Re: SEUL: linux for the masses

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@guinea-pig.rutgers.edu>]

On Mon, 21 Dec 1998, Roger Dingledine wrote:

> http://eddie.cis.uoguelph.ca/~tburgess/local/linuxui.html
> haven't read all of it. so much to read out there...

This seems glaringly inconsistent with his other paper "Linux for the
masses and other popular myths" where he says ...

"The Linux operating system on every computer system is a bad thing"
...
"The attempt to make Linux more user friendly will hurt Linux not help it"
" Why hacking, the command line and vi are a good thing."

hmmm ... 

These opinions are severely at odds with those raised in the linuxui paper. One
almost wonders whether the goal of the paper is to express such an outrageous
point of view as to discredit the idea of "linux for the masses".

I for one do not like the tone of the paper. I do not believe multiple
distributions are a bad idea,  if a clear winner in the "user friendlines"
stakes were to emerge ; this would be sufficient in that newbies would not have
this "confusion" to deal with. I suspect the same would be true if there were
several competing distros , each very user friendly. 

Some of his points about automation are just plain out. For example, Redhat
ships with an autofs that works out of the box. Mounting media *is* automated.
Practically everything ( certainly starting daemons ) has a point&click
interface.

All in all, a paper that (might be) well meaning , but not terribly helpful.

JM$0.02

-- Donovan Rebbechi