And now terrible usability has collided with pointless design trends and given rise to what I refer to as ‘crap bars’.  Crap bars, simply put, are the always-at-the-bottom-over-the-content (see images) that appear on almost every site, and seem to be competing in terms of pointlessness.

You’ve got the whole bloody page, with often massive unused areas to either side, so why obscure the contents?  Why is there this burning desire of web developers (many who really should know better) to trivially waste the bottom 30 or so pixels?  It’s also like they decided ‘we need a crap bar, now what do we put in it?’.  See the ZDNet one, (second image along).  It has ‘a CNet Company’, and a news link.  That’s it.  Is it really worth it?

I tend to do a lot of my reading online either at lunchtime, when I have a sandwich of dubious structural integrity in my hand, or at home, where I am often carrying around a small, sleeping, child.  I like to be able to hit the spacebar and scroll down a page without screwing about with scrollbars.  But now I have to hit space, then the up arrow twice, because someone decided to put a pointless, obnoxious bar across the content because thats what everyone else does.

Can we stop it now please?

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/08/23/1355225/The-GIMP-Now-Has-a-Working-Single-Window-Mode

Cue the hundreds of posts about how this is a terrible thing.  But here’s what confuses me, look at the image on the right compared to my newly Photoshopped screenshot.  Notice anything?  It almost seems like (on OSX at least) Photoshop isn’t even single window.

The reason nobody uses Gimp and the reason it sucks is simply because it has no compelling features that make it worth using.  It’s that simple.  But no, instead we just get pages and pages and pages and pages of people who know nothing about graphics, design or even Photoshop talking authoritatively as if their opinions somehow matter.

Gimp has exactly the same problem Linux has, only significantly worse.  The only people that use it are the tiny fraction of the available markeshare who ignore and belittle majority who largely just want to get stuff done.  It fails to provide anything compelling that could make it useful except for a the very occasional rare use case but most of all the ‘promotion’ for it largely involves the argument ‘We are going to talk crap about our competition for a few hundred posts so you’ll think we suck less by comparison’.

Honestly, I’ve never seen anyone try to promote it on it’s own merits without trying to tear down Photoshop or Windows instead.  Tell me why it’s compelling.  Tell me how it can make my life easier.  Chances are if nobody uses it it’s not a conspiracy, it’s simply because it’s not very good.

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

FOSS advocates need to learn to make an honest appraisal of themselves and their enemies.  Sitting at sub 1% marketshare with no increasing trend while declaring everyone else inferior is the very definition of hubris.

Sure large companies are like an oil tanker in that they take a long, long time to turn while FOSS is (allegedly) agile and maneuverable.  However MS has had over a decade to turn the oil tanker, and Apple apparently bought a speedboat.  What is frequently forgotten about the analogy is that it is a significant task to stop an oil tanker once it has turned.

Any FOSS advocates want to make an honest assessment as to why Windows 7 managed to get a larger marketshare than Linux before it was even released? Surely the very people who installed W7 in beta form are exactly the sort of people who can (and would) install Linux, not to mention the lack of Live CD’s etc.  Yet Linux has had nearly 2 decades while W7 had around 6 months.

Has anyone ever done any form of survey into why people who tried Linux ended up not using it?  I simply fail to believe that more people installed the W7 beta than have tried Linux.

It’s almost cult like.  My theory is the tech crowd that dominates the FOSS ecosystem consists largely of people that want to be seen as being knowledgeable, rather than actually knowledgeable.  The ‘hate Microsoft lol MS Bob’ routine has been handed down from pretender to pretender with the original person who made up their own mind on the subject long since gone.  It’s easy to do, gets you geek cred and you really don’t have to worry about accuracy as nobody is really going to be against you.  You end up with all of the vitriol but none of the understanding or context.  They completely fail to understand who is being evil now as they simply lack the ability to form an idea for themselves.

Just look at how the GPL has been subverted by the client-server model.  You are never technically in possession of the software – only the output – so it is apparently exempt from any distribution clauses your license may have.  BSD, GPL, doesn’t matter – you can’t get the code.  The only one that apparently solves this issue is the AGPL and nobody ever seems to use it.  The valued ‘freedoms’ are almost entirely gone with the client-server approach.  Want the code to the modifications I have made on this site?  Tough.  As an end user you still have no rights to the code nor the modifications made.  Yet there seems to be little to no attention made to this fact despite the large focus on ‘freedom’.  Surely putting two computers in a box with a VNC setup is enough to defeat the GPL entirely given these circumstances?  It’s certainly massively against the spirit of the thing but is this ever even discussed?  Or is it just GPL, praise, praise, when the actual license is irrelevant?

