Linked by David Adams on Mon 24th Aug 2009 09:21 UTC
A reader asks: Why is Linux still not as user friendly as the two other main OSes with all the people developing for Linux? Is it because it is mainly developed by geeks?
My initial feeling when reading this question was that it was kind of a throwaway, kind of a slam in disguise as a genuine question. But the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I felt. There truly are a large amount of resources being dedicated to the development of Linux and its operating system halo (DEs, drivers, apps, etc). Some of these resources are from large companies (IBM, Red Hat, Novell). Why isn't Linux more user-friendly? Is this an inherent limitation with open source software?
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RE[4]: "Free software UI" article
by vivainio on Mon 24th Aug 2009 19:05
in reply to "RE[3]: "Free software UI" article"
Member since:2008-12-26
I don't consider changing Emacs to correspond with the latest popular DEs to be "fixing" anything.
Clipboard isn't just a DE thing, it's an X thing.
Emacs has been around decades longer than KDE, and will still be around after KDE has been long forgotten.
My theory is that emacs is/was just too stagnant as a project to make "brave" moves like this. Though times may be changing - they just added anti-aliasing. Party like it's 1999! You can easily consider the current clipboard contents as last entry in the kill ring, I think win32 version of xemacs does this at least.
Who knows what will be the latest craze a few years from now (though I would wager a guess that it'll keep getting more Windows-like).
If all of us remained sceptical of all the new software, nothing would improve. It's safe to wager that clipboard is mature technology by now, dont you think?
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Member since:
2006-05-30
I don't consider changing Emacs to correspond with the latest popular DEs to be "fixing" anything. Emacs isn't broken, it just happens not to have some UI behavior enabled by default that a certain version of a certain DE that some users have installed.
Emacs has been around decades longer than KDE, and will still be around after KDE has been long forgotten. I won't speak for the entire Emacs community, but I can say that most Emacs users recognize the latest ephemeral UI notions as the fads they are. Who knows what will be the latest craze a few years from now (though I would wager a guess that it'll keep getting more Windows-like). This isn't to say better ideas won't arise, but if the goal is to change something to fit an established standard, well, the standards had already been around long before these newer projects started.