interesting article, for all those who think Ubuntu is already easy

[Alexander Jacob Tsykin]

On Thursday 25 May 2006 00:05, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 11:43:03PM +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> > On Wednesday 24 May 2006 22:17, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > > No, because you're assuming that configuration options have no cost.
> > > They don't. If you have 30 configuration options and never need to
> > > touch 25 of them, how likely are you to find the other 5 that you /do/
> > > need to touch?
> >
> > advanced tab?
>
> What defines whether things are "advanced" or not? And that only pushes
> the problem further back - at the point where you have to give people
> instructions saying "Go to this window, click on the advanced tab, go to
> the checkbox marked 'Enable DMA', reboot" you might as well go with
> "Edit this text file as root" - making it pointy clicky isn't actually
> easier. And then you end up with a checkbox that is effectively either
> "make my computer work" or "break my computer", and it's *impossible*
> for the user to know which catagory they fall into without risking
> breaking things.
>
it is easier, if it is "pointy clicky" with tooltips etc. It is much easier 
than editting some obscure file as root whose syntax they probably do not 
understand
> When something doesn't work, we should *make it work*, not add band aids
> that make it easier to ignore the fact that there's a problem in the
> first place.
>
agreed, but its nice to have configuration accessible
> > > The answer to "I don't have DMA on my drive" is not "Add a checkbox".
> > > It's "Figure out why you don't have DMA on your drive, and then fix
> > > that". Have you filed a bug?
> >
> > It was for breezy
>
> I'm afraid I can't find it (there were a couple of other DMA-related
> issues that I've responded to). Could you give a bug number?
>
didn't file a bug. I'm saying it exists in breezy, not dapper. I can file a 
bug, but I can't give too much detail except for "my drive can use DMA but it 
is not enabled by default" which doesn't seem so informative.

Sasha