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Comment by ot | Hacker News Reader

> Why does Unity suck so much? Because it assumes you're a complete retard who can only click shiny buttons.

What most techies don't get is that this is an extremely reasonable assumption. Well, to be more fair, that most users don't care.

Everything that's hidden behind contextual menus, magic key combinations, endless configuration checkboxes or, for god's sake, command line, simply does not exist, because the average user doesn't want to spend hours to learn the "Right Way" to do something as long as he can find one way to do it, however much inefficient.

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If it assumes that the user can only click shiny buttons, there's no way for that user to acquire skills and climb the Dreyfus skill levels. It holds "novices" in place, while actively hindering anyone already at "advanced beginner" or "competent" levels. "Proficient" or "expert" users will just throw it out.

"Command" key (forget what it's actually called), start typing very much like Spotlight and Windows Desktop Search. IMHO way better than a ton of shiny buttons that I may or may not need.

> What most techies don't get is that this is an extremely reasonable assumption. Well, to be more fair, that most users don't care.

I don't think he's complaining that they try to make it easier for people for whom this assumption holds true. There should be emphasis on only. From what I can gather, Unity seems to make it impossible (or at least highly inconvenient) to do anything but click on shiny buttons - and that's retarded.

In my opinion, Unity does a better job of getting out of my way and doing what I want to do than its predecessor. And I've been using Linux as my primary desktop since 1995...

No problems here.

Drag terminal onto the application launch bar.

Job done.

Then those people want Chromebooks or something.

Linux is no where near ready for those people.

Yesterday my boss, who has been a hardcore Linux user for decades, managed to change his theme in Gnome3 (Fedora) to some weird high-contrast thing, just by clicking on his desktop somehow. We actually couldn't find the place to change it back in the few minutes I was helping him. It wasn't in the menu accessible from right-clicking on the menu. It wasn't anywhere we found in the stupid new System Settings screen. We searched in the Activities window-thing for "Theme" and came up with nothing.

I can't imagine what would have happened if it was one of the people I used to support at my old job. shudder

Linux requires that you use the command line anyways. For example, you can't even format a USB disk unless you spend an hour looking up an obscure command.

Err what? Try Disk Utility in Ubuntu.

Why can't you use the partition manager? It's installed by default.

Untrue. Gparted works fine.

I have several non-geek friends who use linux, and they almost never need my help. They don't know the first thing about the command line.

Ah, something you have to use a command line to install? Not exactly a good counter-point.

You have no idea what you're talking about

Synaptic/USC. Now stop talking about stuff you obviously have no clue about.

Have you ever used Linux? I don't even need to do that on Gentoo, my main system. Right click, format, choose a format type, format. Exactly the same as Windows.

Ed: from your other comment in this thread, I think you haven't. I don't think anyone has ever been required to use the command line to install things in Ubuntu (that are in the package manager which contains most things most users care about), but my memory only goes back to Dapper.

You don't even need a command line to install random packages you've downloaded. Just double-click them, the system package manager will show you what's inside and ask if you want to install it.

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