On Friday, June 26, 2020 10:53:59 AM MST David Cantrell wrote:
On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 01:23:17PM -0400, Neil Horman wrote:
>On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 10:03:12AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2020-06-26 at 12:58 -0400, Neil Horman wrote:
>>
>> > > From this thread you can find at least two people (me and Ben
>> > > Rosser)
>> > > who definitely didn't keep using vi (my very next questions were
>> > > "what's an easier editor to use?" and "how do I
change the default
>> > > editor to something else?"), and are still sufficiently frazzled
by
>> > > the
>> > > experience that we still refuse to. :P
>>
>>
>>
>> > Right, and I acutally think thats great.ÃÂ You had a problem, you
>> > asked the
>> > questions you needed answers to, and solved your problem.ÃÂ I
>> > personally think
>> > the process of identifying whats bothering you, figuring out a
>> > solution (by
>> > asking questions, getting answers and experimenting), and then
>> > implementing your
>> > fix is actually a pretty good user experience in and of itself
>> > (though that may
>> > just be me). :)
>>
>>
>>
>> That is not how it felt at the time :P
>>
>>
>>
>> It's really the point about Unexpected Forcible Learning. If I sit down
>> at my computer and think "right, I'm going to learn to do X",
that's
>> one thing. I am mentally prepared to spend some time stumbling around
>> working out how to do X.
>>
>>
>>
>> The problem with this experience is that's not how it happens. You
>> don't sit down and thinking "today I'm going to learn how to use
vi" or
>> "today I'm going to learn about console text editors and the $EDITOR
>> variable". You were intending to do something else, and you were
>> suddenly sandbagged by this fracking weird thing you have no idea what
>> it is that got in the way of the something else you were trying to do.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, eventually you learn something, but it's not a "pretty good user
>> experience", it is a frustrating and annoying one.
>
>
>But thats more or less the expectation of unix and unix like systems. For
>all
the porcelain and chrome we've put around it, under the covers, its
>all still a bag of parts, and the expectation is (or should be)
when using
>a bag of parts, you will have to learn how several of those parts work (be
>it vi or nano when using git, or substitue your tool of choice here). You
>start with a tool, you relize it relies on another tool, so you have to
>push it down the stack and figure out the new tool as part of the overall
>process.
>
>I'll share a simmilar experience to commiserate. During this thread, I
>went to
go confirm that eclipse actually used its own internal git editor
>for adding commit messages. Thought it was going to be easy.
Quickly
>realized that eclipse didn't come with git integration out of the box, so
>I had to go figure out how to get git support in, then how to configure
>it, then how to interface to it. It all felt like kinda the same tool,
>because it all happened in one of a few related windows, but its really
>learning several disparate tools, and thats ok. I still don't like using
>eclipse, but not because it made me go figure out several new tools, I
>don't like it because it seems nuts to me to have an IDE with a 400M
>Resident set size to edit ascii text. :)
>
>Heres a thought that I hadn't considered before though, and it might be
>useful.
Apple at one point (and still may), shiped iphones without the
>itunes (or some common) app on it,
>and they did so intentionally, because they knew it was an app that people
>wanted, and it forced them into a sort of 'training mission' in which they
>had
to use the app store on their phone to find and install the itunes
>app. It gave end users, after their initial disgruntledness, the
skills
>to install new apps on their phone, and explore how some of the system
>worked.
I'm not sure that's a good comparison. Are we trying to force train new vi
users or gain new Fedora users and developers? Fedora doesn't have a
business interest in users being forced to learn vi like Apple does with
users learning to use the App Store.
>Would that be a possibility here? I've upgraded my fedora workstation so
>many times, I'm not sure what our firstboot screens look like anymore,
>but would it be worthwhile to present users with some text, or a guide
>wizard, to point out files like their ~/.bashrc file with some commented
>text that shows clearly what some useful environment variables are, and
>how they might set them to customize their experience? Its not very 'just
>press the button to do something you may or may not understand', but it
>targets new users as part of firstboot, and introduces them in a somewhat
>friendly way to how things look under the covers, so they can make
>adjustments as their needs dictate. Even if they don't do it immediately,
>they will have a reference to something they can recall if they find later
>that their choice of editor is not something they are comfortable with.
Sounds like something suitable for gnome-initial-setup. I think /etc/motd
with that info would be useful on the non-workstation releases. Slackware
always installed a "welcome" email to the root user with similar info.
OpenBSD has 'man afterboot'. There's a lot we can do here. The common
thing appears to be helping guide the user. For text editing, nano does
that better by default than other text editors.
Thanks,
--
David Cantrell <dcantrell(a)redhat.com>
Red Hat, Inc. | Boston, MA | EST5EDT
Please keep in mind that there is more to Fedora desktop than the GNOME Spin.
There's nothing like gnome-initial-setup for KDE Spin, or any of the other
desktops.
--
John M. Harris, Jr.