Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The main flaw in todays linux environments is the lack of focus on professional niches outside of devops and sys admin tasks, especially professional designers.

This is a trait of UNIX culture, which never cared about doing cool UIs and GUI oriented development stacks, with NeXT being the exception.

Maybe Sun as well, if we consider how cool NeWS was before being killed.

Steve Jobs while at NeXT did not have the UNIX CLI culture in high regard.

"They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them."

https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-st...

In a way, part of ChromeOS and Android success story is due to providing a full stack story to the developers and users, where Linux plays an invisible role.

>This is a trait of UNIX culture, which never cared about doing cool UIs and GUI oriented development stacks, with NeXT being the exception.

The idea of UNIX is more productivity through shared conventions, where the system behaves as expected and newly introduduced programs don't increase the cognitive load that much, because you already have gained experience with those conventions through those other programs in your toolbox.

The idea of modern GUIs for professional tasks is kinda the same, reducing coginitive load and reducing the barrier of entry through aquired familiarity with similar GUIs.

UNIX the GUI way means getting away with not differentiating between professional and casual users, and scaling complexity horizontally by using programs in conjunction with other programs, or task based contextual adaption of UIs in larger programs, where e.g. your sidebar changes depending on what you have selected instead of stuffing all options in the UI at once.

Apple and it's ecosystem of apps have figured that out, there are not really two worlds like in the Windows ecosystem, where there's a hard cut between casuals and niche professionals.

On a Mac you might find your way around Sketch if you've only used Keynote before, or in Logic Pro coming from Garage Band or Final Cut. It's this similarity that adds up and gives generalist creative people superpowers, like those Unix wizards on the command line.

> "...putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers..."

I actually hate how this attitude often seems to be the focus of GUI environments in the Linux world. The effect is that if you have to deal with anything not nicely wrapped up in the dumbed down environment you're presented with, you immediately need to drop down to a CLI world that's difficult to figure out and constantly changing.

Meanwhile, both Windows and OSX actually focus on more of a middle-ground with their UI (to different extents, I'll admit). All the mundane admin tasks, and even those scary super-technical admin tasks actually can be done from within their GUIs.

And then you have FreeBSD, which doesn't even try to target the GUI user. They admit their user is a technical sysadmin, but embrace it by actually making the CLI quite friendly to that set of users.

I think it stems from a logic fallacy that goes something like this:

If a GUI makes a program easier to use, then by using it, I am indicating that I am less technical.

It's not usually stated explicitly, but it's a pervasive attitude. IMHO, even highly technical users can benefit and be more productive from well thought out interface design. It's not like (most) grandmothers are suddenly going to use Visual Studio because it's got a GUI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com