This is FINALLY Getting Easier... Linux Challenge Part 3

[Gimmick21]

41 minutes ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Honestly, if I read and reserched every package blurted by apt every time I try to install something, I would never get anything done.

You have to type "Yes, do as I say" everytime you try to install something? :X

[mamamia88]

Funny how most of Linuses problems are fixed so easily or just straight him having too large of a screen or expecting everything to behave exactly the same. Like how when he goes to zip up a folder and it's progress bar is in the notification area and his screen is huge. So he goes and changes the file extension when it's still a temp file and it fails. If you go into Linux expecting the exact same experience as windows it's not gonna happen. But if you assume for 1 second the developers are designing it to actually be used by someone you'll usually find a solution. 

Kde Dev Reaction is honestly way calmer than I would have been.  Linus kinda comes off making mountains out of molehills. The lack of functionality he complained about in dolphin is like 1 minute of playing with right click contest menus. The "apt is not on Manjaro thing is super weird also" like ok yeah but you'd have found that out right quick the second you googled "how to install steam on Manjaro and been presented with a Pacman command. Makes it sound like Linux is super complicated when it's just different. 

[finest feck fips]

3 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Honestly, if I read and reserched every package blurted by apt every time I try to install something, I would never get anything done.

Yes, absolutely. Linus succeeded in highlighting a number of ways that APT output could be improved, and I hope several of them go all the way out to end users. My point was just that still not fair to say

Quote

All Linus did was the equivalent of following the official directions!

 

Another improvement that afaik upstream isn't yet explicitly considering is changing APT's default behavior with orphaned packages. apt doesn't normally delete orphaned packages, so it inevitably accrues a long message at the beginning that's a list of ‘packages which are no longer needed’, and it spams you with that for every operation.

It's good that the Pop!_OS documentation advises users to read everything. It's bad that the APT affordances implicitly do the opposite and encourage users to zone out.

The docs should encourage users to read, and the tools should reward them for reading with visual hints toward the most critical information, and sparing them as much noise as possible.

In 2021, it's probably safe to just automatically remove orphaned packages. That would get rid of a paragraph of unrelated text in this case.

[finest feck fips]

3 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Honestly, if I read and reserched every package blurted by apt every time I try to install something, I would never get anything done.

I agree with most of your post, but not quite this. I heard something similar yesterday about manuals. You only need to do intensive reading when you're still figuring out how to read in the specialized genre. Once you get up and going, even just for a few weeks or days, you will begin to develop relevant intuitions that eventually  let you safely decide what to read, what to look up, and what to pass over. In cases like this, the sheer number of packages proposed for removal is your red flag. But users, like Linus in the first episode, who've literally only been using the OS for 30 minutes won't yet have the background of normal package management experiences against which that behavior can seem weird, because they can't. For them, unfortunately reading is more important because they need more context to interpret the same information.

In this case, looking up 1 or 2 of packages listed as ‘essential’ would likely have been enough.

Can you (or could Linus, now having had that experience) avoid what happened to Linus with the existing documentation and tools as Linus encountered them? Yes, absolutely! But should the tools do a better job of highlighting really critical information and making it clear to users what's important vs. what's mostly noise? Yes, absolutely.

[Whiskers]

37 minutes ago, mamamia88 said:

Funny how most of Linuses problems are fixed so easily or just straight him having too large of a screen or expecting everything to behave exactly the same. Like how when he goes to zip up a folder and it's progress bar is in the notification area and his screen is huge. So he goes and changes the file extension when it's still a temp file and it fails.

 

Linus isn't the only user with a large screen.  But even if he was, that doesn't make this good UX design. Not all users can be assumed to have perfect peripheral vision for one, so I don't think it's a great idea to show important information relating to the user's active task nowhere near where they are carrying that task out. I think it's also not optimal UX to represent an incomplete file visually as a complete file with a gibberish file extension. The way Windows handles this isn't great either, but is at least good enough that it's unlikely to cause this kind of user confusion - and owing to it displaying a prominent progress bar window on top of everything, it's less of an issue anyway.

