| A coworker and I had an enthusiastic disagreement yesterday about *nix, user interfaces, and consumer perceptions. It would be interesting to hear the UFie community's opinions on the topic.
It started when my coworker described watching *nix newbies get upset because they discovered that they couldn't undelete deleted files. I said that I've always felt that *nix ought to have undelete ability, and that lit the fire of the discussion.
My position is that if we want to get *nix (particularly Linux) on the desktops of the world then we need to start addressing the wants of the consumer. We can make technical excuses until we're blue in the face about why some utility can't be done, but the consumers will simply vote with their desktops and Linux will never catch up with Windows.
(As a tangent, the question is begged if the Linux world actually WANTS to be on the desktop, as opposed to staying in the server room. Products such as StarOffice and Gnome indicate that many people in the Linux world do want Linux on the desktop.)
As for the undelete ability, it could be done without disrupting the defragmentation routines of the system by reworking the delete routine itself. Instead of unlinking the file, the file is moved into a trash folder (each user account has its own trash folder). The trash bin can be cleaned out manually and/or a cron job can clean out files that are x days old. Each account would have a setting (say in a .delete file in the home directory) that would indicate if the account should have undelete ability. By default accounts shouldn't, but user account setup utilities would allow the easy addition of the setting. The real challenge is that this would need to be done in or close to the kernel level. Of course it could be done in the user's shell or file manager, but when the user deletes a file through some other utility he/she will get a nasty surprise.
I'm not going to attempt to present my coworker's point of view because I would probably misrepresent it and that would be unfair to him. He's a regular UF reader so I'll leave it to him to present his own position if he likes. Suffice to say he disagrees with me.
In summary, we in the open source community can make technical excuses about why something "can't be done", but that isn't the attitude that makes open source great, and it certainly isn't the attitude that will rid us of Windows. We need a can-do customer-oriented perspective, finding ways to make the customer happy while keeping the robustness and stability of *nix.
-Miko O'Sullivan
miko@idocs.com |
