A complaint you hear quite often is that the Linux desktop environments, which mostly refers to KDE and GNOME, are trying too hard to be like Windows and Mac OS X. Now, even James Bottomley, Distinguished Engineer at Novell, Director of the Linux Foundation, and Chair of its Technical Advisory Board (put that on your business card) states in an interview that he believes the Linux desktop is too much like Windows and Mac.
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Member since:2009-02-19
I could believe that the idea of exposing these models to casual end-users is outdated, but I highly doubt these things are going to stop being fundamental to the operation of (software on a) Desktop machine anytime soon, or that there's a superior metaphor just waiting to replace them. I'm all for making the computer my parents will use as brain-dead simple and intuitive as possible, but there's also a certain minimum amount of understanding of what the computer's doing that you can reasonably expect from users. You really can't expect to get away with putting absolutely no effort into learning how your computer works and what it's doing, and still being able to be reasonably productive with the thing.
As a note, my Mom doesn't understand what the file-system is; she thinks the save-dialogs for applications are "where" the files reside. If you ask her where she saved her Word document, she'll say, "in Word," meaning "in the MS Word save dialog." Her refusal to learn what a file system is causes her no end of trouble. But it's also the best way to do the job (of storing arbitrary data in a persistent and randomly-accessable and manipulatable form); the problem, in this case, is her unwillingness to learn, not that the file-system metaphor is failing her.
Sorry to ramble.
Member since:
2006-03-20
That's because the technology used to program them is outdated. The model of processes/filesystems/files/folders holds the development of more interesting software back.