WizardStan
Mega GP Mania
- Joined
- May 24, 2008
- Messages
- 16,731
This is the point of disagreement, where the "elitist" comes from. It is not always laziness or ignorance that prevents someone from being able to interact with it, sometimes you have legitimately created a design that only works for a subset of people. When you say "if you don't understand then you must learn full stop", ignoring the very real possibility that maybe your way isn't the best way, you are necessarily segregating yourself, defining yourself as better than others, ie the practical definition of "elite".Agreed, to a point. Linux was not originally intended to be used by everyone for everything. That is something that happened over time with many things added on. If someone is too lazy (or ignorant) to learn how to interact with the OS the problem lies with them, not those that created the thing. If they are unwilling to fix that deficiency there are other options they should should use instead. They will still need to learn how to use the other OS.
Your manual vs automatic transmission analogy is very apt here, because there was a time when people needed to learn to drive manual. Sometimes users struggled with shifting gears, either because they got momentarily distracted or because they physically could not shift the gear and hold the wheel at the same time (or push two pedals at the same time perhaps), it was a recognized problem, and one day someone invented the automatic transmission, thus making cars more accessible to those that struggled before AND to those that didn't. They did not say "you're using the manual transmission wrong, you need to learn how to shift gears", they worked on the problem until it was solved. And you know what happened? Several drivers began lamenting the loss of manual transmission, that you weren't *really* driving unless you were driving stick, that despite this automatic transmission invention everyone should still learn to drive manual because you needed to understand what your car was doing even if it was doing it for you automatically. That's elitist, and wrong, and still going on today actually.
This mostly ties all back to what Sulu originally said, that a "beginner friendly system" is flawed, the idea that there necessarily needs to be a certain level of difficulty to keep out "undesirables", that if the "beginner" doesn't want to become "advanced" then there's a problem with them. I disagree, fundamentally. I'm mostly arguing with you because you seem to fall on a similar side as Sulu, that there's certain "undesirable" people *unwilling* to learn that should be kept out, and you always make for an excellent debate partner.
Are there people that are bad drivers? Obviously. Just on my daily commute I've got people cruising in the passing lane, people changing lanes without signaling, weaving in and out of traffic and cutting people off. I swear there's, like, 5 people in this entire city that knows how to merge (I kid you not, someone actually flipped me off because there was traffic and I slowed down to initiate a zipper merge instead of flying to the end of the onramp and just forcing my way in, the latter of which has been proven over and over to be pisspoor traffic management, but I digress)
Would some of these people become better drivers if they were educated? Absolutely. Some of them are just assholes and know that what they're doing is wrong, but it saves them a few seconds so they don't care if it puts people's lives at risk. Others, like the zipper merge, could be solved if people just went on the internet and googled "what's the best way to merge". But who the hell does that? I actually got fed up one day, figuring there must be a better way, so I looked it up, but not everyone is going to do that, most people aren't going to think to do that. I recognize that I'm in a very niche set of people that learns in a specific way while others learn in different ways: merging works "well enough" that most drivers simply don't feel the need to expend the energy looking up a better way. This is not a fundamental problem; I have absolutely zero doubt that there are things I'm doing every day that are suboptimal but since they work well enough I don't bother looking up a better way, and I will bet hard money that sometime today you will do something that could have been done better but you didn't even think to find out, you simply did it the same way you always have or the way it seems obvious that you should. The "merge interface" (ie, the onramp) doesn't encourage a zipper merge, it actually discourages it, and this can be "blamed" on engineers that came up with the onramp design in the first place: there are better ways of doing it, ways that encourage a zipper merge, but at the time when most onramps were built they didn't know that, they designed it with the information they knew at the time. Even today, very few onramps are being built to encourage zipper merging because it's just not really efficient to do so. You know how some cities have fixed it though, cleanly and efficiently? By putting electronic signs along the road which tell drivers what to do: slow down here, wait to merge, merge here one car at a time. And it works. But the instant you start putting these "helper" signs into an OS you're "dumbing it down" and welcoming in the undesirables who are unwilling to learn. Guess what, the undesirables are already here. If the interface can be made a little better so that I don't have to deal with them not knowing what they're doing then I am 100% OK with that.
And there's going to come a day when the roads are populated with automatic cars, and you know what's going to happen? Elitist drivers are going to lament the days when you actually had to learn how to drive. You know what? Fuck those guys, making cars automatic saved lives, it made faster travel accessible to others that it otherwise wouldn't have been, and the fully autonomous car is going to do the same. If I want to literally drive to work and need to be relegated to the "human driver" lane while autonomous cars zip by I'm not going to be upset that the autonomous car came, I'm not going to complain that "no one knows how to drive anymore", I'm going to recognize that I'm in a minority, that autonomous cars have made the world a better place, and that I need to enjoy my hobby away from others if that's what I want to do.
Highly skilled linux users are a minority of people on the planet, the "excellent driver" of the computer world. Computers, however, are accessible to pretty much everyone: they're cheap and easy to get, people WILL use them, there's no stopping it. If we cling to the notion that you *must* learn certain things to use the OS we're going to miss out on the proverbial automatic transmission, the electric turn signal, power steering, windshield wipers, and all the other things that auto manufacturers invented over the years to make driving more accessible. Seat belts, man! Huge amounts of money went into advertising for them because people literally had to be taught. These things save lives, so many lives, it's stupidly obvious today that wearing your seat belt is important, but 30 years ago no one even thought of it, they didn't have to, they just didn't use them. But the proverbial linux elitist would suggest people just need to learn to drive, then we wouldn't have need of seatbelts.
I want Linux to be the inventor. I want it to create the seat belt, the automatic transmission, the proverbial widgets that helps everyone even if it takes away a small amount of control from a standard install, and then watch as Microsoft and Apple "invent" the exact same thing a few years later. This has happened several times, but looking around several linux communities there's been a lot of pushback, there's a lot of "this is good enough now, this new stuff is just change for the sake of change" and that's the elitist attitude that I don't like, that I legitimately feel is holding us back. Wayland vs Xorg, systemd vs sysvinit. Evolution is an inevitability and I'd rather be on the side of advancement theoretically guiding it than on the backside trying to hold it back. But this is where the computer vs car analogy breaks down, where there's even less to complain about when using a computer than there is to driving a car: if you buy an automatic transmission car, it's prohibitively expensive to replace it with a manual transmission, whereas ripping out systemd and replacing it with init again (and all the requirements on top of that) is a one day job I can do half drunk; if someone wants to drive their car themself in a world of autonomous vehicles they are forced to conform to certain restrictions because you are necessarily interacting with others on the road, whereas my computer at home I can use it in whatever way I want and not interfere with anyone else on the "road" (caveat being unless I am actually going out of my way to interfere with other users via virus writing or whatever, but that's a completely different discussion)
This particular topic is very hot for me right now. I'm required to use a Mac at work (I'm petitioning for Linux desktops, they'll probably happen in May) and I just upgraded the OS to Sierra and the number of things that changed and the number of people telling me I need to learn the new way of doing it because that's the way that it is should be criminal. Nothing major, nothing that I couldn't get used to or work around, but things that I really shouldn't have to if the interface had been designed just a little better, marginally better; a little slider so that some currently static value is now dynamic or something. A week prior I probably wouldn't have thought of any of this, but this week I realize how much bullshit it is that some people think there's only one way to use a computer and everyone needs to learn to use them in that way. I, an advanced Linux user, am quite literally a victim of this kind of elitism, and it has made my daily work-life a little worse because of it. I'd feel mighty hypocritical if I didn't fight against it in my own "home" as it were.It seems I am not alone in long posts