drei.eins

[cosmolinguist]

I read this nifty diatribe a few days ago and wanted to write about it, but never got around to it, what with my busy weekend and all. Besides, I thought to myself, you don't need any more geeky ranting and raving in your journal. Apparently geeky things are all I write about anyway--a perception that honestly perplexes me, but I've heard it enough times from enough people that I guess it must be true.

Well, too bad! More geekiness! Easily ignored, though.

I use CUPS for my printing, too, and even on one printer that's connected to one computer, it's bad enough. It has done demented things and I don't like it. And in this diatribe I recognized some problems I've had--especially having print jobs disappear into a black hole, without error messages or anything ... or, if you can see them, they're not printing and you have no idea why so you can't do anything about it because there is no evidence of a problem except that nothing is coming out of the printer.

But this isn't just about CUPS. It's about the general suckiness of open-source user interfaces.

I can understand why they suck, because these programs are written by hackers and mostly for hackers, or at least fairly technical people. They know what they're talking about, and if you want to know what's going on you have to learn their language, because they are not going to bother with yours. It's sort of a trial-by-fire. Their language is a good one, it's precise, logical, sometimes even fun ... but, unfortunately, it's also gibberish to a vast majority of people. Also unfortunately, communicating with normals is not something hackers relish, so if something about a project is going to suffer, it'll probably be the user interfaces (or the documentation!).

Some people who acknowledge that Linux is better than Windows still don't care, because they can't be bothered to learn something new. It's not just laziness or lack of intelligence. Far from it, actually--their intelligent, industrious nature is probably what's telling them they don't need or want to learn a ton of techical details just to print stuff. I don't blame them.

I still like Linux better and think it's worth it--the lack of explanation CUPS gives me is actually remarkable (as a few of my real-life friends have heard me complain) becaue I've gotten used to Linux either doing what I ask or telling me why it can't do it, and I really like that. For the most part, everything works great and I never have to think about it at all. When Linux is good, it's very, very good ... but when it is bad, it is horrid.

Comments

[autumnsshadow.livejournal.com]

When Linux is good, it's very, very good ... but when it is bad, it is horrid.

That's always been my take on Linux and MacOS as well...

[parakleta.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's the one thing that's annoyed me about MacOS in my using of it... I'm starting to get better at figuring out where to dig to find what I'm looking for when things break (or need breaking) though. For random joe user it does it's job fine, but when you start trying to do stuff it wasn't meant to do, it becomes very bad very quickly.

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

I will grant that CUPS has some issues; my favorite is the only error message CUPS ever gives: "Client-error-not-possible," which doesn't really help very much. On the other hand, I think a lot of people who complain about CUPS don't know what they're talking about, having never used the UNIX printing systems, such as lp and lpr, which came before it, and were far less capable (they didn't have nearly as easy a mechanism for using host-rendered printers, for example).

CUPS does a lot of things very well. It is extensible, as I noted. It shares printers very well on local networks, with a minimum of configuration on the clients. It actually has a graphical web interface built in, and there's an even better UI for CUPS built into KDE's print system. lp and lpr had no graphical interface whatsoever (although I think KDE's print system can interface with them).

Finally, complaining about an open-source system is like complaining about a democratic government: if you don't participate, your complaints will fall on deaf ears. Not everyone is a programmer, but then, neither is everyone a senator. If you want something to be introduced into an open-source system, then you need to make it happen, either by doing it yourself, or by convincing (or paying) someone else to do it.

[cosmolinguist]

I know I do not know what I'm talking about, having never used anything besides CUPS. I do appreciate that it has a GUI at all ... but it doesn't seem to be telling me the truth all of the time.

And I know CUPS is good at doing stuff (as much as someone like me can understand that at all), the point the guy was trying to make was that it could be easier for people to get it to do that stuff. He says, "It's not like doing better would be difficult, either. None of the changes in CUPS behavior or documentation I've described would be technical challenges; the problem is that these simple things never occurred to developers who bring huge amounts of already-acquired knowledge to bear every time they look at their user interfaces."

Which is why I felt competent to talk about it at all, I don't know much about printing or UNIX, but I do know how confusing (or nonexistent) user interfaces in open-source software can be.

As for the democratic side, it seems that his article has had some effect--there's a followup quote from the lead CUPS guy that says he's glad this was brought to their attention and no one had ever said those things before. (Of course, he also tried to blame RedHat as well, since the guy is running Fedora, but that's another point entirely. :-)) So this version of writing letters to your congressmen does seem to have some effect (at least if you're a famous hacker like Eric S. Raymond who writes stuff that a lot of people read) which is something.

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

The one disadvantage to Linux, in my opinion, is it seems we're always reinventing the wheel. Instead of having two or three applications that do a particular job really well, we have 147 that sort-of do the job. Granted, there might be a few exceptions (for instance, Open Office is getting decent), but exceptions they are.