Dear Final Debug: Whenever I try to show people how cool Linux is, they don’t care. When will Linux make sense to those great unwashed who grew up on Windows or the Mac?
Final Debug Responds: As someone who was foolish enough to try to learn Linux before I knew that Gnome or KDE existed, I must insist that the existing windowing schemes for Linux, while far from perfect, do represent a huge improvement in ease of use compared to dealing with the ominous command line.
The biggest problem with Gnome and KDE is that they don’t “protect” people entirely from the command line. Sometimes, when you least expect it, the only way to execute a particular command is to revert to the command line. And no one whose experience of computing is limited to Windows 95 will suffer through that.
The wonder of Linux is how it was developed; the unhappy flip side is the fact that the operating system is truly one designed by programmers for other programmers. Even if the quality of office applications for Linux gets better than WordPerfect or StarOffice, the underlying operating environment must become friendlier to people who don’t have degrees in computer science.
Although the fruits of its effort are far in the future, the most promising attempt to make sense out of Linux for business-minded users is Nautilus, a graphical user interface for Linux being developed by Eazel, a company formed by a group of people who helped design the original Macintosh operating system, still the standard for usability in a consumer OS.
Don’t expect a release of a full system for another 12 to 18 months, although you can sneak a peek at screen shots of the basic UI.
The powers at Eazel have made all the right noises about their commitment to open source. They promise their products will be made available under the standard GPL that GNU, Linux and other crucial open-source projects use.
From a marketing standpoint, the Nautilus project makes a huge amount of sense. Even Windows 2000 hasn’t been demonstrated to be as reliable as Linux, and the combination of an ultra-reliable operating system and a familiar, usable environment to work in will be welcomed by many.
The broader question is whether this misses an opportunity for greater innovation — to make Linux work better than the competition. By making Linux appear more Mac-like or Windows-like, a group of excellent designers and interface architects have decided to look backward instead of forward for inspiration.
While Nautilus might solve many Linux usability problems in the short term, the plan places Linux at the same interim-usability position as Macs and Windows rather than leapfrogging ahead to something new.
