3 ms·

> There's no such thing as an 'intuitive interface' I can't remember where I read it (maybe Design of Everyday Things?), but something that really stuck with m

> There's no such thing as an 'intuitive interface' I can't remember where I read it (maybe Design of Everyday Things?), but something that really stuck with me was "intuitive is just another way of calling something familiar".

grumpyprole 5y ago
Exactly, that is why Gnome is not as intuitive as it could be, it does not work at all like Windows or Mac OS. Sway works very differently to Windows and MacOS, but at least brings potential productivity advantages in doing so.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fuzzfactor 5y ago
Familiarity can run fairly deep. In an established Windows-based desktop network where each office worker has their own PC & apps optimized for that user's particular workflow, this can be one of the most productive arrangements that can be leveraged to make the difference between a low-productivity bureaucracy and high-productivity, whether it remains paperwork-intensive or works completely paperless. The early adopters of DOS who followed directly to Windows in their offices were most likely to have this bit well established (though it was far from universal), and enjoyed its advantages quite a number of years in advance of the internet appearing on the horizon. Regardless some offices still had one dedicated DOS PC for email purposes and directly logging in to clients' or vendors' private servers by dial-up modem, just like it was before there was any consideration to network certain desktops together much less join them all to a future internet if any. With the arrival of built-in Windows Networking in Windows 98 and the dominance of Ethernet for both office LAN and internet WAN, the clear advantage of having the dedicated office workers and their apps remain fully productive without relying on dial-up or later broadband cannections to outside resources became more & more blurred. Linux was still in its infancy. It has been made to accomodate Windows Networking ever since. Remember email came out in DOS way before the WWW came around, and in that respect webmail is the killer app. It is still considered too challenging for an IT administrator to switch this whole shebang over from Windows to Linux, it's like stepping off into the unknown to some extent or another, and there's too much at stake at one time. But one approach is to backtrack into known successful configurations and see if you can fork differently from there. One of the most viable approaches is to insure the local Windows network has maximum functionality and productivity without requring connection to the web. Somewhat like the old days. Then treat the web as a special case just like it used to be when you had to wisely set aside a whole dial-up session for a potentially unreliable connection. Only now its lots quicker to just reboot to Linux for the occasional web use, then back to Windows for regular office work. Very few offices actually benefit from having all the office machines be online to the WWW all the time. People find Linux much easier if the only thing they have to use it for is email and browsing the internet and other web activities only. Not much training or support burden needed for such limited utilization. They are already using things other than Windows to be online all the time on their own devices now, so it's much more realistic to get them to do the web function exclusively in Linux on their office machines before even trying to migrate the vast remainder of integrated Windows workflows into a hopefully-compatible Linux equivalent. This is just a way of functionally recognizing that Windows has continued to become less suitable for the internet for some time now, and Linux is becoming more suitable for high-productivity office work but was not suitable enough fast enough. They did not meet in the middle where one can completely be substituted for the other, but can be handled separately to some advantage. Everyone would be running full desktop Linux each time they went on the web which is easy to get accustomed to, they could further become familiar with more extensive Linux capabilities at their own pace without fearing a show-stopper which could break the carefully-honed Windows workflow. Those few workers who do need to be on the internet almost all the time would be the ones who need to be able to use Linux for almost everything. Even if Linux was perfected, everyone else can only adopt it at a limited pace so there needs to be clear priorities but this is one possible step toward the light at the end of the tunnel.
- lproven 5y ago
  > With the arrival of built-in Windows Networking in Windows 98 This is not correct. Windows 95 had built-in networking from launch and an email client on the desktop. (It did not have a bundled web browser at launch, but it had networking including TCP/IP and dial-up.) Built-in networking arrived with Windows for Workgroups 3.1 in 1992, and became mainstream with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in 1993, because of the performance enhancements of 32-bit File Access. From '93 on almost all PCs shipped with WfWg 3.11 as the sole default version. WfWg 3.11 had an optional extra add-on delivering 32-bit TCP/IP, and Internet Explorer was a free download that gave it dial-up TCP/IP. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-tcp-ip-32/tcpip-32-3-11b https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-tcp-ip-32/tcpip-32-... Also, Windows NT launched in 1993, with built-in networking including TCP/IP over wired and dial-up networks. But networking does not and did not equal TCP/IP. DOS and Windows 3.x defaulted to NetBIOS, with optional IPX/SPX for Novell Netware, which was the dominant PC networking standard from the late 1980s. Until the mid-1990s, TCP/IP was a niche protocol only needed if you wanted to communicate with expensive RISC-based UNIX™ workstations. Microsoft used NetBEUI. Novell used IPX. Apple used AppleTalk. DEC used DECnet. IBM used lots of protocols including DLC but didn't use Ethernet all that much -- it had its own network system, Token Ring -- so you needed special hardware to talk to IBM kit and only IBM-centric businesses used it much. TL;DR -- this is wrong; MS OSes had built-in networking as standard from 1993, a full 5 years earlier.
