Usability Summary
I think I can sum up the real problem with Linux or any open source system where there’s no real usability mandate…
Developers make arbitrary decisions that suit their needs without any regard to how others will view their decisions or even figure out how to use what they do… the real difference between Windows and OS-X and Linux is that two of those are the cooperative efforts of “experts” who try very hard to address the needs of a target audience who wouldn’t be capable of writing their own operating system.
And, of course, with something like Linux it’s geometrically worse than most open source software since any given Linux is the culmination of hundreds of separate open source modules put together in a completely arbitrary fashion.
It really is funny that what I’ve been describing as a lack of cohesiveness is layered; and I suspect no matter what the intentions of a single developer to try and wrap it inside a nice pretty shell that gives a forward facing pretense of a system that was planned and targeted for productivity, the ugly truth of how much a patch work it is will show through… and we can look back on early versions of Windows and MacOS and see just that… it’s really only been within the last five or six years that those systems have risen to the point that they are in fact fairly cohesive, and designed to be tools for people to solve problems with; not projects for people to build for the sole purpose of developing a life of their own.
Without some unifying direction, the only Linux I can see suceeding is Android; and that my friends is likely to become a collection of closed source tools running on top of an open source kernel. Trust me, you haven’t seen an evil empire until Google gets on your desktop, phone, settop box, etc…
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