 

37 minutes ago, mamamia88 said:

If you go into Linux expecting the exact same experience as windows it's not gonna happen. But if you assume for 1 second the developers are designing it to actually be used by someone you'll usually find a solution. 

 

I don't agree. I don't think it's fair to suggest that's what Linus is doing, and I don't think it's reasonable to frame the issue as "Linux not behaving like Windows". That's really not the issue. Linux doesn't have to copy Windows' experience to accommodate new users. It needs to have an intuitive and accessible UI and UX. Windows itself has a notoriously flawed UI / UX; it's a schizophrenic kitbash of decades worth of inconsistent and sometimes downright dreadful interface design. Copying it outright would be silly. Linux should never settle for being as good as Windows; it should be so much better!

 

Linux can be needlessly unintuitive and poorly communicative to new users at times. Things have improved considerably over the years, but there can still be little things here and there that are just obviously designed with insufficient consideration for newer or less technically inclined users. I think Linus' videos are highlighting that quite well.

[mamamia88]

8 minutes ago, Whiskers said:

 

Linus isn't the only user with a large screen.  But even if he was, that doesn't make this good UX design. Not all users can be assumed to have perfect peripheral vision for one, so I don't think it's a great idea to show important information relating to the user's active task nowhere near where they are carrying that task out. I think it's also not optimal UX to represent an incomplete file visually as a complete file with a gibberish file extension. The way Windows handles this isn't great either, but is at least good enough that it's unlikely to cause this kind of user confusion - and owing to it displaying a prominent progress bar window on top of everything, it's less of an issue anyway.

 

 

I don't agree. I don't think it's fair to suggest that's what Linus is doing, and I don't think it's reasonable to frame the issue as "Linux not behaving like Windows". That's really not the issue. Linux doesn't have to copy Windows' experience to accommodate new users. It needs to have an intuitive and accessible UI and UX. Windows itself has a notoriously flawed UI / UX; it's a schizophrenic kitbash of decades worth of inconsistent and sometimes downright dreadful interface design. Copying it outright would be silly. Linux should never settle for being as good as Windows; it should be so much better!

 

Linux can be needlessly unintuitive and poorly communicative to new users at times. Things have improved considerably over the years, but there can still be little things here and there that are just obviously designed with insufficient consideration for newer or less technically inclined users. I think Linus' videos are highlighting that quite well.

His literal first instinct for taking a screenshot was to search for snipping tool. The reason why linux has so many desktops and distributions is because the community is trying to do it better than windows. That's why we have these type of discussions. I was basically saying "assume the developer isn't stupid and spend a few seconds looking for the proper way to do something before assuming it's broken". Every single task he does he assumes it's gonna be relatively similar to windows (which it is) and get's frustrated when it's not exactly like windows. "I need a refresh button it needs to be there!" is such a stupid complaint when you can enable it in a few seconds. Extracting a file and not realizing the progress bar is in the notifications area and then renaming the temporary zip before it's done zipping is user error not a linux specific problem. Manjaro not having apt is not a manjaro problem. It might be a documentation problem but, it's not something manjaro needs to address. We all do things slightly different and linux is tailored to that. So if you can't figure something out slow down, take a deep breath, and google it. Or just spend a few minutes digging around in the right click menu. Really comes off as condescending when you spend more time criticiizing a ui element like lack of a refresh button when it's just a design decision not to have it available by default but, allow the user to change it. 

[finest feck fips]

21 minutes ago, Whiskers said:

[Linux] needs to have an intuitive and accessible UI and UX.

I tend to be highly suspicious of any talk of ‘intuitive’ user interfaces. In one of the previous official posts on an official episode, one user related the experience of baby duck syndrome, which I think is a very useful concept here.

I recently encountered a very interesting old paper on the research and acceptance testing that went into the first Windows release to include a start menu. There's a lot in it to suggest that what may now be easy to think of as ‘intuitive’ is very much a matter of learned convention.

