Mainstream Usability

Sat Mar 13 21:33:13 UTC 2004

I am 99% sure that last time I tried Lindows that it does not spew out all
the kernel booting messages.  And it seems like some other distro's (perhaps
Lycoris, SuSE?) don't do it either.  Perhaps you could look at them and see
how they do it?

Didn't RedHat dumb down KDE for their distribution?  It is certainly seems
to be different than it is on other distros/os'es.
-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-test-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:fedora-test-list-bounces at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Wayne Frazee
Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2004 11:18 AM
To: fedora-test-list at redhat.com
Subject: Mainstream Usability

I'm quite sure that I am far from the first to suggest this but....

With the advent of KDE 3.2 and the latest gnome, the x-based user interface
system has reached a level of usability that would be possible to use by the
average user while still maintaining access to the powerful Linux command
line.  Further, improvements in the 2.6 kernel make the Linux operating
system more robust than ever, offering wide-ranging support for hardware,
platforms, and user-needs.

Still, Linux has not really gone mainstream.  The features are there, but
the operating system is still intimidating.  Besides the traditional
challenge posed by change, in and of itself, you start your computer and are
assailed by a hundred lines of gibberish (at least to the average end user)
from the kernel loading.  Fedora has certainly taken a stride in the right
direction, offering a GUI screen with a progress bar for those who would
like it.  Still, kernel loading is accomplished by lines upon lines of
intimidating text.  Further, not enough time has been put into building good
looking themes and so forth to be included with KDE, leaving first time
users with an impression that the GUI is bland, etc.

So what can be done about it?  Is it really worth addressing these points?
While for the average developer here, we just don't care.  I use my fedora
boxes more than I do my windows machines.  At this point, I have worked with
Solaris, RHEL, FC1, FC2T1, and I don't even notice anymore the lack of
polish.

Each time I start a workstation-configured machine for a client
demonstration on console, I am harshly brought back to the realization that
users aren't used to this level of output.  They practically recoil when
they see the kernel load and it gives them a bad impression right off the
bat.  An impression that the operating system would be overly complicated to
use, that employees would have trouble training for it.  Once a first
impression is made, its rather difficult to break as for most clients it
tends to color their analysis of the rest of the system.  

Please keep in mind that although I do programming, I have virtually no
experience working with the Linux kernel besides loading modules and so
forth.  How hard would it be to add perhaps a parameter to grub as to
whether or not to suppress that initial text pre-gui?  Perhaps offering two
modes, one spitting out everything that it does now, the other perhaps
offering more simplified (5 or 8 lines instead of 100):
"Loading Fedora Core 1..."
"...Init Run Level 1"
"...Starting [big subsystem]"
"...Starting [big subsystem]"
"...Init Run Level 5

Is this something that OSDL would have to look at?  Certainly the OS-related
art content is not beyond the scope of the Fedora Project.

--===============--
Wayne S. Frazee

"If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming
must be the process of putting them in."

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