[PLUG] Natty is here

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 02 May 2011 17:36:53 -0700
Word Wizard <Word.Wizard at comcast.net> dijo:

>Either the OS is designed for newcomers or Linux or veteran users.

So you conclude that a distro can't meet the needs of more than one of
these groups? 

>Right now Natty seems totally hostile to the former while a pain in
>the backside from at least some veteran users. I'm no MS/CS sys-admin
>but I'm not a Linux or Ubuntu newbie either. I love the ease of
>installation and  slick operation of Jaunty-Lucid-Maverick as well as
>the Linux power. Natty has the power of the underlying Linux system
>with none of the convenience of its recent predecessors.

Your opinions are completely valid, but only for you. I'd rather see
some hard research. See below.

>I'm still trying to work through Natty's shortcomings (in Gnome; I've 
>totally forsaken its hopelessly botched KDE implementation) but as yet
>I fail to see anything in Natty that  isn't done as well or better by 
>Jaunty-Lucid-Maverick. An extra mouse stroke to invoke an app is not
>an improvement in my book and I don't think Windows users will see
>that as one.

No comment here. I have not tried Natty yet, and have no plans to do
so. Not because of negative comments such as yours; rather, I just
don't have the time or need.

>Maybe Shuttleworth's Ubuntu is like any other empire that grew too 
>powerful too quickly.  Ubuntu lost sight of achieving worthy desirable 
>goals and chose instead to do whatever it wanted regardless of what
>was desirable, simple because it had the power to do so.

Assuming that Natty is as awful as you opine, do you really think it
was deliberate? Or was it just a bunch of bad ideas?

>On 05/02/2011 09:58 AM, Mike Connors wrote:
>> . An in-depth study of the reactions and problems
>>> of new desktop users, comparing Unity, Gnome, KDE, and a few others,
>>> would be very revealing.

I'm with Mike on this one.

Here is an off-the-cuff idea for a research project. I spent all of
ten minutes cooking this up, so it doubtless needs a lot of tweaking.

Take at least two hundred users in each of several categories, e.g.,
Linux newbies coming from Windows, Linux newbies coming from MacOS,
Linux veterans, etc. Keep data on age and at least self-proclaimed
computer literacy levels.

Give half of them Natty and half of them Maverick. Make each user work
alone at home so none sees what any of the others are doing. Give them
specific user type tasks, such as "write a letter to a potential
employer," "write a term paper for school," "find the meanings of terms
on wikipedia," and so on. Include computer type tasks like "move a file
from one folder to another," "make a backup," and such. Make enough
tasks that it will take them 30 hours or more working with the OS. You
may wish to start them all with the task of installing the OS. 

Make pointed opinion questionnaires to complete at the end of each task,
where the results are numerical so they can be quantified. 

Quantify and compare the results. Send a copy to Shuttleworth.