title: Desktop Systems Review: UI Rant Edition link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/desktop-systems-review-ui-rant-edition/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 167 created: 2010/04/10 17:23:00 created_gmt: 2010/04/10 17:23:00 comment_status: closed post_name: desktop-systems-review-ui-rant-edition status: publish post_type: post

Desktop Systems Review: UI Rant Edition

Just got through the initial config of a brand new dual-core Windows 7 laptop and the re-image of an old Celeron laptop to CentOS 5.4 after a month with Fedora 12.

Let me cut to the chase: all of these new transparency happy, no-evidence-of-where-to-get-a-command-prompt, “simplified” (i.e. limited) configuration, tool-tip infested, “smarter”, “easier”, “intuitive”, 3rd (or is it 4th) generation personal computer gui environments suck.

They truly do.

There was a time when I had respect for gui designers. Windows 3.0 was an improvement on the “MSDOS Executive” from the two prior failed releases. Windows 95’s “Start” menu, as much as I hate to admit it now, was an improvement over the tiles-in-a-window style of Windows 3.

But, although I was willing to put up with the candy-and-gumdrop theme advanced by Windows XP, I found myself in absolute rebellion when it came to Windows Vista. For the record, I didn’t begin reconfiguring all my Windows machines (including those running XP) to use the Classic theme until a month into my experience with Vista. I think Windows XP, at least, is greatly improved when run with the Classic theme.

One reason I stuck with various flavors of Linux as my primary desktop for so long was that it offered a refuge from the user environment chaos that was wreaking havoc among Windows users. I found a comfortable home in the Gnome desktop that shipped with Red Hat Enterprise (and CentOS) systems. It made sense. It was spare. You could right click on the desktop and get a terminal.

From a ui perspective, Windows 7 is just a slightly more refined version of what we got with Vista, except they’ve done so much “better” a job of hiding, obscuring or limiting your configuration options that you have to wonder if Microsoft is part of some kind of conspiracy to degrade American productivity.

Unfortunately some of the same trends in ui design that have ruined the Windows user experience have infected the Linux world.

During my several months on Ubuntu I was consistently annoyed by the ui choices made by its designers, and spent far too much time trying to “correct” them so I could actually use the desktop. I’ve found the same thing is true on Fedora 12, which I drove around for the last month on the old Celeron-equipped laptop I use for casual browsing downstairs.

To be fair Fedora has evolved more into what Red Hat “Rawhide” was years ago, an un-apologetically experimental romp along Linux’s cutting edge, than the standard-setting rock of stability that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become. While I did appreciate that Fedora 12 recognized all my hardware and didn’t require me to spend an hour loading driver software as both Windows Vista and Window 7 did (on hardware actually designed for those operating systems), to be honest the only thing CentOS 5.4 needed was a “modprobe ath5k”, switching on NetworkManager, and a reboot (more evidence for my position that even great products need to be accompanied by good documentation and community support — both Red Hat and CentOS have independently done an outstanding job on that score).

Fedora 12 had other issues, of course. Among these were a much more aggressive integration of iptables, ip6tables (enabling IPv6 by default is such a bad idea that someone in the Linux community should be exiled to the Arctic Circle for it), and SELinux (which although better than App Armor, is also guilty of being a security system designed by experts for experts but inflicted on non-experts). Fedora 12’s performance was awful, even for non-multimedia web browsing. Worse than Vista or Windows 7. And that’s saying something.

But even with all that, it was the Fedora 12 ui that really drove me from it. Like the designers of Windows 7, the Fedora team apparently think that hiding or removing configuration options, or obscuring their operation in inscrutable ways, is progress. And like with those new “improved” Windows products, I wasn’t impressed.

When are the ui designers of the world going to get it? Familiarity is more important than “intuition” when it comes to user productivity. That’s why Windows continues to be the dominant desktop operating system, even years after mainstream Linux surpassed it in performance, reliability and stability. There’s nothing intuitive about operating a computer. There never will be, at least until we get halfway decent speech recognition, and even then I’d expect many people who are logic-challenged to struggle. If I could have their undivided attention of the ui development team over at Microsoft and Red Hat for only two minutes, this is the message I’d deliver:

Don’t make me change my ways.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo