Does the Vista/7 approach still work for Win 8/8.1?

Fantastic post. I see you are on Gentoo now. How do you like it?

I like the way you wrote this. Your usage of user-friendly and newbie-friendly hits a note for me. I'm glad I found your page. Thanks and cheers.

a quick look at what was done with such limited systems as DOS
it's amazing just how far computers are NOW from living up to the power we now have

when I started in to computers it was the day of the 8bit computers
my 5 year old $300.00 laptop would have been (had it been around ) the fastest computer on earth on the day I bought my first timex 1000 with the 16k ram pack it was also a $300.00 computer

Speaking of user-friendly DOS and CPM, I really miss some aspects of both, and still use (with FreeDos, and dosemu) some old Dos programs, that (for me) are more user-friendly than what I have found in any GUI program. Also, I miss the old hardware - printers (for example) that could easily be set to print any width or length of paper, and could be set to print 500 pages, or 1000 labels, at a time, and not need attention until it was done.

But I wouldn't trade my modern inkjet printer with it's CISS, scanner, etc. for one of those old ones, or 4G of memory for 640k (or less). And (though I still use DOS progams) I wouldn't want to be without Linux.

Slackware is user friendly always has been
It's just picky about who it makes friends with

People just take the term in the wrong way and always use it in the wrong place, this shouldn't even be used(actualy in my opnion it shouldn't even exist).
What in the hell is user-friendly?? Is it my friend?
The proper word to use would be familiar, so, one could say: the way that distro works is more familiar to some users than to others. A thing can't just be your friend, there is nothing friendly about it.

Regards

I agree, it is just, the taste of each user...

I consider debian friendlier than Ubuntu.

I completely agree with you. The term "user-friendliness" has two parts, "user" and "friendliness". Now a permutation of "users" and "friendliness" yields a long list. Not any two users are completely same in taste, nor do they need an OS for exactly same purpose.

Then again, if you're choosing between Windows and Linux and you have some experience on how to run an OS wished by you, you might consider Linux. But for choosing between two linux distros, it takes a lot of things to take on account, isn't it?

A thoughtful and logical post, indeed!

You can take the "user-friendly" abstraction to any level you wish...I know programmers who think using precompiled code is "user-friendly" because you don't have to read man pages on system calls and such...and I'm sure there's some crazy old assembly hacker out there who thinks function calls are for wimps...etc...etc...

But the GUI vs. non-GUI level is a critical one because it divides a GREAT many computer users, so it's nice to see someone calling BS on it like this. Good post.

And rich_c, that comment made me laugh =)

I see your point. I'm pretty dependent on various GUI programs to get my work done (and play). So I'm using Mint 10. It makes a lot of decisions for me, and executes them without a problem. But I keep remembering those DOS days (before there was a windows OS). And before that CPM. I got a lot of work done then using command line.

Now I'm really enjoying learning to use command line in linux. Still, for now, I'm going to stick with one that does a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

BTW, Windows could be said to be very hacker friendly. It's just that the hacker isn't in front of it.

One user's friendliness isn't necessarily another user's friendliness. If it was, either we'd never have managed to create computers in the first place, or we'd all be building our own hardware and writing our own assemblers. It's better that we are all different.

I know exactly what you mean. The worst of all are people that say they can't use Linux because Windows is user friendly. Are they insane? How can an OS with so many security and stability issues be user friendly???