A post from my blog which can be found at
http://server.ericsbinaryworld.com/blog/?p=104

As we saw in yesterday’s post, one of the things the author of the article suggested was that Linux needed to get simpler in order to gain a wider audience. But I say, hell no! Do not dumb down Linux! One of the most powerful things about Linux is that we still have access to the raw commands and configurations that allow each person’s computer to be infinitely different from the next. Already part of this process has taken place with a right-click in KDE (at least in FC3) not even having an option for opening a terminal. Look at Microsoft, it’s such a pain to use DOS now and, although some don’t like it, text commands hold a much greater amount of power and complexity than an icon can.

Another related complaint I hear a lot is, “Does Linux REALLY need 15 web browers, 20 IRC clients, and 10 terminal programs?” I believe the answer is a definitive YES! It certainly does! Why do some want to make Linux like the monster we hate? (Microsoft) Microsoft, you will remember is “evil” because they limit choice. They don’t include Firefox or any other browsers in Windows, just IE. And they believe that everyone should use IE or Windows Media Player or any other program they produce. That’s why they enter into deals with companies to only make things compatible on Microsoft products. That’s bunk! I don’t know about the rest of my readers, but as an American you can’t get anymore anti-American than limiting my choice. I have the choice whether or not to believe in a God whether or not to vote, etc and these are big issues. So I want choice on my computer!

For example, recently I began trying out Fluxbox, a window manager based on Blackbox source code, because of the limitations of the donated computers I’m running Linux on. (Unfortunately school work requires me to keep a computer that can run Windows - as well as a lack of a Photoshop port - the GIMP not handling RAW pictures just doesn’t cut it for me) I previously loved KDE to the point of advocating it to anyone who asked. It was certainly better than Gnome and as far as I knew those were the only choices. But now my eyes have been opened and I love Fluxbox, XFCE, and many of the other window managers. They do what I need them to do and are customizable in the way I want them to be customizable. Will I ever go back to KDE? Perhaps, when I get a better computer. For now, my main computer has been running Fluxbox for 14 days straight and it works fine for me.

But without choice this would have been impossible. I would have been stuck with a windows manager too bloated for my computer. Sound familiar? Yes! That’s Windows ME or XP. Why have something with more bells and whistles than you need? My look on life is that you should have a WM that uses the fewest amount of system resources so that you can dedicate the rest of them to running programs! What a novel idea if Windows didn’t take up so much of my RAM that my computer chokes at the most basic of tasks.

So developers, please, if you can read this, DO NOT DUMB DOWN LINUX. There are forums for doing this like Linspire and other Linux Win-Clones. But for the rest of us, allow us to have the power of Linux. Otherwise, people will move on. We don’t want Windows, but free as in beer. We want Linux! At least I do…

I agree 100%. What is nice with Linux is that you are still able to use
your brain.. I hate when it when I can't choose, that's what windows
does, preventing people from choosing, making them think there is
only one way to do things, but look at people's cultures, they're
all different, and that means we're not robots yet..

I don't think we should "dumb down" Linux, but we should make it easier to use. The only thing keeping it complex gains is making those of us who can use it feel "l33t", which is a ridiculous reason for doing anything. We *CAN* make it simpler without sacrificing anything. Not everything should require manual tweaking from the command line or editing configuration files: that's GREAT for some of us, but there are other people out there.

I could not imagine telling my girlfriend she should use Linux two years ago. Today, I could point her to Ubuntu linux as an excellent choice. I wish I could tell her to use Gentoo, but we need a GUI installer and better GUI front ends to Portage first.

This is not dumbing it down: I can still open a console and type 'sudo emerge -vuD --newuse world' and be done with it. This *IS* making it accessible to people who have no interest in administering a system, but just want to use it.

I don't think anyone is advocating "dumbing-down" Linux. Nobody wants less choice -- what they are advocating is more choices for people who want an easy-to-use system. This is why we have so many different distros in Linux, some for desktop, some for server, some for multimedia, some big, some small. The availability of Xandros doesn't prevent you from using Slackware, but it does make it easier for some people to use. If every distro were oriented towards power users, this wouldn't leave any choices for newbies. Besides, another great thing about Linux is that if you don't like any of the distros out there, you can just make your own! As long as there are developers and power users, there will be distros made by and for them.

