Re: SEUL: About friendlyness

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <7718743632.AAA6F36@un1.satlink.com>, j-gazquez@pop.netaddress.com writes:
>I think that this project is an interesting proposal, but I have an 
>annoying question.
>What is the REAL objective of Seul?

The 'real' objective of seul is to help Linux turn into something
that a wider range of people can use. Linux is becoming much more
popular these days, and as such it's encountering more and more
people who aren't used to the command-line interface and obscure
commands that we know and love. :) In order to let those people be
productive and happy, we need to provide them with interfaces that
they're comfortable with.

But while we think that more intuitive (often graphical) interfaces 
are a good idea, we're not working on them. Seul is focused these days
mostly on information distribution. For instance, our Why Linux? document
gets a lot of hits these days. We're working on developing help formats
and documents that are more useful and more accurate. We've got a list
of links to other related projects, and we're supporting several related
projects (such as Project Independence). We're working on a user-awareness
survey, and I'm eventually going to get around to finishing the universal
news submission form for the lu-news project
(http://linuxunited.org/projects/news/). You can get a better idea of
what we're working on from http://www.seul.org/what/todo.html
Our manifesto might provide you with a better idea of why we think what
we're doing is important. And why you should volunteer to help. ;)

>Some like a linux-kernel based version of Windows? A sad idea.
>There are a lot of things to simplify the use of Linux, but I'd like 
>to say two topics about:
>1) What is an EASY interface? A GUI is pretty, but sometimes isn't so 
>easy as Microsoft claims that it is. The better interface must be the 
>sense interface.
> 2) A Windows system is frustrating for me because 
>there is just one way to do anything you want,  the (supposed) easy 
>one. So, always must be a way for the user growing to an advanced 
>(traditional?) way to work.

I think Microsoft was moving in the right direction for a while. I
think they've gone a bit too far, though. We're currently catering to
a more technically adept audience, which is a large advantage for us.

--Roger