Take for instance the ‘standard’ Windows behavior of single-clicking to select and double-clicking to launch. The paper describes the following as a ‘key finding’:

Quote

Beginning users and some intermediates had a lot of trouble using the mouse, especially double-clicking. As a result, they often failed to find things in containers when the only way to open them was double-clicking.

 

Or consider that many users like Linus and Luke might describe an experience where right-clicking on the desktop offers options for changing the desktop background but not the screen resolution as ‘unintuitive’. But how intuitive are context menus?

Quote

Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or “context”) menus, even after training.

 

For a more potent example, consider the behavior of the ‘show desktop’ button on KDE Plasma, which temporarily minimizes all windows, but restores the position of all windows once you move away from the desktop and open any window. Is actually minimizing all windows an intuitive behavior for new users, given that

Quote

All but the most advanced users did not understand how to manage overlapping windows efficiently. Beginners had the most trouble- when they minimized a window, they considered it “gone” if it was obscured by another window. We heard many stories from educators (and witnessed in the lab) how users caused the computer to run out of RAM by starting multiple copies of a program instead of switching back to the first copy. Intermediate users were more proficient but still had trouble, especially with Multiple-Document-Interface (MDI) applications such as Program Manager and Microsoft Word. Market research data confirmed the problem by revealing that 40% of intermediate Windows users didn’t run more than one program at a time because they had some kind of trouble with the process.

So here the path actually forks: does KDE want a behavior that is ‘intuitive to new users’ or one that is familiar to experienced Windows users?

I get the impression from bits like this in your previous comment

40 minutes ago, Whiskers said:

I don't think it's reasonable to frame the issue as "Linux not behaving like Windows". That's really not the issue. [...] Linux should never settle for being as good as Windows; it should be so much better!

that you already agree with that.

But I want to stress that in the context of an audience who grew up with computers in general and Windows computers in particular, it can be very difficult to separate out what is intuitive from what is familiar.

[Olgyd]

5 hours ago, mamamia88 said:

His literal first instinct for taking a screenshot was to search for snipping tool.

Nothing wrong with seeing if your DE would alias them to the Linux equivalents rather than Googling "What's the equivalent of X on Linux" for every single program.

 

Quote

Every single task he does he assumes it's gonna be relatively similar to windows (which it is) and get's frustrated when it's not exactly like windows. "I need a refresh button it needs to be there!" is such a stupid complaint when you can enable it in a few seconds.

For the record, even one of the KDE devs admitted refreshing in Dolphin was rather buried. Besides, Linus's issue was more that he thought Dolphin/KDE was following Apple's "my way or the highway" (which, given their stance on running Dolphin as root, I don't blame him).

 

Quote

Extracting a file and not realizing the progress bar is in the notifications area and then renaming the temporary zip before it's done zipping is user error not a linux specific problem

At what point did Linus blame Linux for that? He himself admitted it was on him for not noticing.

 

Quote

It might be a documentation problem but, it's not something manjaro needs to address.

Linus elaborated on the WAN show; the reason he suggested Manjaro address it is because most tutorials online assume you're running Debian and tell you to run sudo apt-get install X, which was further complicated by his terminal trying to install apt and then failing which led him to incorrectly diagnose the issue (which, ahem, Google wouldn't have helped). No, Manjaro doesn't need to address it, but then again, they don't need to continue maintaining the distro either...

 

Anyway, what I'm trying to say here is that there are better hills to die on. What do you have to lose by making the UI/UX better?

[Guest Linux-Is-Best]

This was exhausting to watch.

 

You BOTH ignored that the font viewer had a button labeled "install."  You BOTH ignored that the zip file increased disk space; you can visually see the MB (megabytes) total grow.  Of course, it will take a while to zip a whole directory with GB (gigabytes) worth of data, Linus.

 

My Grandpa was a 103, and you made him look tech-savvy. There are children in grade school who "get it." You've got to be trolling...

