FreeBSD and hardware??

[Bob McConnell]

On Behalf Of Chad Perrin
> On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 01:25:24PM -0500, Bob McConnell wrote:
>> On Behalf Of Chad Perrin
>> 
>> On the other hand, both Unix and Linux have a long way to go before
they
>> can match Microsoft's ease of use on the GUI. I believe the best way
>> to attack that problem is to find a new paradigm to replace the
desktop,
>> which is not a great interface model to begin with.
> 
> I guess that depends on your definition of "ease of use".  In my
little
> world, "ease of use" involves the ease, efficiency, and speed of task
> completion via an interface with which I'm familiar.  It seems from
what
> you said that in your little world "ease of use" means "familiarity",
> since that's really the major win for MS Windows interfaces, to the
> majority of its users.

Here are two simple tests for ease of use.

1. View a tree of files and directories, some local some remote mounts.
Highlight a random group of those objects. Move the entire group in one
motion by dragging and dropping the collection to a new location in the
tree.

2. Do an SMB mount of remote directories onto the desktop or your home
directory. Open any application and access files in that directory as
easily as when they are on the local drive.

I have not been able to do either of these on Ubuntu 7.10 or
XFCE/Slackware 12. In the first case, I need to cut and paste the
individual files one at a time. I can't even move a directory. In the
second, I have been unable to get Amarok, vlc, xine or any other
multimedia application I have tried, to recognize the SMB mounted
directory. It is invisible to them. At the application level there
should be absolutely no difference between a local drive and a mounted
remote drive, no matter what protocol was used to mount it. The
application should not need to implement smb:// itself.

I am not even going to talk about how difficult it is to find and modify
basic configuration files, particularly after the LSB crowd really
screwed everything up.

Once you fix basic problems like these, then we can talk about how to
redefine ease of use.

Bob McConnell