Ubisoft are obsessed with always-on DRM for single player games (it requires a constant net connection to play) and everyone who knows about it is rightfully outraged – after all how long will these servers be up?  However the same goes for Google Apps and other thin-client software.  People, largely FOSS advocates, are cheering from the sidelines as they trade a non-free chunk of binary code that they can store locally and use forever for a web based version which they require net access to use, may be discontinued at any time and keeps all documents on a computer you have zero control over.

Sure webapps/mobile/newtech may kill Microsoft, which seems to be the cause of the cheering, but the replacement is an order of magnitude worse.  But how are you meant to try to look clever on Slashdot if you have to actually understand technology, history and context?

*drumroll please*

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/23/1631232/GNOME-and-KDE-Devs-Wrangle-Over-System-Settings-Name

Lets ignore the fact that it’s such a ridiculously minor thing and that only petulant children would waste more than 30 seconds coming up with some form of compromise.  The true issue here is why on Gods green earth would you ever even conceive of having a system where you can have two items called ‘System Settings’ which are entirely unrelated existing on one system at the one time with who knows what sort of conflicts and problems?  At what point did anyone think this could possibly be a good idea?  Anyone who was even briefly acquainted with the term ‘Usability’ would facepalm at the slightest suggestion of this.  But over to the Slashdot crowd:

The real problem is themselves, for not providing a menu system that allows for any other environment to be simultaneously installed.

So the real problem is that it’s not possible to duplicate absolutely everything.  We should have two independent DE’s running at the same time, that’s the key!  Reading the comments the first time around (and I am certainly not doing that again) nobody mentioned that hey, perhaps it’s a bad idea to have two separate system settings menus at the same time.  Of course not.  Technical solutions only, not human.

I can see how we got to this point.  It’s like two teams building a tunnel who agree to meet in the middle and start at opposite ends, but who completely fail to communicate and miss by a country mile.  But, of course, choice.  So let me recap on a point I am sure I made a long time ago:

Multiple Standards Are Bad! The only time you should have two competing standards is if they have different use cases (xls vs doc) or one is being deprecated in favour of another (ipv4 vs ipv6).  Having two standards for the same thing is universally recognized by just about everyone as a bad thing.  Here’s a quick, and by no means exhaustive, list:

• Multiple phone/laptop chargers and connectors.
• Differing power plugs and voltages.
• Almost any form of ‘proprietary’ connector.
• Attempts by companies to ‘fork’ a standard, see MS Java and ‘IE only’ browser extensions.
• Fluctuations in .doc which makes importing old files annoying.
• The reason hibernate and sleep work so badly in Linux is due to a lack of standards.
• Ad nauseum…

Choice in Implementations of Standards Are Good! I remember the dark days of IE before Firefox ruined Microsoft’s day.  Having no choice in browsers lead to having one terrible browser.  And while many people and enterprises are still stuck with IE6 thanks to standards proliferation I can enjoy the benefits of Firefox, Chrome and IE all battling it out to be the best browser they can be.  I don’t have to use IE for IE sites or Chrome for Chrome sites because they all conform to the same standard (more or less).

I can also connect to any of these sites due to them all supporting HTTP.  I don’t need a separate browser for MS’s own version of HTTP (fortunately) because there isn’t one and the only point of someone making another, competing, standard for it is if the aim was to replace it.  The entire reason for the creation and promotion of ODF is to give consumers choice in their office application.  Multiple standards do not provide choice, they limit it.

I seem to be drifting off topic here.  But let me just make one fun point:

The only distinction between the myriad of supposed ‘user friendly’ distro’s is standards proliferation.

• Multiple package formats, as opposed to multiple implementations of package managers.  Check.
• Cosmetic differences in filesystem layouts that cause issues.  Check.
• Variations in API’s for handling.  Check.
• Multiple ways of doing system notifications and widgets.  Check.
• Multiple system config file storage and editing methods.  Check.
• Etc.

Once you settle on a set of standards then the concept of a system repository becomes meaningless as you will have a system just like every other (successful) consumer OS ever made where software is not tied to a particular version of a particular distro.  If there was a standard for binary-blob-or-otherwise drivers then you wouldn’t have this ridiculous ‘Distro X supports your hardware better’ situation.  In fact once you take away the ‘incompatible for largely the sake of being incompatible’ then the only difference real between distro’s is the splash screen and maybe wallpaper they choose for whatever DE they are using.

