Fluxbuntu's aim is to be a lightweight, productive, agile, and efficient operating system; this review takes a look at Fluxbuntu and whether it lives up to the challenge of creating a user-friendly experience on a tight resources budget. The review discusses included applications, ease-of-use, and some of the limitations of this featherweight operating system.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-07
Partly, I agree with you - it depends a lot on what you do and who you are. But be honest. Sometimes, you see improvements to an interface which don't let it loose any features or flexibility yet make it a million times easier to do stuff in em.
So there are improvements possible - which improves usability. Sure, I wouldn't know how to objectively asses interfaces for that, so it's hard to judge - but I think some projects clearly spend more time on it than others. Enlightenment looks good, but I don't think they did much to get very usable. KDE does, lately, and Gnome does for a while already (though for a big part the imho wrong way, by removing stuff).
Anyway, that's my point. Screaming "we're easy to use" - everybody does that, but it takes work. Gnome got a long way (but imho *decrease* usability for most users by focusing on a hypothetical, stupid, common user). And KDE is working on it as well. In FOSS, I think not many other projects really did much in that area. Some separate apps, maybe, but often it's lack of resources which leads to lack of features, not a striving for usability. So don't claim it is usable in such a case...
Member since:
2006-10-08
You're introducing an existing problem here.
For the first part of your sentence, I completely agree with you. "Easy to use" is a term that mainly depends on individual experiences, on your knowledge, on what you are familiar with and what you're used to know. For example, to me IceWM's menu configuration file is "easy to use" because I can simply put any application into it that I like. To others, this is "hard to use" because it involves techniques they don't know about (i. e. editing a text file in a hidden directory).
Regarding the second part of your sentence, I think you are wrong. The self-declaration "easy to use" does not come from limitiations of functionality. Just imagine KDE. It can easily be declared as "easy to use" but it does not concentrate on a certain subset of functionalities; instead, it tries to address all imaginable ways to use it.
In my opinion, "easy to use" is something that only users can tell of. Their experiences are mainly the result of how good developers could implement something that is easy to the user. And as I explained before, that's very individual.
TWM is eally fine if you're running a low end machine as a HMC or a NFP where you don't have much interaction and window shifting. :-)
As I said before, it depends on the user. What makes some piece of software "easy"? Which criteria have to be applied? I think it's neccessary to make this clear first. Don't get me wrong, it's an important discussion, but as I said many times before: Computers are not easy. :-)