The Comedy of Linux, its themes

[tashirosgt]

My impression of the typical Linux expert is a person who knows all about modules and servers and configuration files, just the type of expert you would want to have fix your computer. But as to the computers of the expert himself, they usually have some comical flaw. Perhaps he must keep unplugging and plugging in his scanner to have it work. Perhaps the last update he did made all his desktop icons vanish. The list goes on and on. In analyzing the themes of the Linux Comedy, I arrive at a single consistent motif: over sophistication. It is the comic theme of the expert who outsmarts himself.

Take sound as an example. The typical user wants to do something simple like play a sound file or record a message with the microphone. So what does the typical distribution giive him? A tape recorder? No, he gets an entire sound studio. He has a a mixer with all sorts of controls and adjustments, all set to some infeasible set of defaults.

Gimp is another example. You try to do something simple like cut and paste images and all of a sudden you find that your are dealing with "layers" of things that seem to erase each other.

The X Windows System predates Linux, but I think its incorporation into the Linux world is another illustration of this comic theme. The sophistication here is that it is made to run over networks and display programs that are running on remote machines. So how do you set things up on a single machine? Well, just pretend the single machine is both itself and a remote machine. Make the machine's applications do all the authentication processes that one uses over a network. And voila, you have "Your Gnome session lasted less than 10 seconds" and "Error: Cannot open display 0:0".

I predict this trend will continue. The programmer who contributes code to free software projects is likely to be an expert at the subject matter of the program. It is only natural for an expert to think that what everyone needs is the most general and sophisticated approach. Don't all math teachers think people really need to know more about math? Don't history teachers think people do not know enough history? And how closely do the History Department and Math Department coordinate their efforts?

[AndyGreen]

Your musings seem to me to a jumped over something worth noting. If a system is excessively capable, like X, but functional and correct (ie, it works), then given a Free license this is a great opportunity to create lower functionality variants from the whole. Whereas if all Linux had was trivial apps, architecting great works on the back of a 200K main.c without a makefile is not going to be easy.

[Shadow Skill]

I just think that the users even more so than the developers in Linux tend to delude themselves into believing that overly complicated ways of handling things is good and that those who do not share the same delusion are not worthy.

[sej7278]

I disagree with the point that is implied that simple is better.

I think if it's possible to add a lot of features to software, then the more the better, however you need to have a simplified abstraction layer - be that a simple GUI or sensible defaults in a .conf file, or whatever.

I know I'd be pissed if X didn't have remote sessions because some n00b thought it was too hard to configure!

[AndyGreen]

Hm, but one cannot arrive at the "overly complicated" part without considering the purpose of the software and the needs of the user. My wife is able to use Gimp to do brightness and contrast correction on photos after been shown once. My kids use Open Office after one of them was shown once.

If you want "overly complicated", take a look at Microsoft Office. Yes it is still accessible for simple tasks, but so is The Gimp and Open Office. Now Qmail: you'd have a point.

[tashirosgt]

The good thing about X is the remote sessions and no network administrator would want to be without it. But most home users of a single computer don't want to be a network administrator either. Most home users don't have raid arrays so they don't need logical volumes. They would like their hotplug devices to come up in predictable places because they only have a limited inventory of them. So I'm not saying that one point of view ( network administrator vs single computer user) is right or wrong. I'm only saying they are different. My observation is that the Linux distributions tend to favor the tasks of the netword administrator at the expense of the single computer users. And if you were to have a race between the network administrator and the "nOOb" (and his Windows machine) in performing simple tasks like printing envelopes or recording the kids singing Happy Birthday, the nOOb would often win. As to a job like configuring clusters of servers etc, that race goes to the network administrator and Linux. I find the comical part to be the clash in attitudes. The ordinary user wants something simple, perhaps he wants his printer to work. The network administrator thinks this is just a minor inconvenience and all you have to do is download a new driver or reconfigure cups. He does this and leaves feeling that he has proved the superiority of Linux. The ordinary user is left with the impression that this freeware stuff is a pile of crap. I think this is funny. (But then I enjoy watching "Scare Tactics" too.)

[Pudduh]

Your musings seem to me to a jumped over something worth noting. If a system is excessively capable, like X, but functional and correct (ie, it works), then given a Free license this is a great opportunity to create lower functionality variants from the whole. Whereas if all Linux had was trivial apps, architecting great works on the back of a 200K main.c without a makefile is not going to be easy.

He does actually have a point. I'd rather use MS paint or another program where I can just paste a screenshot and resize it to 640x480 than go mess around for half an hour in GIMP. I mean whats the point?

Its like deciding to go to a shopping centre but decide to use the Big Foot monster truck to drive across a housing estate rather than take a road that goes straight to it!

The same thing occured to me when I was doing anime fanfiction. There is one main site for anime fanfiction called fanfiction.net. Basically every other windows user would mess around for hours on end trying to format their fanfics properly to display on fanfiction.net and guess what? All the Linux users crowed and snickered.....then spent the same time pissing about with openoffice trying to format THEIR fics.

And here I was with a specially downloaded program for Windows and Linux which took your txt file and automatically formatted it to a specially done rtf file for Fanfiction.net.

Basically all the Linux users saw it and whined "b-but whats the point in that when you can use Openoffice" which I interjected with "yeah for an hour or so before you get tired with it and publish it in it's unformatted state and sigh as everyone moans at why it looks rubbish?"

I mean honestly.

[Raafi]

i must say that as a newbie, i chuckled at the post, because it does have some points

but i must admit, the more i get into linux, the more i want to be able to be "master of the fedora", from what i read of most of the guys here, fedora/linux is fine just the way it is, with more improvements everyday, i was given a free windows disk and havent installed it yet, i am enjoying my linux (and all of its annoying quirks) just fine

maybe there should be levels of certain things, or maybe just leave it as it is, who knows, but it was an interesting read

[owakroeger]

Maybe I'm just lucky, or too stupid to know any better. I'm certainly no expert, but I haven't had any trouble with OpenOffice, gimp, sound, or printers, or my desktop. The ONLY problems I've had have been self induced when I tweaked something and broke something else. But, even my screw-ups have been relatively easy to fix, thanks to help from this forum and the man pages and documentation I had sense enough to buy.
I am still relatively new to Linux, just about 15 months. Most of that has been with Fedora Core, starting with Core 2. But the transition was fun. Seriously, I mean it was fun, the transition from Windows to Fedora.
The comedy I've experienced has been laughing at my mistakes when my enthusiasm exceeded my abilities. The fun has been, partly, learning how to fix my mistakes, and learning from the experience.
My $0.02
owa

[kerrysl]

My ideal would be for most programs to have 'simple' and 'advanced' modes. In simple it just works with sensible defaults. In advanced you get to play with everything to make it 'just right' for your machine. To me this is the best of both worlds.

I'm pretty confident that Linux will get there, but its not there yet.