[TriLUG] User Friendliness

[Bob Shepherd]

I'm a programmer who codes for Microsoft technologies in a Microsoft shop.  I 
use SuSE 9.0 for my workstation.  Why?  An email virus was propagated from my 
email account via a (then) unpatched security hole in MS Outlook 
Express.  The virus picked a random historical email and sent it to everyone 
in my address book.  Fortunately the email was innocuous, but it could have 
been something private.  That was it for me. 

The happy news?  I generally like the typical features of SuSE / KDE better 
than Windows.  KMail beats the pants off OE.  Nice text editors.  Multiple 
desktops.  YaST, the SuSE configurator makes everything pretty simple.  It 
has a centralized GUI package manager for all my installed applications, with 
automatic updates.  Can Windows do that?  No way.  After about 6 months I got 
confident enough to replace my mom's Windows PC with SuSE.  It's going well.  
Her biggest problem was that she didn't know to hit <enter> after typing a 
URL location in FireFox (IE has a 'go' button.)  Other than that I haven't 
heard from her.

I am an experienced applications developer.  But I have zero interest in 
fiddling endlessly with my desktop workstation, just to get it to do "basic" 
things.  When I first tried to switch to Linux about two years ago (RedHat 
8), I couldn't stand all the "shelling out" to do simple things.  (And, yes, 
I never figured out how to edit the start menu until I switched to KDE.)

Maybe RedHat is better these days?  All I know is I found a great alternative 
in SuSE that's just as easy to use as Windows.

On Friday 04 June 2004 12:18 pm, Rick DeNatale wrote:
> My number one pet peeve about UI on Linux, compared to windoze or the
> Mac, has to be the number of GUI apps which don't give adequate feedback
> that they actually heard what I told them to do.
>
> The worst example in this regard has to be PAN. I click on a different
> newsgroup, and...
>
> Nothing happens
>
> and then...
>
> maybe after a while it switches.
>
> Even if something is going to take a while, some intermediate feedback
> is essential.