[Olgyd]

6 minutes ago, Linux-Is-Best said:

This was exhausting to watch.

 

You BOTH ignored that the font viewer had a button labeled "install."  You BOTH ignored that the zip file increased disk space; you can visually see the MB (megabytes) total grow.  Of course, it will take a while to zip a whole directory with GB (gigabytes) worth of data, Linus.

 

My Grandpa was a 103, and you made him look tech-savvy. There are children in grade school who "get it." You've got to be trolling...

I'm just gonna leave this here.

[Guest Linux-Is-Best]

The two most "hackish" (held together with glue and tape) distros I know are Manjaro and Linux Mint. I recall a few years back, one of them waited more than a week to patch a zero-day exploit when Mozilla had pushed a fix within hours. They're one of the reasons I do not use bundled browsers in any OS (operating system).

3 minutes ago, Olgyd said:

I'm just gonna leave this here.

Ugh!  They're trying to digitally sign something in a manner of a webpage vs. an actual signature.

[Guest Linux-Is-Best]

On 12/5/2021 at 2:40 PM, Sarra said:

Back to the topic of this thread. I'm getting prepared to switch my laptop over to Kubuntu LTS, which might be a mistake. I probably should use Ubuntu instead, but I'm trying it out on hardware

Honestly, if you're a complete newbie, try Gecko Linux. It's openSUSE with all the non-free firmware and media codecs pre-installed. Yast found in SUSE is comparable to your Windows Control Panel and Windows Update. Additionally, because openSUSE Linux is the upstream for SUSE Enterprise, you will have better hardware support out of the gate. That includes better plug-in-play support as well.

 

For a beginner, I suggest XFCE, as it uses virtually no resources or dependencies, plus the user interface resembles a classic Windows desktop. Once someone has mastered Linux, I may suggest KDE, which will offer them a more modern Windows experience, along with the extra settings that may have confused them before first mastering the basics.

 

But that's my 2 cents.

[Hugo-Leung]

As the common saying goes

"Never underestimate the stupidity of the user"

and

“Users don’t read”

Good thing to remember for any UX and UI designer

[Guest Linux-Is-Best]

7 minutes ago, Hugo-Leung said:

As the common saying goes

"Never underestimate the stupidity of the user"

and

“Users don’t read”

Good thing to remember for any UX and UI designer

If everyone took the time to read everything and adequately plan ahead, there would be less need for tech support. But, ironically, it is general stupidity and the inability of people to plan ahead that keeps me and many others employed.

[finest feck fips]

On 12/6/2021 at 8:21 AM, mamamia88 said:

There's a very good reason the AUR isn't default in arch and never will be. It's called the Arch User Repository. It's all user submitted, potentially malicious code, and the arch team can't verify it won't mess something up. Stuff in the official repos you can be 99% certain it's gonna work as intended cause it's been vouched for. Hell it might even fail to build which is a bad experience.  It's just bonus stuff that you can install if you can't find it in the repos and are willing to take the risk. 

This is a bit of a Linux ecosystem pet peeve of mine. Let's see how I can handle it.

The AUR's eternally unofficial status would be fine if it weren't de facto required to get a decent user experience on Arch. The AUR is huge, but Arch itself provides packages for fewer than 10,000 software projects. For a sense of perspective: the biggest distro provides packages for over 58,000 projects, Debian over 25,000, and Fedora just under 20,000. In terms of projects packaged, Arch doesn't even crack the top ten (collapsing redundant distros from the same families above it into one, e.g., Ubuntu and Debian are together counted only once, under Debian, since Ubuntu is downstream of Debian). It's smaller than the ports systems for most major BSD distros as well (only OpenBSD's ports system is smaller than the Arch repos). At the same time, the AUR is widely hailed as one of the great benefits of Arch Linux; access to the AUR is supposed to be a reason to run Arch in the first place.

