How dumb can GNU/Linux users be?
Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 28 November 2006. This one picked up some diggs and I thought would make it to the front page with resulting praise, adulation, and scathing condemnation, but then it was cruelly buried. I suppose my provocative, attention-getting headline may have been frowned on. I paid the price and only got 0.15 seconds of fame instead of 15 minutes.
Question: How dumb can GNU/Linux users be?
Answer: As dumb as necessary.
Let’s rephrase: How technically sophisticated should GNU/Linux users have to be? How knowledgeable should any computer user have to be? The answer to that, of course, ranges from “very” to “not very.” We need to get past the name-calling of clueless newbie and sneering elitist, and understand that there are going to be varying levels of ability in any community, including the one made up of people interested in using free software. From there, I suggest it is critically important that we expand the size of the the free software community. That means dealing with more “dumb” people.
I’ve been thinking about this in the aftermath of Steve Goodwin’s post last week and the resulting discussion. The commenters take up familiar battle positions. Newbies suck because they can’t figure it out and can’t be bothered to learn how to figure it out. GNU/Linux users suck because they are snobs and the system is hard to use and the combination of the two is why we’ll never take over the desktop.
I see dumb people. They’re everywhere. They walk around like everyone else. They don’t even know they’re dumb.
“Dumb” is an inflammatory label, obviously. What we really have are inexperienced people trying to use something new and unfamiliar. I like to think so, because I’m in that group. I may be starting out with slightly more knowledge of Unix-type operating systems, and I may have better skills at searching and trying to find simple answers than some people, but I still get stumped sometimes with asking the right question, or with composing the right search query.
I have empathy for people who struggle at an even more basic level, because I know what it’s like to not understand things. I’ve worked with people whose skills are so far ahead of mine that I get the sense of what it must be like for people lower down on the ladder. (If I can be so arrogant to place myself higher than the lowest rung.) Yet still, these people are interested in trying GNU/Linux for various reasons. This is great!
What should we do?
When they struggle, we can point out that Windows isn’t necessarily so much easier to use. That it just happens to come installed on most computers so that more people are familiar with it, and since it’s so widespread, the hardware vendors support it better. Well: duh. That doesn’t help get us to our goal: more widespread use of free software. It just tells us we have hard work ahead of us to recruit more free software users and help them figure it out.
Our job isn’t so much to explain why Windows continues to dominate, but instead is to break that dominance by getting more people to value freedom and use free software. In order to do that, we have to make it easier for people to switch. We don’t want to offer excuses.
We do need to understand why Windows holds the position it does, however. Lock-in is one reason, and sure, Microsoft plays dirty tricks. But I think we also have to acknowledge that Windows is easier to use in many ways. All those useability tests that Microsoft conducts actually have some value and lead to improvements.
Efforts are being made to create easier-to-use GNU/Linux distributions, and from my experiments with one of them, Ubuntu, things are going well. It would be helpful if some of the people who use far superior and more manly distros would stop tearing apart the efforts of those working hard to bring in new recruits by offering a “friendlier” user experience. Likewise it would be helpful if people didn’t tear down anyone trying to learn something new and potentially enlist in our ranks. Scathing condemnation of enlistees has worked well for the armed forces, but do you think it will be helpful for us to demand new users drop and give us twenty?
Again, how dumb are we allowed to be?
That gets us back to the question of how much people should be expected to know in order to use their computer. I played around with an analogy comparing computer literacy to the invention of the printing press and the industrial revolution and the rise of literacy.
Reading and writing take many years to become proficient at, and it’s considered an essential skill in our society. Shouldn’t we expect something similar for computer skills, the engine of the new Information Revolution? However, my wife pointed out to me that although most of us can read and write, we’re not all reading physics textbooks. I think this is a good point (and not just because she is the boss of me). We should all know how to read and write, but it’s not necessary that we all consume the most challenging works available.
