Linked by Mystilleef on Mon 29th Sep 2003 06:30 UTC
Linux will become ubiquitous in the year 3000. Okay, that was a horrible joke. Linux is just a kernel, the engine that runs an operating system. By itself, it is essentially useless. Kernels shouldn't be discussed or noticed by normal users. And as such when providing these users with reviews, previews and "professional" opinions, computer consultants, computer reviewers and computer journalists should not spew headlines like "Linux is not ready for prime time", "Linux on the desktop by XXX", "Linux to takeover Windows", "Linux is not ready for desktop" and so on.
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And hence a perfect example of not understanding the user.
AFAIK, I am an user, too.
Yes my friend, playing checkers is part of ease of use. I like to play checkers over MSN. Now its much easier to click on a person's name and choose play checkers on MSN than it is to get their IP address, go to the command line, and type "checkers --join "123.456.789"". It's also much easier than spending a few minutes logging into Yahoo games and find a channel...
Of course, I can't disagree that it makes cheesy games a bit easier to play, but tell me... What it has to do with an instant messenging program? It could burn CDs remotely, give food to the remote user's cat while he's away, cook turkeys in remote ovens... but it would still have nothing to do with "ease of use". It might be easy to use right now, but it's still bloatness, something that is usually making software harder to use after a while.
As to the requirements of Messenger. I have a 1gig Duron. Not exatly state of the art, but MSN has never impacted its performance. I code, play games, and MSN is nicely doing its thing in the background. I don't care what its requirements are. If I see my system slowing down, then maybe I'll have a look at it. MSN and other 'background' apps are not the bottleneck of my PC.
If you don't care how crappy a program is as long as you can run it nicely, good for you... Obviously, I don't share that opinion.
Anyway, it's useless to argue because we simply don't have the same expectations and don't see the current situation the same way... and I sadly know that I'm in the minority.