Windows, Linux

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@home.com>]

Just one brief thought on the Windows Linux discussion,
which I've mostly tried to stay out of.

I've seen my wife, an intelligent woman who has been to college,
and has two good eyes, spend half a day trying to install a game for
our children.  Finally she gives up in despair and writes off the $20.
Her time is just too precious.  Maybe the next game will install properly.
And I've seen her install one game and have it break another one.
Together we tried to unbreak that other game, cuz we really liked it,
and we tried off and on for over a year, then gave up.
One day she installed a third game, and if fixed the first game.
We still don't know why.
Windows is so monolythic and intertwined, the slightest bug or inconsistency
or incompatibility can break six other things, or even bring Windows to its knees.
It's terrible!
Compare this with the simple beauty of rpm -i, which works like a dream.
So Linux is better, right?
Maybe not.

If she had Linux, and was facing a $ prompt, she'd have no idea what to do.
Even if I told her to type rpm -i, and then explained all the wherefores and
why's of becoming root, with passwords, and now rpm -i works,
but she's still looking at a $ prompt.
"So, how do I run the game?" she asks.
Well I tell her about how to get info about the package she just loaded,
and a list of the associated files,
which you cull through looking for something in /usr/bin,
and there's the command to run.
Then run "man command" to read ten pages of options and arguments,
and oh it looks like you'll have to make a .commandrc file
in your home directory with lots of options and settings,
and ok, now you can play your game.
Yeah, like that's really a user friendly system!
For her at least, Linux is terrible!

And there we are: two powerful operating systems that are almost
unusable by anyone except geeks.

All this has nothing to do with blinux I suppose,
and perhaps I shouldn't have posted it,
except to say that nothing really changes if you're blind.
Both systems are still hard to use, for all the same reasons,
but they become even harder, because you have to do
everything through an adapter.

Now I love Linux, but then again, I'm a geek.
And perhaps that's another salient point for this group.
Sighted users can sometimes brouse the net and get mail
on Windows,
even install and play a few games if they're very lucky,
all without any computer expertise.
(This also assumes our casual home user buys a new computer every two years,
or nothing works.)
Blind users don't have this luxury.
We *must* become geeks, to manage these complex adapters and synthesizers etc,
and once you've acccepted this reality, and become a geek,
I think you'll like Linux too,
for the same reasons I do.
Or, maybe you'll become an even bigger geek than I,
and you'll understand why those three games have inconsistent versions of the same dll,
and how to make them all work together.
Who can tell.

Karl