality of bold than if you click on the bold button.  It’s just as bold, except it didn’t take 3 days to work out how to do it.

PSA2: The really, really stupid thing is learning how to use vi does not give you a better understanding of how a computer works – it just means you have wasted loads of time.  Does knowing d5w give you a fundamental insight into the machine?  Or is it just a relic of a time when text-only is all you had?

What is amazing though is that he appears to speak for Linux – (maybe he’s channelling the spirit of tux?) – and likes to say what Linux is, what it isn’t, and even says in his summary:

It’s great, but it’s not the point. The point is to make Linux the best OS that the community is capable of making. Not for other people: For itself. The oh-so-common threats of “Linux will never take over the desktop unless it does such-and-such” are simply irrelevant: The Linux community isn’t trying to take over the desktop. They really don’t care if it gets good enough to make it onto your desktop, so long as it stays good enough to remain on theirs. The highly-vocal MS-haters, pro-Linux zealots, and money-making FOSS purveyors might be loud, but they’re still minorities.

So he is speaking for the thousands of developers (I hope he consulted them first) and got the consensus that none of them want Linux to be a success, and don’t really care about the normal users, just about catering for the already computer literate elite.

I think he’s missed the point: Linux is free, in all senses, as people like him love to state at length.  So why does he have the right to say what it is, and isn’t, what it should be and shouldn’t be, who it’s for and who it’s not for?  What is to stop anyone (who has the time and money) to create a fork to do everything that he says it isn’t?

Linux isn’t anything, it’s just a collection of software packages that happen to be released under a permissive license – that is all.  They are created by exactly the same people that make commercial software, in exactly the same way.  Talk about ‘community built’ all you want but there is no effective difference between a volunteer squad of 10 and a company hiring 10 people.  It’s just software – would Windows change fundamentally if MS just GPL’d the whole lot one day?

Linux, if this guy is their representative, is a collection of elitists who want people to think they are smarter than they really are by using complicated software (And acting like it’s easy) to try to impress.  That is if you really have to put a label on it.