6 ms·

I see two almost independent objections here, and I think the press has failed to convey this adequately: - One is the Linux argument; that these laptops shoul

by andrewf 18y ago

I see two almost independent objections here, and I think the press has failed to convey this adequately: - One is the Linux argument; that these laptops should be open to tinkering and closed source is inappropriate. - One is the Sugar argument; that the desktop-and-windows GUI is not good enough, hence the building of the Sugar UI from the ground up. MS Windows is viewed as inappropriate for the same reasons that the laptop wasn't originally shipped with XFCE or GNOME. As an interested observer, it seemed to me that both these arguments were prominent design objectives for a long time. It's not surprising that if you drop these objectives, a lot of the people who drank your Original Flavor KoolAid will drop you faster than New Coke.

wmf 18y ago
Both of these arguments sound like "we're going to build what our customers should want, not what they actually want". That rarely works except in a monopoly situation. Maybe OLPC imagined themselves as some sort of benevolent monopoly, but that rarely works as well.
- jcl 18y ago
  In the case of the second argument -- Sugar as a more appropriate interface -- it may be more a case of "we're going to build what our customers will want, not what they think they want". The XO has a screen that is not much larger than other ultra-compact notebooks, but with a resolution on par with full-size notebooks. If you run a standard Linux or Windows, any interface text or icons at the default size will be so small as to be illegible. If you crank up the interface DPI to an appropriate size, however, then you lose a lot of screen real estate to menus, toolbars, and statusbars -- something we take for granted now that we have 20-inch displays (just try using Word in a 640x480 window). What the XO really needs is an interface like a kiosk or mobile device: something easy-to-use that aggressively conserves screen real estate. Sugar fills this role pretty well... the default installs of Linux or XP do not. Windows CE would have been a better choice than XP in this respect (and others), but it would presumably have been more work for Microsoft with less payoff, since CE has relatively few educational activities and doesn't run the "real" version of Office.

by andrewf 18y ago

wmf 18y ago

Both of these arguments sound like "we're going to build what our customers should want, not what they actually want". That rarely works except in a monopoly situation. Maybe OLPC imagined themselves as some sort of benevolent monopoly, but that rarely works as well.

jcl 18y ago
In the case of the second argument -- Sugar as a more appropriate interface -- it may be more a case of "we're going to build what our customers will want, not what they think they want". The XO has a screen that is not much larger than other ultra-compact notebooks, but with a resolution on par with full-size notebooks. If you run a standard Linux or Windows, any interface text or icons at the default size will be so small as to be illegible. If you crank up the interface DPI to an appropriate size, however, then you lose a lot of screen real estate to menus, toolbars, and statusbars -- something we take for granted now that we have 20-inch displays (just try using Word in a 640x480 window). What the XO really needs is an interface like a kiosk or mobile device: something easy-to-use that aggressively conserves screen real estate. Sugar fills this role pretty well... the default installs of Linux or XP do not. Windows CE would have been a better choice than XP in this respect (and others), but it would presumably have been more work for Microsoft with less payoff, since CE has relatively few educational activities and doesn't run the "real" version of Office.