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    Thanks for filling in lots more of the accurate historical details. Especially the way Windows Networking in general was all over the place but not primarily TCP/IP over Ethernet until Windows 98 when anyone could finally just add an Ethernet LAN adapter having RJ-45 connections and connect to most anyone else from then on not much differently than can be accomplished still today. Which is why late '90's is when so many offices first started any networking to begin with, it could not very well be considered mainstream until after that.
    - lproven 5y ago
      LANs in office networks were certainly entirely mainstream in the first half of the 1990s. When I started my first job in London in 1991, we had just one client who _didn't_ have an office network. That was considered unusual but it was an intentional management decision, intended to slow the possible spread of malware and increase real-life face-to-face staff communication. What wasn't mainstream was them being based on TCP/IP. These days, networking and TCP/IP seem synonymous, but that's just how it happens to be this century. Networking, mostly over Ethernet, initially Thin Ethernet (10base-2), in wide use as a common office tool predated the rise of TCP/IP by a good 15 years or so. Some early adopters were using it 20+ years earlier. Network protocols then were a bit like OSes are now. Many people use Windows but lots use Macs, some use *BSD, a few still use commercial UNIX, etc., and there are things like ChromeOS, thin clients over RDP, and stuff. It's not at all homogenous and it's hard to even say there's a clear majority for any one OS: Windows has the edge, but not by a lot any more. Well, in the era of MS-DOS, Novell was the server OS of choice for almost everyone, with rivalry from 3Com and its 3+Share MS-DOS-based server OS; 3+Share was related to MS LAN Manager, which was in OS/2 and led to 3+Open. They all used NetBEUI. LAN Manager also ran on VMS thanks to DEC Pathworks, running over DECnet, which was handy because it also supported terminal sessions -- remember, this is before SSH -- and X.11 and DEC email and more. Focussing on big businesses was Banyan VINES, with its own protocol derived from Xerox's Alto and so on. This had the first network directory. Novell designed Netware 4, with NDS, as a direct response to Banyan's StreetTalk, and in the NT 3.x era it kicked Microsoft's behind in the market; the tide only turned with NT 4. Speaking of big enterprises, email was common long before LANs or TCP/IP. All big DEC users and IBM users had those companies' email systems. Small firms used dial-up to pre-Internet service providers -- I used CIX, which dominated in Britain. My 1991 CIX email address is still live and still works. Americans favoured CompuServe, AKA Compu$erve, but it was too expensive in Europe where we pay for local calls too. This stuff is, ballpark, a quarter of a century older than TCP/IP and Internet-based networking. And given that that is only about 25 years old, what I am saying is that widespread LAN use didn't begin with Win98. At the time, Win98 wasn't even a blip; it was nicknamed "GameOS" in enterprise IT circles and few companies even considered it. NT 4 was where it was at, and it launched with full TCP/IP support two whole years before Win98. So no, Win98's networking didn't begin anything at all. It wasn't significant in any way, then or now. Win98 was a home OS for standalone PCs with dial-up, but it merely took over from Win95 which created that market. The rise of TCP networking in business LANs arguably began with Windows NT, but NT 3.x wasn't very significant, and NT itself arrived about half way through the lifetime of business use of machine-to-machine communications, email, groupware, etc. from its beginning to now. If you want to argue that integrated networking in Windows was a significant turn, that I won't argue with. But it began 5 years before Win98, with Windows for Workgroups and Windows NT. The fact that _now_ it looks big and significant that it's when TCP/IP became the default is an emergent artifact of the current focus on IP. It wasn't at the time. Email is a 1960s thing. The Internet started to become significant in the 1970s, long after email. Corporate LANs rose in prominence in the 1980s and by the 1990s were almost a given. Macintosh-based companies (mostly in design, print, repro etc.) did direct peer-to-peer comms over ISDN. In the 1990s, for most people, TCP/IP only ran over dial-up modem connections, and it was contemporaneous with the industry moving to 10base-T: Ethernet over UTP replacing Ethernet over Coax. For a time, the obvious successor to 10base-T looked to be ATM, which is a protocol at well as a cabling system; TCP/IP had to be tunnelled over ATM, but it looked clear for a while that ATM was the future. 100base-T (Fast Ethernet) was just one contender among several. But actually, as it happened, TCP/IP rose vastly in importance, and networking switched to 100base-T and then wifi. LANs switched to IP in the 21st century but they were a roughly 20-year-old, established, totally normal technology then.

