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Futile Foray into Linux, 2011 Edition (Part 0)
Posted 11-12-2011 at 01:06 PM by commodorejohn
Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why!?
I have been trying, for some seven years now, to get into this technically advanced and totally impressive and Free new operating system, without success. I made my first real attempt in 2004, when I installed Fedora Core 4 on my then-laptop, a cheapo Presario that stole 1/8th of my RAM and God knows how much of my memory bandwidth for the video.
I fiddled around with it for a while but never accomplished much and didn't enjoy it. But I won't blame it too much for that, because I didn't try all that hard, and I really shouldn't have expected a good experience running on 448MB of RAM and 64MB integrated video. I wound up just sticking with Windows XP, because that's what I was comfortable with.
I used that laptop until early 2009, when I purchased an Asus Eee. This, I thought, was a machine designed with Linux in mind, so I'd obviously run Linux on it. I installed Fedora 11, but I hedged my bet and made it dual-boot XP - just in case.
Turns out that the included version of Firefox ran like ass, I had trouble figuring out how to get things working in WINE, and I couldn't find native alternatives I liked. I wound up just sticking with Windows XP, because that's what I was comfortable with.
Now, all of this had to do with me being unwilling to move out of my comfort zone, and so when I obtained a Power Mac G5, I figured I could install Linux on that and acclimate myself over time. It wasn't a bad plan; I installed Debian 6, and I found that, as compared to Fedora, Synaptic and its comprehensive repositories were a delight and the whole thing was just generally lighter-weight, and much preferable to OSX.
I put that machine to use occasionally for months on end, doing text-editing, raytracing, and assorted other simple tasks - but I still mostly wound up sticking with Windows XP...because that's what I was comfortable with.
So recently, my Eee was beginning to show signs of reaching the end of its lifespan. The fan turned first into a rattly annoyance, and then into a grinding agony, and it began to run problematically hot as a result. I put in a replacement, but I figured that as long as this computer was reaching its inevitable planned obsolescence, I should get another. This time, I was determined. I purchased a PowerBook G4, so that I could not install Windows XP on it, no matter what. I would make myself switch over, no excuses.
I installed MintPPC 9 on it (would've done Debian, but it appeared to be having some disagreement with the hardware.) I transferred most of my files over. I've been using it regularily for over a week now, my longest sojourn into Linux yet. Things seemed pretty okay at first, and it was convenient that Bash's full-featured scripting language allowed me to set up a script to file my daily comics away easier than cmd.exe's pumped-up Batch does.
But there were some warning signs:
It was when I opened up the GIMP that it all crystalized for me. Oh my God, the Linux community has no sheep-sodomizing CLUE about usability! The GIMP plainly wants to be a Photoshop workalike, but they couldn't bring themselves to copy its interface? Why the hell not? They've reimplemented every other damn thing about it satisfactorily, why not the part that makes it talk to the user?
It's just awful. Photoshop has keyboard shortcuts for damn near everything, most of them pretty easy to remember, once you learn. GIMP has almost none by default, and while you can at least configure them (more than I can say for some other programs,) would it be so much trouble to just ship with a Photoshop-like set?
Accelerator keys are spread willy-nilly to make up for the piss-poor tab-stop ordering and default control focus, and often the same letter has multiple controls using it, which means you get to cycle through them, at which point you might as well just use the tab key.
The lack of any understanding of contextual controls means you can't use the Delete key to erase a path when you're done with it, because the Delete key is reserved for erasing the current selection area, even when what's "selected" in any user's mind is the path.
And oh holy Jesus H. Christ, WHY COULD THEY NOT HAVE USED A MULTIPLE-DOCUMENT INTERFACE!? Like with QMMP, there's no concept of Alt+Tab being used to switch between applications, only windows - which means that if you want to mass-open a couple dozen images for touch-up and compression before filing them away, as I do, you are going to have to deal with twenty-plus extra windows.
And I could almost live with that, using another workspace in place of a parent window, except that I can't set images opening and then switch to another workspace, because the GIMP will happily deposit opened documents in whatever workspace I happen to be in.
It's completely unusable, and I cannot even begin to fathom how anybody could ever have thought otherwise. I'm not even a professional interface designer, and I can see how broken this thing is. There is no excuse for it.
I have been trying, for some seven years now, to get into this technically advanced and totally impressive and Free new operating system, without success. I made my first real attempt in 2004, when I installed Fedora Core 4 on my then-laptop, a cheapo Presario that stole 1/8th of my RAM and God knows how much of my memory bandwidth for the video.
I fiddled around with it for a while but never accomplished much and didn't enjoy it. But I won't blame it too much for that, because I didn't try all that hard, and I really shouldn't have expected a good experience running on 448MB of RAM and 64MB integrated video. I wound up just sticking with Windows XP, because that's what I was comfortable with.
I used that laptop until early 2009, when I purchased an Asus Eee. This, I thought, was a machine designed with Linux in mind, so I'd obviously run Linux on it. I installed Fedora 11, but I hedged my bet and made it dual-boot XP - just in case.
