| From: | Roger Light |
| Date: | 5 Sep 2000 at 10:57:40 |
| Subject: | Re: Oh No not linux |
On Mon, 4 Sep 2000, Gerald Mellor wrote:
> Hi Don, on 04-Sep-00, you wrote:
>
> > A beginner with only Windows experience will find it quite
> > difficult.
>
> I'm inclined to believe that's the fault of Windows trying to
> over-simplify things for the user, and implementing non-standard GUI
> "features" such as 'My Computer' and the Start Bar.
Yes, a reasonable chunk of Windows appears to be "simplified", but surely
that's a benefit? It means that people who aren't good with computers can
use them to some useful degree. Simplification is a good thing, as long as
you aren't constrained by it. As for the Start Bar being a non-standard
GUI feature, I think that it's a standard now. Windows has one, Unixes
have them, Amigas have stacks of them. Maybe it wasn't standard when they
introduced it into Win95, but does that mean they shouldn't have? It's
a [mostly] good thing in my opinion. The cycle gadget in it's "only cycle,
don't do the drop down menu thing" mode is non-standard too. It's also a
royal pain.
My Computer, as I'm sure you realise, is just a single stage lower than
the Workbench screen. If you ignore any Left Out icons and and AppIcons,
then the Workbench screen (more so when it is a window) is just the same
as a maximised My Computer window.
> Perhaps this is a symptom of computers being brought to the masses in
> recent years, so that more and more computer illiterate people are
> using Windows systems.
I think that this is probably the case. Most new users, unless they are
interested in computers, aren't particularly interested in how a file
system works. Maybe it's also that there's so much damned stuff in
computers these days. My spectrum +2 is very very simple. There's nothing
to it at all - turn it on and you get 4 menu items, none of which
does much. You can run one program at once. No file system to worry
about. With windows there is an awful lot to learn at once.
Cheers,
Roger
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