Two rather negative articles about Ubuntu

[Peter Whittaker]

On Sun, 2006-02-07 at 20:25 +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote: 
> If they don't, play with stuff they don't understand, and then end up
> breaking the system, IMHO you cannot say it's an Ubuntu bug as such. It
> could hint to a usability problem if this is a common occurrence though.

On the one hand, I tend to agree with you: mess with things you don't
understand, pay the price. On the other hand, if it is simply too easy
to mess with the wrong things, then the system is poorly designed.
Especially if it is too easy for the naive user to accidentally muck
things up belong belief....

("Changes to /etc/gps.cfg committed. Retargetting missile systems, will
launch in 50 clock cycles, hit ctrl-c to abort.... Launching...." Hmm,
perhaps we should have updated the sleep bit when we moved away from the
8086... ...oh well, who's going to mess with a cfg file they don't
understand? This may seem silly, but bear in mind that Linux is derived
from an OS that was designed for use by advanced computing experts - and
we are living with and "correcting" - if that's not too strong a word -
the legacy of many of those "for experts only" design decisions.)

Poor design is a bug. Usability problems are bugs.

I know, I know, I live in a rose-coloured world. What I'd really like is
a "restore sane defaults and tell me what the diffs are" button.
Something than resets all system config files - and major user UI
elements - to shipped defaults, and reports on the changes between the
two environments.

pww

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