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Open Source and Interface Design

Oh no I said both words in one sentence. Eric S. Raymond has a written a piece on his homepage about his experience of trying to configure cups. Beeing in the cups "interface" myself ones in my life I can clearly see where he is coming from. Yes the command line is fast. Yes the command line is beautiful, IF you have no girl and if all you do your whole life is trying to figure out how stuff works. If you want to get stuff done sometimes there goes nothing over a single mouseclick.

He writes:

The point of this essay is not, therefore, just to beat up on the CUPS people — it's also to beat up on every other open-source designer who does equally thoughtless things under the fond delusion that a slick-looking UI is a well-designed UI. Watch and learn...

Seeing that the new Gimp(2.0) has a somewhat improved interface I think there is more and more awareness in the Opensource field that this might be an important point to bring the non geeks to the Opensoftware movement. I do not say that the movement should look at Microsoft, Adobe and co. they do have the power to do things differently, but remember always ALWAYS have the user in mind when creating an interface. It does not have to be flashy hip it just needs to work fast and reliable just like the command line. I have friends with PCs that hate Microsoft some tried out Linux, they are not unintelligent people (in their field they are quite good) they are just no geeks and they throw out Linux after a couple of days figuring out only the most fundamental stuff and not getting anything done.
The constant ignorance in the opensource movement in regards to interface has to stop if they want to succeed in the long term.

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Comments

my expirience with cups are absolutley not the same. i've installed cups, opened the webfrontend from cups in my browser, added my printer and see there, my printer is running realy fine since then.

it was so easy with cups, i don't see the problems from mr. eric s. raymond

But you are an open source geek who uses linux :)
I tried it on OSX (before it was incorporated into the OS) at a friends computer. After wading through 100 subpages and reading 20 A4 long articles on the net I finally figured out that the printer was "not fully" supported. He had (and still has) to push page feed after printing out a page to release it and the print out looks horrible, its a USB printer so not that old. It cost me, who is a quite computer literate a full day to get it to work at all. The guy who owns the computer in questions failed already to turn on the programm yet even grasp that the webinterface is for configuring a printer. I do see that people like you can use CUPS (and about all other open source software out there) but I would argue that some people would ever switch to linux even if microsoft would charge them 1000 Euro a month to use their OS because they could just not use Linux as much as they want to and this has to do with the lack of any or lack of any good interface for almost everything. As bad as Microsoft Interface might be its still WAY better then ANYTHING Linux and the opensource community has to offer. ;)

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