grumpyprole 5y ago

Exactly, that is why Gnome is not as intuitive as it could be, it does not work at all like Windows or Mac OS. Sway works very differently to Windows and MacOS, but at least brings potential productivity advantages in doing so.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

fuzzfactor 5y ago

Familiarity can run fairly deep. In an established Windows-based desktop network where each office worker has their own PC & apps optimized for that user's particular workflow, this can be one of the most productive arrangements that can be leveraged to make the difference between a low-productivity bureaucracy and high-productivity, whether it remains paperwork-intensive or works completely paperless. The early adopters of DOS who followed directly to Windows in their offices were most likely to have this bit well established (though it was far from universal), and enjoyed its advantages quite a number of years in advance of the internet appearing on the horizon. Regardless some offices still had one dedicated DOS PC for email purposes and directly logging in to clients' or vendors' private servers by dial-up modem, just like it was before there was any consideration to network certain desktops together much less join them all to a future internet if any. With the arrival of built-in Windows Networking in Windows 98 and the dominance of Ethernet for both office LAN and internet WAN, the clear advantage of having the dedicated office workers and their apps remain fully productive without relying on dial-up or later broadband cannections to outside resources became more & more blurred. Linux was still in its infancy. It has been made to accomodate Windows Networking ever since. Remember email came out in DOS way before the WWW came around, and in that respect webmail is the killer app. It is still considered too challenging for an IT administrator to switch this whole shebang over from Windows to Linux, it's like stepping off into the unknown to some extent or another, and there's too much at stake at one time. But one approach is to backtrack into known successful configurations and see if you can fork differently from there. One of the most viable approaches is to insure the local Windows network has maximum functionality and productivity without requring connection to the web. Somewhat like the old days. Then treat the web as a special case just like it used to be when you had to wisely set aside a whole dial-up session for a potentially unreliable connection. Only now its lots quicker to just reboot to Linux for the occasional web use, then back to Windows for regular office work. Very few offices actually benefit from having all the office machines be online to the WWW all the time. People find Linux much easier if the only thing they have to use it for is email and browsing the internet and other web activities only. Not much training or support burden needed for such limited utilization. They are already using things other than Windows to be online all the time on their own devices now, so it's much more realistic to get them to do the web function exclusively in Linux on their office machines before even trying to migrate the vast remainder of integrated Windows workflows into a hopefully-compatible Linux equivalent. This is just a way of functionally recognizing that Windows has continued to become less suitable for the internet for some time now, and Linux is becoming more suitable for high-productivity office work but was not suitable enough fast enough. They did not meet in the middle where one can completely be substituted for the other, but can be handled separately to some advantage. Everyone would be running full desktop Linux each time they went on the web which is easy to get accustomed to, they could further become familiar with more extensive Linux capabilities at their own pace without fearing a show-stopper which could break the carefully-honed Windows workflow. Those few workers who do need to be on the internet almost all the time would be the ones who need to be able to use Linux for almost everything. Even if Linux was perfected, everyone else can only adopt it at a limited pace so there needs to be clear priorities but this is one possible step toward the light at the end of the tunnel.