Turns out that the included version of Firefox ran like ass, I had trouble figuring out how to get things working in WINE, and I couldn't find native alternatives I liked. I wound up just sticking with Windows XP, because that's what I was comfortable with.
Now, all of this had to do with me being unwilling to move out of my comfort zone, and so when I obtained a Power Mac G5, I figured I could install Linux on that and acclimate myself over time. It wasn't a bad plan; I installed Debian 6, and I found that, as compared to Fedora, Synaptic and its comprehensive repositories were a delight and the whole thing was just generally lighter-weight, and much preferable to OSX.
I put that machine to use occasionally for months on end, doing text-editing, raytracing, and assorted other simple tasks - but I still mostly wound up sticking with Windows XP...because that's what I was comfortable with.
So recently, my Eee was beginning to show signs of reaching the end of its lifespan. The fan turned first into a rattly annoyance, and then into a grinding agony, and it began to run problematically hot as a result. I put in a replacement, but I figured that as long as this computer was reaching its inevitable planned obsolescence, I should get another. This time, I was determined. I purchased a PowerBook G4, so that I could not install Windows XP on it, no matter what. I would make myself switch over, no excuses.
I installed MintPPC 9 on it (would've done Debian, but it appeared to be having some disagreement with the hardware.) I transferred most of my files over. I've been using it regularily for over a week now, my longest sojourn into Linux yet. Things seemed pretty okay at first, and it was convenient that Bash's full-featured scripting language allowed me to set up a script to file my daily comics away easier than cmd.exe's pumped-up Batch does.
But there were some warning signs:
FirefoxIceweasel's shortcuts were all wrong. They either required more keypresses to achieve the same thing (Ctrl+Shift+Y for download manager? Okay, Ctrl+J isn't exactly intuitive either, but it doesn't require two modifier keys,) or they were inconviently placed (Ctrl+W for close-tab, next to Ctrl+Q, to quit the program - and it doesn't ask whether I mean it. Yes, I've lost multiple sessions to that.)- GTK theming affects only GTK programs, of course, and every program decides randomly whether it's going to indicate highlighted controls or just let you guess where you are in a form.
- QMMP only registers one window in the taskbar, but you have to Alt+Tab through three of them.
- Every program with menus requires you to hold Alt while you press the accelerator, you can't just hit Alt to toggle yourself into menu context as you do in Windows.
- For that matter, nothing has any idea of contextual controls; every keyboard shortcut has one and exactly one function, whether or not it's even usable in the current context.
- Sort order is arbitrary and random, and never tailored to the application. ls does a simple ASCII-value sort, case-sensitive. PCManFM does a human-readable sort, case-insensitive, which means that your directory view doesn't look like your ls view. Comix uses ASCII-sort like ls, even though that makes absolutely no sense for the application - so I can browse through a comic, and find that the pages are all out of order, because the program doesn't understand page numbering if all the leading zeroes aren't in place.
- There doesn't seem to be any concept of operations on groups of files. I can't select an arbitrary set of MP3 and open them in QMMP as I can in Winamp, nor a similarly arbitrary set of images for Comix.
- - -
It was when I opened up the GIMP that it all crystalized for me. Oh my God, the Linux community has no sheep-sodomizing CLUE about usability! The GIMP plainly wants to be a Photoshop workalike, but they couldn't bring themselves to copy its interface? Why the hell not? They've reimplemented every other damn thing about it satisfactorily, why not the part that makes it talk to the user?
It's just awful. Photoshop has keyboard shortcuts for damn near everything, most of them pretty easy to remember, once you learn. GIMP has almost none by default, and while you can at least configure them (more than I can say for some other programs,) would it be so much trouble to just ship with a Photoshop-like set?
Accelerator keys are spread willy-nilly to make up for the piss-poor tab-stop ordering and default control focus, and often the same letter has multiple controls using it, which means you get to cycle through them, at which point you might as well just use the tab key.
The lack of any understanding of contextual controls means you can't use the Delete key to erase a path when you're done with it, because the Delete key is reserved for erasing the current selection area, even when what's "selected" in any user's mind is the path.
And oh holy Jesus H. Christ, WHY COULD THEY NOT HAVE USED A MULTIPLE-DOCUMENT INTERFACE!? Like with QMMP, there's no concept of Alt+Tab being used to switch between applications, only windows - which means that if you want to mass-open a couple dozen images for touch-up and compression before filing them away, as I do, you are going to have to deal with twenty-plus extra windows.
And I could almost live with that, using another workspace in place of a parent window, except that I can't set images opening and then switch to another workspace, because the GIMP will happily deposit opened documents in whatever workspace I happen to be in.
It's completely unusable, and I cannot even begin to fathom how anybody could ever have thought otherwise. I'm not even a professional interface designer, and I can see how broken this thing is. There is no excuse for it.
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