Being a go-getter kind of person has, on occasion, actually gotten me somewhere besides into a mess. With having significantly more free time than usual because of being on summer vacation, I decided to work on a document which combined two RFCs I have already written, which can be found here and here. Knowing how it seems like discussions on R2 usability seem to be both endless and unproductive, I decided to put some the ideas into code before publishing it in an effort to demonstrate that most, if not all, of the ideas I propose are practical, reasonable, and worth implementing for the second version of the community’s beloved OS. The first of these to see public eye is the Filer.
A couple of articles I just read (here and its rebuttal) are written by Linux users about why Linux is the best and how to get a regular person (hereafter referred to as Joe User) to start using Linux. To save you the time of reading the two articles, the first is entitled “Understanding the Common User: Everything should be as simple as it is, " by Keyto. The article is partly about how a Common User thinks, but primarily that quite a lot of the problem with Linux is the current users – geeks who have trouble relating to Joe at Joe’s level of expertise instead of the geek’s level. The rebuttal “Get Real or How NOT To Convert Your Grandma to Linux,” by Karol Trojanowski, advises that Linux users shouldn’t try to “convert” everyone and why. A quote from the article describes Linux perfectly: “A wand does magic in a wizard’s hand. Otherwise, it’s just a stick.” All too true. Many of the problems that Linux advocates face are the same ones that BeOS proponents struggle with. The first step to effective persuasion is understanding the audience, so who exactly is Joe User, anyway?
