Subject: Re: [linux-audio-user] icky low level linux stuff
From: Rob Kudla (lau_AT_kudla.org)
Date: Fri Jul 26 2002 - 19:40:01 EEST
On Friday 26 July 2002 11:26, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
> > Surely you can't believe it's as great a leap from Cool Edit to
> > Audacity (or Ardour, once it gets packagable) as it is from Cool Edit
> > to patching, configuring and building a kernel from source at a
> > command line.
> No, of course it's not. But think about all the learning curve that
> happens before you can even talk about patching a kernel. All that
> Unixy stuff that people aren't really exposed to.
You're right, they're not exposed to it anymore. It's not necessary. I
moved my very non-technical partner over to Mandrake Linux 8.2 a few weeks
ago and here's what I found. He is a double click on everything, Barbra
Streisand playing in Winamp, "how do I print out a playlist" kind of total
non-nerd. A list of his apps as of a few months ago (when I was still
actively discouraging him from moving to Linux) is at
http://www.kudla.org/linux/ .
I did do the install myself and helped him find some of the extra
software, but I would have done that for him if he'd stuck with Windows
too. The Cool Edit guy I was talking about is way beyond him as regards
audio tools and doing basic system maintenance (and has installed Mandrake
on a web server himself once), but certainly not up to patching,
configuring and compiling a kernel, nor should he have to be.
> * Different way of managing files
Telling someone to go to "/d" in Konqueror instead of "D:" in Explorer
turns out to not be as big a deal as you make it out to be.
> * Strict permissions
When most of their data is living on their migrated DOS partition where
the permissions are rwxrwxrwx, that really doesn't come into play.
> * Strong division of operating system vs. user data
Turns out Linux users really don't need to mess with operating system data
at all. I have yet to hear "What is this /usr directory?" and have yet to
even manually edit a file in /etc for him.
> * Network centrism
I have to admit I'm at a loss what you're referring to by this. Maybe you
mean how Mandrake automatically goes out and retrieves the updated
packages he needs when he tries to install a new RPM?
> That's just to name a few. Now consider all the new learning needed to
> effectively know how to use X11 well. Then all the learning needed to
> effectively use a particular window manager or desktop environment. All
> of this is just interacting with the computer - not even configuring it!
I set my partner up with whatever that installed-by-default KDE theme is
that looks like Win2K, and not only was he able to function right away, he
ended up figuring out himself how to change it to a MacOS 9 type of theme
which is what he uses now (along with the horribly unreadable Stencil
window title font he used under Windows.) Maybe you don't define that as
"effectively [using] X11 well" but I promise you he couldn't care less.
Neither could I.
I'm working on a page describing the experience to demonstrate just how
little his work/play habits have changed (aside from not having to reboot
twice a day and not settling for stuttering audio on a 900MHz, 512MB
system.)
Seriously, when you are using a computer for particular tasks, regardless
of the OS, you double click on the app to start it, and then you open the
file you want to open, do what you have to do and close it. Maybe in the
case of audio you have to double click the little mixer icon too. You
REALLY don't need to know the command line to use Linux any more than you
do under Windows at this point. This opens up Linux to a lot of users who
have no idea what a compiler even does -- some of whom are musicians --
and it's not reasonable to expect them to know how to apply patches and
build kernels, either. They're users, we're nerds. We make things easy
for them, not the other way around. If that means shipping a kernel with
all the options they could possibly ever want enabled, that's what someone
has to do.
Suffice to say that Linux users who say "It's not a big deal to expect new
users to rebuild kernels because of all the other nerdy stuff they'll have
to do first anyway" has not migrated any normal Windows users to a recent
Linux distribution lately. It is not entirely seamless (today's question:
"How do I find out the title of this CD in Konqueror?" Obviously 'head -c
32840 /dev/cdrom2 | tail -c 32' isn't going to be what I tell him) but it
is nowhere near the impossible task that either command-line using Linux
zealots nor Windows apologists would have you believe.
Rob
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