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EXCELLENT list. One, that of having a choice in software, had never even occurred to me before.

• joe_the_user 17y ago
  This is a good list of many things that people might not get. But the crazy thing is that there no guarantee that a given user will or won't any one of these things - as well as no guarantee whether they will or won't other subtler things. After all this, it actually makes me less inclined to pander to all the user's possible ignorances. Rather than worry every strange conception that users might have, we should create a UI which is self-consistent, powerful and hides as little as possible. "Drag-and-drop" and "click versus double click" are two approaches which were created to make things "intuitive" but which are a disaster because they don't make any announcement of their presence and don't actually increase the number of options a user has. Hierarchical files and hierarchical menus may indeed not be "gotten" by some people but those people need to be educated and once they are, they use just about any standard-conformant GUI app whereas each time the latest visual-fu-metaphor is added to a given app, everyone will always need to parse it again.
• GavinB 17y ago
  Surprisingly, to my knowledge there is no layperson-accessible site that explains and offers downloads of the most popular open source offerings--firefox, open office, GIMP etc. Everything I have found is either hopelessly technical or stuffed with thousands and thousands of poor quality programs. There are lots of individual sites, but no where that you can point someone that will take care of them.