Daemon News '200008' : '"Dumbing down

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Dumbing down - Part 2

by Brett Taylor, brett@daemonnews.org

This is part two of June's editorial. I'm writing part two because I had a great response to part one. Why a month later? Why not in July's issue you might ask? Well, I wasn't here in July! I was busy riding my bike in Italy and seeing some friends in Copenhagen so it had to wait.

As you might recall, I was concerned with the following question:

How do we attract new users without dumbing down the operating system?

As I noted I got many responses and they varied all over the place. A few people seemed to suggest that I was a CLI-elitist and trying to keep all new users out. Others suggested that there should only be GUI installs/tools and that if BSD didn't have them it wasn't worth using (sysinstall from FreeBSD was considered to be too primitive as well, with its curses interface). These were the extremes though and most people ranged in the middle group - those who felt GUI tools had their place, but that the users who wanted to should be able to edit things by hand.

In some sense, I think I asked the wrong question and a number of people actually came up with a better question (paraphrasing a number of peoples' versions):

How do we insure development of tools so that they are flexible and robust enough for "power users"¹ to utilize while hiding the complexity well enough that new users can utilize the same tools?

I think this is a far better question and more to the point. As a number of people pointed out, one of the problems with some of the "simple" tools is that as the user you're never quite sure exactly what they are actually doing! Other times config files created by a tool are difficult, if not impossible, to parse by looking at the text file. It's a bit unnerving to use a tool if you're not sure what it does. And it seems like you always try one before you've made a backup of your critical configuration file and then it gets destroyed or it just doesn't work at all afterwards and you have to start from scratch.

We have then three options it seems to me:

provide/maintain the tools we have now and hope all new users will have the desire to learn how to use what's provided;
attract new users by developing intuitive tools (let's assume they're some form of GUI) that are also powerful enough to do the right thing for the "power users" while being just as effective for new users;
have two sets of tools - one for the "power users" and one for the new users.

We first have to recognize that we cannot hope to satisfy everyone.

Option #1 can provide only a minimal growth of new users, but they're likely to be better users. New users who want to learn how their computer works are similar to the students who go to college because they want to learn, not because all of their friends are. This group will become the next set of developers, testers, documentation providers etc. Obviously this is the ideal group to have as a user base, but if that's all of your user base then it will be a small one.

Option #2 obviously requires more development time (and personnel) and these are obviously hard to come by in a volunteer project. Assuming we have the manpower, we could certainly create these tools, but at the best I think we can hope for a few to show up over time but that none of the BSDs will have a Macintosh-type "everything is GUI" system anytime in the near future.

Option #3 carries with it the same problem - a lack of manpower to write the tools for the new user. At the very least, it appears the present set of tools (text editor/text config files) are adequate, if not preferred, by most of the present users. Maybe it's possible then to create only a few new tools to satisfy the new user.

Now it's a question not only of developing the tools, but deciding if you want to have lots of all types of new users. Support for them becomes critical and again the manpower issue raises its ugly head. There is commercial support for BSD but the primary sources of support seem to be friends, IRC, or the mailing lists.

Where does that leave us? Beats me - that's a decision each BSD will have to face on its own and how its users and developers decide to spend their time. Certainly Apple has made it clear that their intention is to make Mac OS X a purely graphical system (although it's almost a certainty that a terminal will be available, whether directly from Apple or via a shareware program). So far, FreeBSD has done the most to attract new users, but none of the BSDs seems to be moving in the direction that many of the Linux companies are with graphical tools for nearly everything.

I'd like to thank everyone who wrote - I appreciated seeing all of the feedback and all the points of view. I apologize for not responding directly to each one of you at the time because I was out of the country. If you have comments, please be sure to email me <brett@daemonnews.org>.

¹ Anyone but me remember the Apple infomercial with the grandfatherly figure who was picking up women via chat/email? One of the women he was talking with said he was a "power user" because he had 8 MB of RAM on his machine! Wasn't this just 3 or 4 years ago? [return]