FreeBSD and hardware??

[Jerry McAllister]

On Tue, Dec 02, 2008 at 01:41:43PM -0500, Bob McConnell wrote:

> 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.

That's easy.   Actually easier with just a simple mv command.
Who cares about drag and drop.   That is harder.

> 
> 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.

Works fine around here.

////jerry

> 
> 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
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