But back to the original point.  The very fact that you require large chunks of KDE to run certain apps under Gnome* (and vice vera) due to the utter failure to come up with a standard API (that both can separately implement) is the actual problem here (and as a result people are denied choice in DE’s).  It has nothing to do with namespace collisions or any of that crap.

* Last time I tried to run Ubuntu none of the help in the games I downloaded would work as it required KDE’s help system.

It’s hard to know where to start though to be honest considering the awesome quantity of delusion involved.  I think in the mind of a Linux advocate everything revolves around Linux.  They believe that Microsoft and Apple are furiously battling them – there is a war on!  However the reality is that Microsoft, and especially Apple, probably barely even pay attention to what Linux is up to.  The fact that is obvious to everyone – that desktop Linux is irrelevant to everyone but desktop Linux fans – proves the stupidity of this.  How can you lead when you have no followers?  How can you be winning a race when you are not even on the same track?

Here’s the money quote:

“Almost every ounce of real innovation happening in the world of Desktop Operating Systems… is happening on Linux. Microsoft and Apple have completely dropped the ball and ceased to innovate in any real way in this area.”

That’s right, he actually said that.  It’s a question of faith I suppose.  True FOSS advocates have faith in the idea that Free Software has a ‘superior development model’ so to them it must be better.  And if it’s not then it’s just a minor glitch that will be fixed soon.  Never mind that 99% of the new UI ‘innovations’ in FOSS can be traced back to a closed source competitor, never mind that large swathes of the FOSS software ecosystem is clones or built on closed source software later opened, or even that all the ‘innovation’ he claims for Linux is actually stolen from Unix and then claimed as FOSS’s invention.  It all matters not as ideologically it should be better, so it is better.

Here’s the reality:

“Free Software is a dictatorship where the people in charge do not have to answer to the users as, unlike commercial, the more people that use it the harder it is for them.”

It’s not a happy-go-lucky commune, it’ a dictatorship where whoever is in charge sets the rules and if you don’t like it you are free to spend the rest of your life maintaining a fork (or just buy commercial).  It’s not a community effort.  It’s not a democracy.

Unity is an utter disgrace.  Introducing the global menu in 2011 has to be one of the stupidest moves in UI development I have ever seen – and auto-hiding it doubly so.  When just about every large-scale application outside the pro arena is now eliminating it Ubuntu is making it a permanent part of the UI.  The only reason for putting it at the screen edge is apparently due to ‘Fitt’s Law’, an advantage that is entirely nullified by the fact that it auto-hides.  Fitt’s Law also does not apply so well in situations where people either have trackpads or large monitors, but when does that ever happen?  Anyway it’s all about the touch – or would be if the window close button isn’t now on the left making it impossible to use without constantly closing what you are doing accidentally.

The left hand dock, as with the global menu and the window decoration change is a nice idea in theory but one that just doesn’t work in practice.  You can only trigger it by going to the top left as triggering by any point on the left causes it to pop up unnecessarily, however the bottom of the screen has no such problem.  I get it is to save vertical space on the corner-case netbooks.  UI concepts in the hands of FOSS developers is like a dog with a chew toy – they won’t let go no matter how mangled things get.

I think Lunduke is simply confusing action for motion.  There is a constant churn of new ideas (generally rehashes of old, bad ideas) which gives the impression of progress.  Sure a great UI may come out of it in a few years time (if you have faith) but right now they are just slinging crap around with the hope that some sticks.  The difference is the closed source world does this in private – with competent people.  Throwing alpha-grade software out as final release isn’t any innovation I want any part of.  Take the time, do it properly, release something decent.  Or is it not innovative unless you inflict every bad idea you’ve had on the world.

But the source of all desktop innovation?  I’ve yet to see anyone point to a single fundamentally decent idea to come out of the FOSS labs at all.  Churn, yes.  Crap, yes.  Decent (original) new ideas.  No.  Seriously Bryan, put down the pom pom’s – your team isn’t even able to make it on to the field.

Anyway I have this twitter thing so if there is anything worth writing about message me @SomewhatCloudy as I am the worlds worst emailer!

“In 10.10, we’ll take a big step forward in the netbook edition, by
moving the menu into the top panel and combining it with the titlebar
for maximised windows.”

