rhgb no more

[Olivier Galibert]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 09:49:59AM -0400, Simo Sorce wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 14:58 +0200, Olivier Galibert wrote:
> > And, the usual rhetorical question, why so much people like the idea
> > of forcibly ensuring that the users won't learn anything, ever?
> 
> Users don't want to "learn", why should you FORCE users to "learn"
> something ?

I'm not forcing them to learn anything, I'm just giving them the
opportunity.  Some people seem to be bent on ensuring that such an
opportunity will *not* be presented, ever, by reducing the amount of
presented information to the absolute minimum necessary for survival
if everything goes well, and sometimes even less than that.

And it looks like my users are not your users.  Pretty much everybody
new to linux I've seen like to learn, especially when it's incidental
to their use.  They even like the text messages, because the green
"OK" boxes give them confidence that all is going well, the waiting is
perfectly normal, the computer just has a lot of things to do.  Even
the occasional red error message is good.  It pushes them to ask
questions about it (to friends, to google, to forums), makes them
understand a little more about their computer, and they *like* that.
Probably something about being in control and informed rather than
handled and considered unable to understand.  Which is a feeling I've
heard numerous times about the windows environment and its
applications. "It says there's an error and I have to call my
administrator and nothing unseful.  What am I supposed to do?  I don't
have an administrator, it's my computer I paid for."


> I personally like the option of *not* seeing ugly text messages at boot,
> even if I perfectly understand what they mean and find them useful when
> there is an error.

If you find information ugly, why do you use a computer?  An icon
blinking for a while with nothing else seemingly happening and with no
other information, _now_ that's ugly.

  OG.