Daring Fireball: Ronco Spray-On Usability
A well-reasoned rant on why freeware interface “design” is so shoddy (if Eric Raymond can’t figure out to print to a shared printer on his home network, what does that suggest?).
Coincidentally, I had a similar problem this week with some installed (and at one time, working) software going south and finding it was going to take the better part of 3 days to resolve it. But when it worked, it’s been flawless.
And there’s a sidenote/reference that suggests it may not get any better: if all the geeks who care about such matters have adopted OS X as their desktop OS, what will happen to KDE, GNOME,et al?
I think John has a valid but by no means new point: I would rank some aspects of the freeware OSes higher than Windows (installing on a bare machine is no easier on Windows and can be less friendly, by a long shot), but for Raymond to claim that Linux et al have overcome their complicated “touch a million config files” roots is ridiculous.