--C

recently had installed ubuntu , but it does not work !! why? it does not have tetex !! stupid ubuntu !! a computer which does not comes with a working TeX is simply not a computer ! Or maybe i install ubuntu in the wrong way or i miss out something obviously simple during the installation .........

anyway after that i try to install tex system , but asusual , everything depend on everything and libraries depend on every libraries , what the hell ........ now my ubuntu comes with tetex/latex , sgml/docbook and some other which i do not even know what is it , i just whack only , because these are the dependencies ! and i give-up about installing jade-sgml , as long as i can view dvi files , do conversion between latex-->pdf , latex-->dvi , dvi-->ps-->pdf , sgml-->latex-->dvi , text-->ps-->pdf , not to mention image conversion used in latex-dvi-ps-pdf files , ubuntu does not even has imagemagick !! how are we going to convert and organise image files , not to mention enscript and psnup etc etc for book-binding and the craft of plotting ....... all these are just the basic , without these basic a computer is not a computer !! Can we call a person who does not know how to create a text-->postscript-->pdf -->dvi , or "reading" the headers in image files , sound files and video files , or just making a simple guesses to what language are used in that text file ,is it C or pascal or lisps varients ? can we call these persons as someone who know what is the craft and meaning of computing ?! .............

the craft of computing really tainted and degraded by the democratic masses !!

not so long long time ago i tried to learn postscript language that is writing postscript language directly in a text file and save as postscript but i'm kind of demoralised by the current democratic "Boom" era , i just give up since right now not a single "Boom" soul on earth understand and believe and has faith in what is a text file anymore .........
everything are binaries now , no need to learn an to read a binary , even if you wanted to you can't do that either , you just sit there and waiting to be served ........... smiliar to the democratic media and their fast-food-chains stores ...............

Guys!

Linux is he KERNEL of an operating system. On that kernel, you can build just about any kind of system you want. You can have a simple to use and maintain system (dumbed down?) or a system you build yourself, tweaking every setting by hand in text files.

People will create different Linux-based OSs for different purposes. I want simple systems to wean people off windows, and I want them to co-exist with systems that make use of the full power you can get through getting your hands dirty!

There is room for all kinds of distro.

I don't think that gentoo needs a graphic installer. I learned a lot of things that suse kept hidden from me by installing gentoo and if there were a gui package manager I wouldn't use it and I don't think I'm alone on that one.

My girlfriend does use gentoo. just built her first kernel this week. maybe what you need is a new girlfriend.

Part of the problem also is that I've heard a lot on the FC dev listserves that people want to eliminate what they call redundancy - multiple packages that do the same thing. But, again, that's not redundancy, it's choice.

Also, as I said, there are distros like Linspire for those who are less technically inclined. It's just that it seems as though other distros are also going in that direction.

But coldsalmon is right - the best thing about OSS is the ability to fork. Can't do that with a closed source license. With OSS if I don't like it I can create my own version of Fedora that has the packages I want. Good point!

the problem is with the word CHOICE ....
the majority one are making choices , they are choosing CHOICE itself and that is how society works in a democratic way ...........

people choosing MS windows not because Windows are easy , no , Windows are not as easy as what we the linux users have thought , try drop yourself to a NT shell and learning NT emergency recovery command line touching drivers , services , user permissions and control files or system and overhauling and recreating network(is it possible?) , not to mention changing or emptied NT administrtor's password from a boot floppy(the floppy itself uses linux) ...... what i mean is do it in the traditional POWER linux style ........

people choosing MS windows because everybody somehow are using it , try imagin back in 1980s where thare are no MS and linux decided to mass produce and charge for the cost of productions only , but somehow linux will be or should be the same linux as what it is right now after all the donkey years , and now in the 2000s suddenly someone comes out with an idea similar to MS Windows . If it is all true then how will the democratic majority settle with CHOICE or maybe they have already choosed MAC instead of our linux long time ago even if ours one is the cheapest .........

seriously i think ubuntu is a very good choice over the common MS Windows . i do not have to configure any thing after fresh installation except for network address for dns server or gateway which i key in during the installation .Striaght away i can browse the internet , striaght away(except for the password challange) i can connect to and browse ftp and ssh server in normal graphical filemanager . i feel that It is easier than Windows !

somehow we underground linux users always have that devilish intention to convert the masses , and i think the time is ripe for a ReeeeeeVoLution my amigos !

Haha, well, the only time I've used a gui portage frontend (porthole, specifically) was just to see how it looked. As a developer, I do get curious.

As for my girlfriend... well... I won't say I'm not jealous of you having a girlfriend who uses linux, but I do love my girlfriend for other reasons... just to get her to switch... *sigh*

don't worry, my fiancee won't touch linux with a ten foot pole. Of course it doesn't help that the whole FC2 dual boot problem messed up my brother's computer.