lproven 5y ago
> With the arrival of built-in Windows Networking in Windows 98 This is not correct. Windows 95 had built-in networking from launch and an email client on the desktop. (It did not have a bundled web browser at launch, but it had networking including TCP/IP and dial-up.) Built-in networking arrived with Windows for Workgroups 3.1 in 1992, and became mainstream with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in 1993, because of the performance enhancements of 32-bit File Access. From '93 on almost all PCs shipped with WfWg 3.11 as the sole default version. WfWg 3.11 had an optional extra add-on delivering 32-bit TCP/IP, and Internet Explorer was a free download that gave it dial-up TCP/IP. https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-tcp-ip-32/tcpip-32-3-11b https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-tcp-ip-32/tcpip-32-... Also, Windows NT launched in 1993, with built-in networking including TCP/IP over wired and dial-up networks. But networking does not and did not equal TCP/IP. DOS and Windows 3.x defaulted to NetBIOS, with optional IPX/SPX for Novell Netware, which was the dominant PC networking standard from the late 1980s. Until the mid-1990s, TCP/IP was a niche protocol only needed if you wanted to communicate with expensive RISC-based UNIX™ workstations. Microsoft used NetBEUI. Novell used IPX. Apple used AppleTalk. DEC used DECnet. IBM used lots of protocols including DLC but didn't use Ethernet all that much -- it had its own network system, Token Ring -- so you needed special hardware to talk to IBM kit and only IBM-centric businesses used it much. TL;DR -- this is wrong; MS OSes had built-in networking as standard from 1993, a full 5 years earlier.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  Thanks for filling in lots more of the accurate historical details. Especially the way Windows Networking in general was all over the place but not primarily TCP/IP over Ethernet until Windows 98 when anyone could finally just add an Ethernet LAN adapter having RJ-45 connections and connect to most anyone else from then on not much differently than can be accomplished still today. Which is why late '90's is when so many offices first started any networking to begin with, it could not very well be considered mainstream until after that.
  - lproven 5y ago
    LANs in office networks were certainly entirely mainstream in the first half of the 1990s. When I started my first job in London in 1991, we had just one client who _didn't_ have an office network. That was considered unusual but it was an intentional management decision, intended to slow the possible spread of malware and increase real-life face-to-face staff communication. What wasn't mainstream was them being based on TCP/IP. These days, networking and TCP/IP seem synonymous, but that's just how it happens to be this century. Networking, mostly over Ethernet, initially Thin Ethernet (10base-2), in wide use as a common office tool predated the rise of TCP/IP by a good 15 years or so. Some early adopters were using it 20+ years earlier. Network protocols then were a bit like OSes are now. Many people use Windows but lots use Macs, some use *BSD, a few still use commercial UNIX, etc., and there are things like ChromeOS, thin clients over RDP, and stuff. It's not at all homogenous and it's hard to even say there's a clear majority for any one OS: Windows has the edge, but not by a lot any more. Well, in the era of MS-DOS, Novell was the server OS of choice for almost everyone, with rivalry from 3Com and its 3+Share MS-DOS-based server OS; 3+Share was related to MS LAN Manager, which was in OS/2 and led to 3+Open. They all used NetBEUI. LAN Manager also ran on VMS thanks to DEC Pathworks, running over DECnet, which was handy because it also supported terminal sessions -- remember, this is before SSH -- and X.11 and DEC email and more. Focussing on big businesses was Banyan VINES, with its own protocol derived from Xerox's Alto and so on. This had the first network directory. Novell designed Netware 4, with NDS, as a direct response to Banyan's StreetTalk, and in the NT 3.x era it kicked Microsoft's behind in the market; the tide only turned with NT 4. Speaking of big enterprises, email was common long before LANs or TCP/IP. All big DEC users and IBM users had those companies' email systems. Small firms used dial-up to pre-Internet service providers -- I used CIX, which dominated in Britain. My 1991 CIX email address is still live and still works. Americans favoured CompuServe, AKA Compu$erve, but it was too expensive in Europe where we pay for local calls too. This stuff is, ballpark, a quarter of a century older than TCP/IP and Internet-based networking. And given that that is only about 25 years old, what I am saying is that widespread LAN use didn't begin with Win98. At the time, Win98 wasn't even a blip; it was nicknamed "GameOS" in enterprise IT circles and few companies even considered it. NT 4 was where it was at, and it launched with full TCP/IP support two whole years before Win98. So no, Win98's networking didn't begin anything at all. It wasn't significant in any way, then or now. Win98 was a home OS for standalone PCs with dial-up, but it merely took over from Win95 which created that market. The rise of TCP networking in business LANs arguably began with Windows NT, but NT 3.x wasn't very significant, and NT itself arrived about half way through the lifetime of business use of machine-to-machine communications, email, groupware, etc. from its beginning to now. If you want to argue that integrated networking in Windows was a significant turn, that I won't argue with. But it began 5 years before Win98, with Windows for Workgroups and Windows NT. The fact that _now_ it looks big and significant that it's when TCP/IP became the default is an emergent artifact of the current focus on IP. It wasn't at the time. Email is a 1960s thing. The Internet started to become significant in the 1970s, long after email. Corporate LANs rose in prominence in the 1980s and by the 1990s were almost a given. Macintosh-based companies (mostly in design, print, repro etc.) did direct peer-to-peer comms over ISDN. In the 1990s, for most people, TCP/IP only ran over dial-up modem connections, and it was contemporaneous with the industry moving to 10base-T: Ethernet over UTP replacing Ethernet over Coax. For a time, the obvious successor to 10base-T looked to be ATM, which is a protocol at well as a cabling system; TCP/IP had to be tunnelled over ATM, but it looked clear for a while that ATM was the future. 100base-T (Fast Ethernet) was just one contender among several. But actually, as it happened, TCP/IP rose vastly in importance, and networking switched to 100base-T and then wifi. LANs switched to IP in the 21st century but they were a roughly 20-year-old, established, totally normal technology then.