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"You seem to have mistaken my comment for sarcasm."

My apologizes.

"But if I am interested in playing games for example, should I not be interested in knowing how to use the tool that lets me play the games?"

Only if you want to be. But you shouldn't have to be. Just as you shouldn't have to know anything about how your car's driveshaft connects to the wheels in order to be able to successfully drive it in a straight line down the road. You don't have to have any interest in cars at all to want to be able to drive because it is useful from getting you to point A to point B. And as such, you don't have to have any interest in computers at all to be able to want to use them for their entertainment value or whatever.

And this is the holy grail of OS / UI design. We want to design computers that can understand conversational English (or Japanese, or German, etc.) commands. We want to design computers that have artificial intelligence, and are capable of deducing what we mean rather than simply doing a literal translation of what we said. We want to design computers that can prompt users when they need something, and know how and where to get it without the user having to to tell it. All the user has to do is give the computer permission to do it.

Of course, only the last point has been achieved with any real degree of success so far. The rest of them are a ways off yet. But the holy grail of UI design is to design a UI that users intuitively know how to use, because it is something have already been doing before they even touched a computer.

"But that is the monster that we now have to deal with."

Well, we don't have to deal with it. We can choose to remove ourselves from the community. Or move on to other projects. A lot of FreeBSD hackers I know used to be Linux hackers. And if you ask them why they switched to FreeBSD, they will give you the exact reasons I stated. They got fed up with the politics and militaristic bagage that has been attached to Linux.

Edited 2005-12-16 19:40