Yes, but how about typing "./configure make make install" in it, in the directory of the tarball of GNU-Go I download? Because I like playing the board game Go, but there isn't a GNU-Go package ported to such-and-such package system, so I'm stuck. How about typing "python" and diddling out a quick script to calculate this differential equation? Because I *need* to calculate that, and the system calculator can't handle it, and math.py library is missing. How about porting my own Tcl/Tk/wish applet for changing the desktop background wallpaper? Because I don't have a GUI proggies to change the desktop background in Fluxbox/Blackbox, so I wrote my own Tcl/Tk proggie, and even if I enter it into the menu, all I'll get for my troubles is "Bash: wish: command not found" So I guess I'm stuck with the default. Hey, I have a parcel of SDL screenhacks (which I wrote in C) to dump into the xscreensaver hopper, but whoops, they changed everything in xscreensaver and now that doesn't work. What do I do now? How about if I'm a Blogger and want to use BloGTK, but I can't because it needs GTK+2.0 in order to work? And I think it's wonderful that you're getting Visual Basic macros in your office application, but why does that mean we have to get rid of Emacs? Because I use Emacs, and I need it to run the Elisp macros I wrote to optimize my POVray code! And hey, what happened to all the documentation? What do you mean, "info: command not found"? How can it be GNU/Linux without info? And whoops, my video card's fried, and I need to get to the console to fix a couple of things, because X is showing just colorful, blurry stripes.
{EDIT TO ADD: No, I'm not being hypothetical. The above represents a typical computer day for me! Don't like it, well, gotohell.}

That's the problem: the choices are going away. Out of all the thousands of flavors of Linux distros out there I can count just four-and-a-half that are programmer-friendly: Slackware (being discussed loudly on Slashdot right now as "Does Slackware still matter?") (and the only one I can find fit to use to full power out of the box), Gentoo, Sourcemage, Linux-From-Scratch, and the half: Debian. Dammit, I AM A USER, TOO!!! I matter! There is no reason to shove me into the ghetto just because I want to do something with my computer besides surf-de-interweb and write office memos!

What brought me to Linux was that (this is the important part) IT LET ME BE AS SMART AS I AM ! That's pretty much it! Believe it or not, there was once a time when I ran DOS 6.22 with QBasic's free compiler QB4.5 and, because I knew not of Linux, thought I had it all! I hardly ran Windows on it. Lobotomize Linux until it's I-can't-believe-it's-not-Windows and, sad the thought makes me, I'll have to leave Linux, too. I'll probably just end up with BSD or Solaris. Until the AOL zombies come to eat it's brain, too.

You have KDE/office applications/ web browsers in every single distro out there. But where are the things *I* use? They are going away. "Nobody uses those anymore!" Yes, doubtless, we ancient dinosaurs who did unfashionable things like read and program need to just get out of here. C'mon, Paul Volkerding, it's you and me off to the pasture; they don't want us anymore. "I wonder who they think is going to write more Linux for them?" "No, they probably don't think about that; they believe software grows on trees."

in summary don't dumb down linux.

Uh, helloooo, people DO want less choice. The people who want everything handed to them on a silver platter resent all that bothersome compilers and libraries on their system. So the power-user stuff is thrown away. Result: dumbed-down Linux! The *TOPIC* of this discussion.

No, you've missed a couple: for lethargic users we have Ubuntu, Mandriva, Suse, Fedora, Debian(sorta), Knoppix, Mepis, Xandros, and all the distros based on them. Power users have Slackware: maintained by one guy who's not getting any younger, and currently being discussed as "un-needed". No, we have no reason to worry! Gosh, silly us! And the build-it-yourself distros (all four of them: Gentoo, LFS, Rock(T3?), and Sourcemage) STILL need a host system to start working on, before they can work on their own tool-chain. (Ironically, you still need a compiler in order to make another compiler.)

Well, now, how do we make our own distro with NO COMPILER????????? How do you click 'n' build a bootloader? What menu option in KDE do I select to make it write a device driver? And our final point:
Developers. How do we get more of those? We won't live forever. So, think next generation: when some fresh new kid gets her/his nerve up and wants to try programming, are they going to persist in the face of all this? How do they learn without documentation? How do they code without code editors? How do they run without libraries? There won't be any infrastructure for them to learn WITH. They'll be frustrated and give up, or they'll leave Linux for something like BSD. There goes your developers, and Linux dies without them. End of story.

When you dumb things down, you usually just end up hiding the truth. Its just a layer between you and the infinite complexity of the universe.