Linux Advocate Struggles to Configure Printer
Oh man - John Gruber just hit the nail on the head in responding to Eric Raymond's rant on Linux usability:
The problem isn?t just that dear old [Aunt Tillie] can?t use desktop Linux ? the problem is that even Linux geeks have trouble figuring it out.
...
The open source revolution has done nothing to change the fact that the best-designed, most-intuitive user interfaces are found in closed-source commercial software.
I?m not saying all commercial software is well-designed, nor that all free software is poorly-designed ? what I?m saying is that software that does provide a well-designed, intuitive interface tends to be closed and commercial. The bigger the software, the more likely this is to be true.
The most obvious explanation is that the open source model does not work well for producing software with good usability.
It's a terrific essay; Gruber (a Mac apologist) does a good job of framing the discussion in terms of pragmatic realism - good usability costs money and open source software usually can't afford it. Guys like Raymond might not like it, but that's the facts.
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