Computers are just a tool, not the prime mover of human future.
If we could stuff a soft, fat rubber ball in the mouths of the world’s mindless fanboys, the silence would be suddenly deafening. That includes the vast majority of Linux users I encounter online. Somebody take away their keyboards — please! There are easily millions of Linux users who aren’t making that much noise, and I wish I could make their lives better. Fanboys make everything worse for everyone regardless of what sort of interest we are discussing.
So we have some good thoughtful articles about why Linux hasn’t hit the mainstream of computer use. Without fail, the stupid fanboys — and sadly way too many developers — pop up insisting that the real problem is users are afraid of change or something equally insipid. People don’t fear change; they don’t give a damn. That is, they don’t care enough about what drives the fanboys to have any kind of strong emotion at all. They don’t adopt Linux because Linux is too strange and — horror! — it’s not worth the trouble to change.
That’s what I was trying to say when I wrote about how wrong Open Source GUIs are. In the first place, they are not user friendly or intuitive. They might be intuitive in the sense that fanboys can quickly figure it out, but to common users the interface is alien. Unlike Windows 95, it does not answer the crying need of a billion users who are pretty much forced to learn how to run a computer or suffer major consequnces. They don’t love computers; they can’t escape them. So when Microsoft spent that millions of dollars testing ordinary humans, they found out what works. It bores the fanboys and developers who eat, sleep and live computers. When fanboys design a computer, the world can’t be bothered.
The problem is not with the common user, but with the developers and fanboys. The code monkeys are dismissive, if not spiteful, toward common user concerns. You would think they designed all this out of some dark hatred for ordinary people, as if ordinary is somehow evil. This is why Game considers computer nerds Gamma; they can be useful when they decide to interact with humans, but they don’t have a clue what makes humans tick. Worst of all, some fanboys and coders are outright Omega, the damaged and twisted perverts who are lucky no one has killed them yet.
Granted, plenty of developers keep their heads down and do good work. I’m sitting here typing this on my Debian Wheezy desktop. I love it, but I’m not a fanboy. For good or ill, the God I serve has called me to watch over and meet the needs of the common folks out there who have to deal with the complexities of real life. I’ll teach them Linux if they feel the need, but most of the time I help them fix Windows and try to keep it secure. That’s sacrilege to the fanboys. They can’t stop me from learning and using their precious Linux for my own needs, but I can surely stop them from harassing me. They haven’t been around much this past year.
Oh, and I have Windows XP running in a virtual machine on this system for stuff that Linux can’t or won’t do. And Windows 7 running on another system around here. Win7 is the new XP in the marketplace, because it’s close enough to the original human default UI that people can still instinctively figure out most of it. Open Source UI developers are too arrogant to take advice from common users, so they keep coming up with lots of computer cool, but nothing anyone can tolerate. This is what happens with developer-centric software.
Somehow I seriously doubt the Linux UI projects will ever figure it out.