Now look at the image on the right.  It’s a screenshot of the proposed ‘Unity UI‘ that is being ‘developed’ by Ubuntu inside an OSX screenshot.  Note the monochrome icons in the system tray, the Apple / Ubuntu logos with identical spacing, the popout options on the dock with the identical black background, curved light borders and association arrow.  There is even a ‘Keep in Launcher’, ‘Keep in Dock’ option.  Ok I suppose the current running program indicator is an arrow instead of a bright spot, but that’s only because they are copying Tiger rather than Snow Leopard.  Add in the recent pointless change of moving the window decorations to the left.  It’s all very suspicious.

Although once you take the above quote into context the only significant difference between them disappears.  That is it is going to get an OSX style universal menu – that is the File / Edit / View menu moved to the top left outside the applications window.  I mean come on, there is being inspired and then there is outright plagarism and there really is far too much similarity here to chalk it up to chance.  As I said before it’s all cargo cult usability – the focus is on copying Apple because they care about usability rather than copying the reasons Apple do what they do.  It’s a significant difference.  It’s all irrelevant anyhow though.  Here’s why:

THE DESKTOP IS A SOLVED PROBLEM!

It’s 2010.  It doesn’t matter any more.  Why are we even talking about this?  I remember years ago, before the Internet was fast or reasonably accessible, playing with the OS for the seemingly sake of it, but nobody ever does this anymore.  Simply put the OS’s only job is to run the important thing – that is the applications.  Nobody tweaks their OS.  The reason you can’t change themes on OSX is because the majority of people don’t want to do that anymore.  Windows 7 lets you change the colours but that’s about it.  Essentially the OS has two jobs, running apps and bothering you as little as possible.  That’s it.

But no, we have Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, CentOS, Mint, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, etc, etc, etc.  It’s a constant reinvention and minor tweaks to the overlying thing that doesn’t really matter (the OS) while the thing that really really matters (the apps) languish in obscurity as ‘upstream’.  With Windows (and OSX) there is a vibrant third party community developing all sorts of apps independently of their target platform.  With Linux it’s all about the repository and what apps you get is based on what distro you use.  You get your software updated when the distro decides you should get it updated, not when it is actually updated.  It’s not at all uncommon to have the repo version as several versions behind what is in the wild and if what you want isn’t in the repo you are screwed.  All the talk of ‘choice’ is utterly irrelevant as no matter what distro you ‘choose’ you will still have the exact same selection of software (you know, the things that matters) as every single other distro.

So why are the FOSS communities version of the record industry – the ‘packagers’ – where all the focus lies?  Why does everyone get whipped into a frenzy every few months when some new distro comes out with a fancy new wallpaper and a fancy new theme?  Why are we even still talking about this?  The only reason I can see to ever upgrade your OS is because the new one brings something significant and most people take a largely ‘wait and see’ approach yet with Ubuntu you have the insane BiannualForcedDeathMarch™ and if you don’t upgrade you can forget about ever having newer versions of the software.  Why on earth is there no sane way to install software outside this byzantine system?  LTS support?  Fine if you don’t mind them not bothering to update or add any apps to the repo.  Then they moan about Microsoft not following standards then require software developers to waste days making an individual releases for each version of each distro (see Skype) as they can’t even agree among themselves.  I can get software that was released for Windows 15 years ago and provided the developers didn’t do anything stupid it’ll still work.  Why is doing this so hard?  As I said it’s a solved problem.

Essentially no amount of distro tweaking is going to make Gimp stop sucking, or make OO any less bloated or magically make a decent selection of games appear.  The best Shuttleworth and co are going to end up with at this rate is a copy of OSX without any application support.  What’s the point in that?

Multiple desktops (if you don’t know already) essentially emulate having multiple monitors, with the ability to switch between them at will.  You can have Firefox open on screen 1 and Notepad++ or something open on screen 2 and flick between the two workspaces as you work.  Unlike a real desk though there is no actual limit on how much you can have open on one screen at once – you can have 1,000 windows one on top of each other.  What multiple desktops do is provide you with a way of organising multiple applications better.  That is, the basic application switcher (Dock, Start Bar, etc) has problems organising things necessitating an additional metaphor to aid organisation.  Multiple desktops are essentially a hack to improve on the poor performance of the task switcher.

However multiple desktops add a layer of complexity to what needs to be a very simple system.  The whole concept can be conceptually confusing for beginners and much functionality is non obvious and problematic, such as drag and drop when the drag target is on a different desktop to the drop target.  Programs can also misbehave in that parts of them are on one desktop and parts on another, or they can change desktops, and when you launch a program you must wait for it to open before you can do anything or it’ll open on the wrong desktop.  They also generally require a planned workflow to be useful, Editor on Window 1, Browser on 2, Graphics on 3, Email on 4.  Just putting things on random desktops is always confusing when you are trying to find something again.

