The Blog From Hell

I’ve been reading PenguinPete’s series of blogs called “you can hack an OS but you can’t hack people” and I must say it’s a well thought-out, well written piece with a fairly clear understanding of the history of the desktop.
So far it has raised the two biggest problems facing a desktop revolution. It comes down to this: the masses of windows users may want to change -but their culture is one where there was never any problem solving (it wasn’t POSSIBLE to solve problems), it’s one that’s made up of a combination of handholding and blind-clicking, so they need a lot of initial help to get started. The other problem is – they outnumber us thousands to one.

The next problem is that they refuse to read manuals – if you suggest one, you’re an elitist.

These are all valid points – and part of why I said all along we won’t have a year of the GNU/Linux desktop. But we can and will have a decade. Part of the reason why the process is slow – is because it takes a lot of manhours to get a windows user comfortably migrated. A lot of effort – and there are only so many of us to do it.

What Pete has not yet made any attempt to do (granted he has 2 blogs to go in the series) is to actually suggest solutions. The fact is – he is right we cannot do it one-on-one because there aren’t enough of us – and there won’t be for a long time, especially at that rate. So we need to start developing efficient one-on-many support mechanisms. Ways to talk many people through it at once. I think WOLE had been a step in that direction. But imagine something like that in Ubuntu. Something that takes the admin OUT of things that aren’t admin – that makes all the most common setup tasks as simple as the most common day to day tasks have already become.

WOLE did it by looking and acting like an IM client between you and your PC. It handled updates, it handled WIFI and bluetooth setups. Too bad WOLE was never finished- in a 5 year period of very many innovative ideas (many of which are now standard in other distro’s) – I believe it was the best, most revolutionary idea I ever had. Oh well, technology is not always the only question.
It would be nice if other distributions realized it though – added a social aspect to it – and turned the GNU/Linux hand-hold problem into something that worked like self-service but didn’t look like self-service.

I think that’s the crucial aspect, right now the only one-on-many support there is, is googling the problem and getting either a manual or somebody else’s discussion of the same problem on a forum somewhere. This just isn’t good enough.
It needs to be right in there. Wole had to cheat a lot of the desktop concepts to achieve it. Nowadays, with desktops like KDE4 – this is not even needed anymore. Everything WOLE did, and much more, including a user-to-user linking and ‘find users near me’ and all sorts of other Web2.0-ish human-to-computer-to-other-human interaction funky stuff could happen as native and comfortable parts of the desktop paradigm.

So that is the answer I see – and the obvious side-note is that I think the technology that will make it happen (way beyond my little vision of 2 years ago) is already (inevitably) being developed onto the GNU/Linux world.
Guess what, I think you can hack people. Marketroids have been very effectively hacking people for centuries. But you don’t hack them the way you hack code. People aren’t actually very logical. What you need to do to really hack people – is take what used to be difficult and make it fun. Everytime somebody achieves that – he’s about to cause a social revolution.
GNU/Linux has always been that (not only that, but for a lot of people including Torvalds that was the big thing) – making computing fun. The new challenge is to make computing fun for people who are not computer engineers. Everyone has been trying to do this for 30 years of course with mediocre success at best – but I actually think that GNU/Linux is busy achieving it – even if it does look like the underdog. It’s achieving it because ultimately, one of the cornerstone things about fun is that you cannot have fun if there are too many rules. The less rules, the more playtime – and that is why windows can never be fun.
GNU/Linux has been fun for geeks for years, every day it’s getting more fun for non-geeks. And if we crack the computer talking to you the way normal people listen and communicate problem (which I think we’re damn close to …. (tell me, why was WOLE the only program EVER to actually show a DESKTOP VIEWABLE MESSAGE if a disk in the optical drive cannot be read instead of leaving the user waiting for ever and wondering why nothings happening ? I cannot be the only person who ever thought that maybe showing critical stuff from dmesg as popups on the desktop is a good idea ?) … well once we do that, I think the revolution will happen – and who knows – I may even be pleasantly wrong and wake up one day and find out it wasn’t a decade, it was a year after all.