brian will . net

The Linux community is often accused of being poor at catering to non-expert users, but this is a misdiagnoses. Contrary to myth, the community is not full of old Unix beards demanding the rest of us master perl before they give the rest of us the time of day. Surely, many Linux users lament that more people don’t see the virtuous ways of the command line, but very few of them still refuse to accept that most people just have better things to fill their heads with than cryptic Unix utility names, parameters, and Bash syntax. And this acceptance is not just reluctant: there are large projects (GNOME and Ubuntu first among them) whose primary mantra is to make Linux bare bones simple enough to bring naive and non-programmer users a painless Linux experience.

The real problem with the Linux community is not that they disregard non-expert users but that the Linux community fails to account for the sliding-scale of expertise in between ‘competant Linux installer/admin’ and ‘Aunt Tillie who thinks that the blue E is the Internet’. (“Aunt Tillie” is the name of the naive Linux user in Eric Raymond’s essay about Linux usability, The Luxury of Ignorance.)

Let’s consider the full range of users.

1) On one extreme, you have Aunt Tillie, the naive user:

• Aunt Tillie not only doesn’t know how computers work, she has no working conception of their limits and so can’t form realistic expectations of how to interact with them.
• Aunt Tillie uses a small set of apps which a relative once showed her how to use, and she treats each computing task ritualistically, never straying from her limited repertoire of actions, treating all tasks as ad hoc.
• Aunt Tillie is afraid of any experimentation and so, when confronted with choices outside her comfort zone, Aunt Tillie becomes paralyzed.
• Aunt Tillie sees neither commonalities nor distinctions: she is barely aware of the most basic interface commonalities between applications, and she cannot see the dividing lines between one application and another application and between an application and the desktop.

There are thankfully very few ‘pure’ Aunt Tillie’s in the world—or at least, very few users remain as pure Aunt Tillies after gaining a little bit of computing experience—but almost everyone exhibits some degree of naiveté in some part of computing, and everyone is an Aunt Tillie in some domain of knowledge.

2) After the naive user, you have the largest group of users, the ‘User’ users, so-called because they may use their computers quite heavily but otherwise don’t think about their computers except as means to an end:

• ‘User’ users are not sitting out the PC revolution and in fact may have been using a PC since the DOS days. They might be addicted to their computers, browsing the web and sitting on chat all day. Or they may use a computer once or twice a week.
• ‘User’ users generally have no trouble using the desktop, and some (the longtime users, in particular) have a working mental model of hierarchical file systems, and may even place their files in proper folders rather than just dumping everything on the desktop or My Documents.
• ‘User’ users may be comfortable in some complex applications, such as Photoshop.
• ‘User’ users may or may not do program installs as long as they aren’t asked too many strange questions by the install wizard.
• ‘User’ users get along fine with their computers until configuration changes are needed or configuration problems arise. These users hate spending time on anything not immediately relevant to what they wanted to do with the computer in the first place, so they throw up their hands quickly when system messages alert them about anything to do with drivers, etc.
• ‘User’ users may think that the blue E is the Internet, or at least that the Web is the Internet. The idea that a TCP/IP connection is a service provided by the OS to its running programs is an unfamiliar notion, but they may understand the idea if you explain it to them.

3) Next come Windows power users.

• Unlike ‘User’ users, Windows power users have experience with driver and OS installs.
• Power users secretly like futzing with their computers, so they’re quite tolerant of complex and troublesome installs. However, Windows power users expect installers to come in the form of an executable and greet any other method with bafflement.
• In fact, Windows power users expect everything to come in the form of a binary installer, including plug-ins, OS modules (Direct X), and drivers. The primary troubleshooting technique in Windows is to uninstall and reinstall, which is annoying, but it has the great virtue of actually fixing the problem 90% of the time. Really, the main technique in the Windows power users’ repertoire is the software equivalent of kicking their computer. On Linux, uninstall/reinstall is never needed, but to Linux’s great detriment, uninstall/reinstall never fixes problems either.
• Power users are further distinguished from ‘user’ users by the range of software they use. Most power users trawl the internet for programs to meet their needs, often hobbling together a group of programs to meet a particular need rather than using all-in-one commercial packages, e.g. power users generally use a heady mix of free programs to rip, encode, and burn their CD’s and DVD’s. This mish-mashing is beyond the tolerance of ‘User’ users, who aren’t willing to go to such lengths to extend the capabilities of their computers.