We can look at the good old car analogy, but to me that never works very well either. I know very little about how my car works. All I care is that it gets me from here to there. Shouldn’t it be the same with my computer? I don’t think so. The computer can do so much more. It’s a brain amplifier, not just a leg enhancement. Where is “here,” and where is “there?” We should be willing to expend as much effort learning to use it as we did to learn reading and writing, so that we’ll have the necessary base to get the most benefit possible.
A signpost is useful to a literate person, but only to a point. A novel or a textbook can enlighten and lift its reader up so much more. A car is similarly useful in limited ways, but a computer can and will take us so much further. But we shouldn’t expect everyone to get Calculus, and we shouldn’t expect everyone to know how to rebuild an engine.
Again, what should we do?
So let’s get back to these pesky newbies and their problems and our headaches in dealing with them. (Wait, I’m one of the pesky newbies. But you know what I mean.) Why should we suffer them?
I say that we need them. If you’re interest is in the success of free software for the freedom it gives us, I think you will agree that the more people using it, the better. If we’re just a small, isolated community, it will be more likely that the forces of “unfreedom” will be able to lobby for laws that effectively eliminate the use of free software.
If we want to grow to be a large community, it follows that we need more people using GNU/Linux and other free software. This is a battle on two fronts. Making the software easier to use for the people who just want to read their pulp fiction and take their car for Sunday drives, and doing everything we can to help people understand it and get over their hangups.
Yes, it’s frustrating if people are unable or unwilling to figure out the easy stuff. If they resist learning how to fish for themselves. We don’t want to answer the same old questions day after day. But still, I think we need to keep handing them the fish, and do our best to help them fillet it and catch some of their own.
Think of it as community service. You should limit the time you spend, but please do spend it. Do things that you’d rather not, for the betterment of the whole community. Again, you may ask what’s in it for you, and does it really help to have these dimwits in the community, causing headaches for years to come?
Yes!
First, behave: they’re not dimwits, most of them. Second, many of these people are able to reproduce successfully, and their children will have the chance to grow up knowing what freedom is and valuing it. They may contribute greatly to the community and to your own children. This may be a generational struggle. The other side is hard at work indoctrinating children with anti-freedom propaganda. We need to work just as much at gaining our own recruits. Go forth and multiply!
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It would help if “fishing” actually worked. One recurring problem I’m seeing with Web research in nearly all technical areas is this:
Search engines work very well when you search for the answer, and very poorly when you search for the question.
Result, of course, being people search everywhere for their question, don’t find anything, post to usenet, and get instantly flamed by three or four people saying JFGI (Just … google it) and posting various queries that never occurred to the searcher to try. Because for someone who already knows the answer, finding it with a search engine was easy, and somehow they think this means it would have been just as easy for someone who only knew the question.
Oops.
Ultimately, there are two sources of information on the internet: googling it and asking someone. When the first fails the second happens. We need more tolerance from question-answerers, but I think we also need better search, or at least better search-optimized pages. Pages with the answers to important questions should be made to score highly on queries based on the questions, even where those queries are phrased entirely in the problem domain without words from the solution domain. Otherwise they won’t be found by those who need them most.
This can be solved by making pages that are the answers to important questions score highly on problem-domain terms. Fortunately, with modern search engine ranking algorithms, that doesn’t require the page author’s cooperation. Anyone who finds it useful to answer a given question can link to it using the question’s language in their link text and enough people doing so will boost the answer page’s ranking for such queries.
Smarter search engines would, of course, help too.
And so would better documentation bundled with something.
Five years ago, this experience was fairly typical:
* Download some free software.
* Install it.
* Run it.
* It works, but there’s a lot of documentation it’s supposed to have, which isn’t showing up when you go to browse it.
* Look about the readme.txt file that is available.
* Apparently the documentation needs to be “built” to be usable.
* Perform build procedure, thankfully not documented in that documentation that still needs to be built but rather in the readme file.
* Procedure fails, saying the sources are missing.
* Reinstall. Same deal.
* Check the .rpm file manifest. The sources ARE missing.