What Gnome Shell, as far as I can tell, is trying to do is trying to fix the issues with multiple desktops by providing an easy way to add/remove them and move applications between desktops, which has historically always been very unintuitive.  If anyone has seen Gnome Shell they have in fact removed the task switcher from the bottom entirely and rely on you going to the full screen overview and selecting the desired application.  They have taken what is effectively a crutch to a poor task switcher and made it the main task switcher.  It’s incredibly jarring and inefficient to use due to it’s full screen nature and that the thumbnails can often be too small to make out.  If you don’t want to use multiple desktops (99% of common users won’t) then Gnome Shell becomes entirely pointless too.  Watch this clip of Gnome Shell and ask yourself what the point would be if you only used one desktop.  I don’t deny it looks cool, I just doubt it’s utility.

The problem with traditional task launchers like the old 95/XP/Vista style start bar and OSX’s dock is that they simply don’t handle large amounts of running programs and multiple copies of the same program at all well.  If you have, say, two Finder windows open on OSX for example you must right click on the Finder icon in the dock (do the annoying two finger tap on the trackpad in my case) and then try to work out what instance you want by the limited information given to you by the text list of the programs titles.  The fact that the dock is so bad (as I said at the start) at handling multiple windows from the same application is largely the reason I use multiple desktops as then you can lay everything out and don’t need to use the dock to select the running program by effectively eliminating the Z axis.  Windows 7 has this solved incredibly well with the improved taskbar – watch this YouTube clip (Skip to 1:50 if you want, but watch for a few minutes) – which allows you to easily find your program, largely negating the need for multiple desktops, which Windows doesn’t have anyway.

An often suggested alternative to multiple desktops is to allow program ‘groups’ in the task manager and then when you are using a particular group it will hide all windows from the desktop that are not in that group, so if you had Firefox open in group 1 and Excel and Calc open in group 2 and then clicked on Calc it would fade down Firefox and fade up Excel and Calc.  Groups would be created with +/- buttons and you could re-order by simple dragging of the program icon, plus if combined with a task launcher system ala Mac OS Dock and the new Windows 7 start bar there is no reason the groups couldn’t be persistent.  That is just one of many potential solutions to the problem and I am sure there are many more.  Essentially the issue is one of organisation and should be fixed by making organisation easier and more efficient.  Rather than trying to work around the flaws in the current system with multiple desktops which bring their own problems with them the system should be redesigned so multiple desktops are not even necessary in the first place.

Now lets look at ‘Project Ayatana’, Ubuntu’s answer to the fact that Linux usability sucks.  The thing about usability is it is like security, in that every line of code you write, feature you add and default you set has usability considerations.  Although the project has obviously identified the issue (usability sucks on Linux) it has failed to appreciate that it is the culture of ignoring usability that needs to be addressed, not the usability itself.  Failing to address this will still give you usability issues and trying to fix them after the fact is stupid.  Again, Microsoft tried to fix security with a bunch of addons as an afterthought and it just didn’t work.

The issue is that the Linux developers simply don’t respect usability.  They don’t value it as something necessary to development.  Fundamentally usability is treated as ‘making it work for the dumb users’ and it shows.

Launchpad Sucks

Take Ayatana’s home, Launchpad, for example.  To ‘get involved’ you must have an account with Launchpad.  Ok I thought, I’ll sign up, so I went to the site, put in my email address and tried to register.  Except you must open the confirmation link with the same browser you signed up for – if you open it with, say, your Blackberry it won’t work.  They obviously value security by implementing such an (albeit pointless) step but if they valued usability they would have thought about this use case before.  Large amounts of modern sites often don’t require a confirmation email or use OpenID to make life easier – but not Launchpad. So after trying to remember the webmail login and clicking the link from the same browser you are faced with this:

Password must be at least 8 characters long, and must contain at least one number and an upper case letter.

One number and one upper case letter.  None of the standard passwords I use have an uppercase letter.  Sure they are alphanumeric strings and contain all sorts of dodgy ASCII but no uppercase.  I am forced to invent a complicated password which I have written on a post-it note.  Security enforced again (badly) at the expense of usability.