(Mac power users do exist but are much less interesting than Windows power users, having not suffered as much.)

4) After plain power users come Windows PC builders, who assemble their PC’s from parts and install Windows on blank disks.

• PC builders aren’t so different from plain power users except that they are more comfortable with hardware lingo and configuration.
• PC builders are motivated by the desire to know and control everything about their system configuration. They are typically heavily into games and/or media, and they won’t give Linux attention if it doesn’t fully take advantage of their bleeding-edge hardware or at least compensates by doing something unique that makes it worth maintaining a dual-boot system.

5) Finally, we have the Linux power user, someone who installs, admins, and possibly builds Linux systems.

Obviously, the Linux community doesn’t need to win itself over, so you might think there’s nothing to say here. On the contrary, it needs pointing out that, within this group, knowledge level varies significantly (e.g. some compile their own kernels, others don’t), as do tastes (e.g. some like GUI apps, others forsake the desktop entirely). There are plenty of technical Linux users on the desktop-using end of the spectrum, so it’s baffling to me that discussion of the Linux desktop never focuses on features that the Linux community itself would like to use; it’s like there’s this strange implicit assumption that, aside from serving Aunt Tillie, the Linux desktop is already just fine, even though it—and all desktops, Windows and OS X included—have glaring faults affecting all users, not just the most naive.

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The free desktop—GNOME and KDE, mainly—is at a crossroads at this moment in early 2007. With Vista, Windows joins Mac OS X as an eye candy über alles desktop just at the moment GNOME and KDE had just about caught up to XP in looks and basic functionality. For a long time, the Linux desktop just wasn’t up to snuff, but recent versions of Ubuntu, GNOME, and KDE have come tantalizingly close to being a full desktop replacement for non-technical users. This perception, though, unfortunately requires that we squint just right and ignore the lacking plug-n-play support for a number of proprietary techs (3D hardware, wireless devices, flash support, media codecs), but the point remains that, for a very significant chunk of casual users, a GNOME or KDE desktop is actually the best current option, even better than OS X because it’s cheaper and more reliable (maybe it’s just me, but I’ve had trouble with unstable OS X apps, especially the stupid Finder). Now, this still assumes that the casual user has had their system set up by a family expert, but in fact, my main point here is that the desktop Linux community should embrace this assumption: by serving the middle tiers of the user skill-sets—Windows power users, Windows PC builders, and desktop-oriented Linux power users—you will conquer the lower tiers (the naive and User users) because just about everyone today knows someone in the middle tier and uses them for computer assistance. These middle tiers are not themselves being served by the Linux desktop today because there’s nothing compelling about the Linux desktop for them to use it as their own desktop; nor is it quite feasible for them to give Linux to their Aunt Tillie relatives because getting a Linux desktop up to par with Windows/Mac in the media department is basically impossible for these middle tiers of users.

Which finally brings me to my main point and explanation of the title of this post. Serving the Aunt Tillie’s of the world doesn’t take brilliant interface design: being an ad hoc user, Aunt Tillie will basically accept any kind of interface as long as it is kept minimal, doesn’t crash, and doesn’t prompt her with questions about things she doesn’t know anything about (such as ports—of the USB, TCP/IP, or any other variety). This is feasible because, unlike even with User users, Aunt Tillie is not constantly looking for new things to do with her computer. Aunt Tillie doesn’t want to be empowered by her computer to explore the cutting edge; she just wants to keep up to par with those essentials of modern life that only computers can do: email and web browsing, basically. And maybe keep a photo album and a simple calender and do her taxes. The GNOME and KDE people don’t really need to do anything for Aunt Tillie except allow her niece to set her up a user account that locks everything down and presents only the four programs she uses in her start menu. The desktop has no further responsibilities to Aunt Tillie, for the details of those apps should rightfully be left up to the apps themselves.

Ergo, fuck Aunt Tillie. She comes with the rest.

I’ll discuss how to make the desktop compelling for power users in my next post. Proprietary support is a controversial topic much-covered elsewhere, but I’m sure I’ll get around to that topic myself sometime soon. (It’s a whole other debate whether free software needs to win the masses or not; I’ve heard Chris DiBona say no, but I believe it does for a few reasons, mainly because legal threats to free software may kill it unless it grabs a larger user base of ‘ordinary’ users.)