ian

Definitely a help website that focuses on user level questions and not IT pro solutions is desperately needed. Today new users are immediately given misinformation by hard core Linux techies with no clue about usability or user level solutions.

Windows users have a variety of different skills and experience. I guess the most likely ones to try Linux first are not going to be the PC-fearing ultra-causal users, who probably follow what their friends do. But the more adventurous and curious ones, or IT workers.

You mean SMS? I rarely use SMS these days. And I don't know many people with an iPhone. That's a US, UK thing it seems.

Yes. When I use particularly badly designed software, where you know it's from a lazy, cost cutting money grabbing company, and you know you need 8x more clicks, and where any miss-step, means you have to start again, I have great trouble motivating myself to use it.

Managing digital information today is a horrible mess of silos and big business driven incompatibilities. It often drives people to use PDFs, as there is nothing appropriate. Blame the software/businesses, not the victims/users.

I guess, if I'm on Android, this will make no difference to me?

Dolphin has tabs, split screen, a real tree, plus a whole load of other useful productivity features.

If a user speaks a different language, good usability knowledge will tell you, change the software to help the user. Not change the user to help the software. The software is only there to make things easier for people.

As I said for many people, the tasks they do are not always possible or not easy with the CLI. Try drawing a curve, try moving an object from bottom left to a position higher up to the right. Even navigating a tree structure, common in many apps, it's easy to click on a chosen branch directly. Even with CLI options, more people, including CLI users, feel it's natural to use a GUI app to do their email, manage files or browse the web. There is a lot of learnability built in. Discovering new things by accident is a natural benefit. And a big downside of the CLI. Which is not THE natural way at all.

"The command line is the natural way of interacting with a computer."

It's not natural at all for many people. Far from it.

It's not always *fear *of the CLI. I am not interested in memorising a whole load of unnecessary stuff I'd need, to start using a CLI, that I can already do productively with the GUIs. I'm not in IT. I know my way around GUI applications quite well. So it's more worthwhile extending my knowledge there.

Sure there are some people who can't do anything. But there are a large number of full time computer users not in IT who know their GUIs really well. These are candidates to switch to Linux.

If you give someone a text string to paste in, chances are they won't be able to tell if it worked. They might need another command for that. And how can they undo that command? And the next time they need that command they'll have to have stored that command string somewhere! Which is why it is better to show them the option in their application GUI, as the GUI will provide feedback on the status. And makes it obvious how to undo the change, and they know where to go next time. Otherwise they are dependent on you forever. Also, I doubt if there are any text commands for most things I do on a computer.

You don't design a UI around the relatively few occasions when GUI help is too hard for some helper.

Yes. You can bork your system via the registry. But only some parts of the registry are dangerous. Changing the mouse scrolling direction as I do, hasn't given me issues so far.