September 27, 2005

Many folks have pointed at discrepancies of Linux here and there especially on the Desktop. It has challenges there still. Asa on his weblog detailed a few of them around integration, etc. There are others. One I would call communication. I think the major modus with Linux is a separate and good tool for each job and the tools may not or will not talk a common language. This breaks many user’s expectations of a desktop that is united in how it deals with process communications between programs. Perhaps Evolution as a mail client has addressed this most significantly; but the desktop itself still isolates its components to some degree and we get a set of separate and unique tools that each have man pages that really don’t tell a user how to fulfill the needs. If you want people to use Linux and they are people that have not, man pages and their terse and almost senseless communication is gonna have to change.

The second level of communication which suffers is between old and new users of the OS. What formats and formulats do people use these days to communicate? I think its still an online experience vested in the growth of forums, usenet, IRC, and even IM. They all correspond to communication needs whether its one on one, one to many, many to many, many to one. Perhaps the crowning glory are mailing lists and how certain mailing lists gateway themselves to usenet.

I think this creates a technological impasse or gap for users that want to find either an integrated solution or integrated use case scenaro but are faced instead with multiple layers of one to many or many to one communication. What I have seen on usenet is, don’t come here saying you are a noob. Read the man pages dood. Don’t ask stupid questions cause we ain’t got no time and we’ll just ignore you. So much for patient communication. But the real gap here is do we want new people to use Linux? Do we want them to bring their own perspectives and feelings and views and thereby make Linux into yet another new (gnu) thing?

The little and big answer is we need to close the gap or at least address it.