Once you are in you are faced with a page that looks like this (right).  There is no way to get from this page to the rest of the site – no links, nothing.  It appears like you need to change your password again to get in.  You need to directly put ‘launchpad.net’ into the browser address bar to actually get to the site, which doesn’t actually log you in, instead placing a ‘log in / register’ link at the top right.  You then get taken to a page with a button saying ‘log in’, and clicking it logs you in – no details required (right).  I have no idea at all why this step is required – you are logged in by virtue of it having verified your details – what is this pointless step?  And why didn’t I get taken straight to Launchpad.net after signing up?

After all this work you can finally ‘get involved’ so to speak so I hopped on over to ‘https://launchpad.net/~ayatana’ to see what was going on and found that the premier discussion forum for usability on Ubuntu was a mailing list.  A mailing list.  I hate mailing lists.  While in the last 40 years the rest of the world has moved on to other forms of dynamic web-based collaboration they are still using the good old staple of IT communication from the 70′s.  Want to read over what’s been discussed?  Prepare to look though the horribly presented archive which makes reviewing topics almost impossible.  Want to comment on anything?  You have to do that through email.  It works, sure, but does it work well?  No.  Is it intuitive?  No.  Is it a pleasure to use?  No.  Does it encourage contributors?  No, it probably sends them running screaming.

Missing The Point?

While I am not going to dismiss Ayatana as quite as laughable a failure as the Gnome Usability mailing list, which is a whole special sort of failure, it is still fundamentally missing the point:

If you want usability to improve, educate the people making the mistakes and convince them of the value of it.  Trying to fix their mistakes retroactively will be an order of magnitude more effort and will almost certainly not give good results.

Usability is still seen as something for ‘dumb users’.  Most developers sit in their ivory CLI based Bash/Emacs/GCC castle and make things usable for the little people when if they truly valued usability they would start by placing focus on the tools they personally use.  The current system of the walled garden of usability where users and developers might as well be using a different OS says that the developers do not feel they need usability.  Even simple tools are developed as a CLI version and then ported to the GUI, commonly with just a wrapper around the CLI version.  You in the end have a choice between the arcane CLI version or the usually underpowered, overly simplistic and buggy GUI version.

Even now that terrible, terrible article ‘Linux isn’t Windows‘ gets bandied around and treated as fact on a regular basis when, in reality, if usability was valued in such communities the poster would be rightly ridiculed.

Ultimately if usability was a concern, and not just something for other people, Launchpad would have been the first thing to be fixed not probably the last.  Actually it would have been made properly in the first place.  As with security it only takes one mistake to compromise a system with usability it only takes one mistake to destroy the user experience.  Wilfully making the mistakes on the rationale ‘we’ll fix it all later’ is simply not workable.

Furthermore

Such as ‘easy’ has been co-opted to mean ‘quick to do once you have learned how to do it, irrespective of learning curve’ by the FOSS community, the terms usable and usability are quite often redefined to support the status quo.  Take the following link for example: Usability Comparison: Five PC Operating Systems Compared.

The basic premise is ‘lets reduce usability down to how many clicks an operation takes’.  Guess what, Windows 7 falls as a far last with this fantastic quote:

I honestly did not expect Windows 7 to fall behind so badly. I could probably fine grain the tests further, but then I would begin to react more on the impressions that I get from the OS rather than the simple ease of use, or lack of hoops to jump through.

That’s what happens when someone who knows nothing about usability but who likes Linux takes a scientific approach to it.  I mean, ‘simple ease of use’ indeed.  The best bit is this, though:

Kubuntu follows the normal mantra, right-click on desktop to change your background. Thing is, the item you need to click on is “Desktop Activity Settings.” Once you have that figured out (to my shame I had to Google, because for the life of me I could not find where to change my background simply because of the cryptic naming) you can select a background as per normal.

That’s right, he actually had to use Google to find out how to change wallpaper on Kubuntu.  It really is that unintuitive.  However Kubuntu was not penalised for the added time (And got 4 points to Windows 0) as it fell outside the remit of the test and as such beat Windows.  It could be argued that if you just made the whole screen as a 1280×800 grid of single pixels you could assign a function to each one (just over 1 million functions) to a pixel and have the most ‘usable’ system in the world.  All you’d need is a look up table and a ruler!

So, on the incredibly unlikely event that someone from Canonical reads this, actually cares and is in the position to do something, start a project on educating developers (and users) on what usability is and why it is important as I don’t see anything else working.  Considering the bulk of the developers don’t even know what it is you’ve got a large job ahead!