* Where to complain/get the missing files?
* Seems there’s a mailing list and no other alternative.
* Sigh, another login/password pair to remember.
* Create one. Go to post. Oh, what’s this? Suggests searching the archives for your question first.
* Check archives. Great. They’re full of email addresses, all of them in clear text. And the answer isn’t already posted.
* Sigh, write email, and resign self to a noticeable increase in daily spam.
* Get flamed, and caught in a circular finger-pointing exercise where the developers blame the packagers for omitting stuff, the packagers blame the developers, and neither side offers you any clue as to how you can obtain the missing files. The most helpful suggestion being to *write* the missing documentation yourself — which is ludicrous, since you’d need to get the documentation first to know what to write, and if you knew it all backwards and forwards anyway why would you even be asking???Part of the problem was to lose sight of the fact that there was an end-user with a problem who wants to download a file, push a button, and have their problem go away, not actually do a whole bunch of extra work or even create manually the stuff that was omitted from the distribution. Especially given the implicit assumption that the user would even have the skills to do the latter.
If I got a flat-packed furniture kit from IKEA that was missing a part, IKEA would exchange it or furnish the missing part, not argue with me between whether the factory or the shipping company was to blame, and certainly not suggest that if I couldn’t find the part I should actually make it myself from raw materials! And IKEA behavior is typical of when open source does something *well*, but is hardly the apotheosis of user-friendliness itself…
Posted by Nemo on 20 December 2006 at 7:01 pm
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A kinder, gentler GNU/Linux… most LUGs seem to be helpful. I haven’t encountered many of the ascorbic Linux folks in a while.
Maybe they wait and ambush newbies? :-)
Posted by Taran Rampersad on 21 December 2006 at 8:20 am
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There’s a group of reasonably capable people, already somewhat competent with computers, just waiting to be converted to GNU/Linux: research scientists.
If there were a GNU/Linux bundle that would replace (and be compatible with) Powerpoint, Word, Excel, IE/Safari, Acrobat and Photoshop on Windows or Mac, AND could be reliably installed on a majority of computers that would otherwise be scrapped (that is, models from a few years ago), I think the potential “market” in research would be huge. It appeals to researchers not only because it’s not proprietary, but (in fact mainly) because it’s so much cheaper.
Convince the world’s scientists that it’s safe to thumb their noses at Microsoft — that GNU/Linux will not be more problematic than Windows already is — and you’re on your way to a big expansion in marketshare.
Posted by Bill Hooker on 21 December 2006 at 11:19 am
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My feeling is that the problem is not so much proprietary applications — for one thing, most labs will have a couple Windows machines or Macs around to run things like, say, ImageQuant (to work with information from a phosphorimager). Also, a dedicated computer with pre-installed software is often built in to the price of things like phosphorimagers, RT-PCR machines, chromatography stations and so on. Even better, there is a *lot* of free (speech + beer) scientific software available, especially for bioinformatics.
Where I think the block lies is the perception that GNU/Linux is a dog to set up and keep running. That’s still my feeling, though I acknowledge that it’s way out of date. I really should just get an old machine and try to get GNU/Linux up and running on it. I even have a Red Hat distro around here somewhere, and where I work there is a room packed full of (not very) old computers. I’ve been saying for years that there’s a fortune to be made by selling computers packed with free software to scientists…
Posted by Bill Hooker on 22 December 2006 at 8:28 pm
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there’s that saying about old ones and new tricks
Yeah, ouch. I’m not looking forward to the learning curve myself.
Just to play devil’s advocate for a moment:
people somehow aren’t counting all the spyware and virus infestations when they think about ongoing difficulties
Macs don’t face the same problems either, for the same reason: malware authors target Windows because of its marketshare. If Mac or GNU/Linux or anything else ever achieves, say, even 25% marketshare, it will start to draw the attention of undesirables with coding skills.
Posted by Bill Hooker on 24 December 2006 at 12:17 am
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