Monday, March 06, 2006

Learning new tricks

Today I saw this comment from someone looking for advice on Linux tools:

The more Win like the GUI the better for Linux noobies like me.

My response is: If you are already used to Win GUIs you are a noobie no more.

Moving from one OS to another implies relearning and adapting. It's harder to teach an old dog new tricks.

The same happens when switching applications on the same OS. The more knowledgeable you are about a tool, the more complains you will have about a new one. Many people were still using WordPerfect for DOS long after there were Windows tools available, just because they already knew all the cryptic WP key combinations.

Even user friendliness is on the eye of the beholder. Some people find GUIs less user friendly than command line because GUIs rarely allow automation for repetitive tasks.

What is true is that the more tools and ways-of-thinking you learn, the easier will be to learn something different if nothing else just because you will be already conditioned to accept change.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

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Raul Suarez said...

Karl,

The intention of the post was to show that once a user decided to switch, they should have the mindset for change.

You bring up another interesting missconception: "Windows Just works", well, it does if it comes preinstalled, so for most users that preception is true just because highly technical people made sure that all the drivers and configurations were in place. If you want to do it yourself it is a bigger pain than Linux.