 

The end result is that a huge number of Arch users (most of them, I would guess) will end up installing and keeping at least a handful of things from the AUR at some point. And when they do, they'll discover that, as ‘foreign’ packages, those packages are second-class citizens on their system when it comes to dependency resolution in pacman. Integration problems ensue. Package quality on the AUR is extremely inconsistent, to the point that installing some AUR packages will do things like overwrite your glibc and break your whole system.

Arch maintainers assert that this isn't a problem essentially because the AUR is only for advanced users, you should always be reading any PKGBUILDs you get from it yourself, etc. But using the AUR is simultaneously so necessary and so cumbersome that there's a whole little ecosystem of ‘AUR helpers’ designed to paper over all of that and let users treat AUR packages as though they were natively part of the base system. Still, those are kept out of the Arch repositories, so users at least have to bootstrap their way into running them, right? Well, not really. All of the most popular Arch downstreams, including those that have been mentioned in LTT videos (Manjaro and EndeavourOS), include AUR helpers out of the box.

I'd write more but I'm falling asleep at this point (perhaps, reader, so are you). The point is:

The AUR is poorly integrated, and packages installed with it are poorly integrated with pacman unless you run local repositories to host them. This causes breakage. Arch users (and developers) pretend that the AUR is optional, while in fact, the distro depends on the AUR to be usable for many people, and most users include the AUR as part of their pitch for Arch. It's bad. It feels like using a distro whose core tooling is unfinished.

[Sarra]

8 hours ago, Linux-Is-Best said:

Honestly, if you're a complete newbie, try Gecko Linux. It's openSUSE with all the non-free firmware and media codecs pre-installed. Yast found in SUSE is comparable to your Windows Control Panel and Windows Update. Additionally, because openSUSE Linux is the upstream for SUSE Enterprise, you will have better hardware support out of the gate. That includes better plug-in-play support as well.

 

For a beginner, I suggest XFCE, as it uses virtually no resources or dependencies, plus the user interface resembles a classic Windows desktop. Once someone has mastered Linux, I may suggest KDE, which will offer them a more modern Windows experience, along with the extra settings that may have confused them before first mastering the basics.

 

But that's my 2 cents.

I actually used Ubuntu as a daily driver back in 2008ish. Maybe 2009? I also used Red Hat on and off back in 2003-2004.

 

I've got a gaming system that does video rendering duty, and I want to use Kubuntu to take advantage of the 6800XT, so I think I'm going the right way.

 

I'm not going to nuke and pave my main Windows drive right away, so it's not going to be a permanent change. Though, I might do that with my Xeon machine first. My laptop has no important files on it, and... I haven't even used it in 2 years, so there's no reason not to nuke and pave it right away. Just waiting for some time to get some projects done, and I'll be tossing Kubuntu on the laptop and trying it out.

[Sho2048]

On 12/6/2021 at 2:34 PM, RejZoR said:

Lol, it's just bunch of unnecessary steps. PRTSCR is straight raw desktop snapshot into ANY program by pasting it with standard Ctrl+V. What's so complicated about that? Especially when I need to draw arrows and add extra text on stuff most of the time to describe bugs and issues or the steps for which you need to use editor anyway.

Greenshot's editor has that, or I can just copy anyway to the clipboard if I want it in another editor, I have the choice

[Whiskers]

On 12/8/2021 at 3:51 PM, mamamia88 said:

His literal first instinct for taking a screenshot was to search for snipping tool. The reason why linux has so many desktops and distributions is because the community is trying to do it better than windows. That's why we have these type of discussions. I was basically saying "assume the developer isn't stupid and spend a few seconds looking for the proper way to do something before assuming it's broken". Every single task he does he assumes it's gonna be relatively similar to windows (which it is) and get's frustrated when it's not exactly like windows. "I need a refresh button it needs to be there!" is such a stupid complaint when you can enable it in a few seconds. Extracting a file and not realizing the progress bar is in the notifications area and then renaming the temporary zip before it's done zipping is user error not a linux specific problem. Manjaro not having apt is not a manjaro problem. It might be a documentation problem but, it's not something manjaro needs to address. 

 

The refresh button should be part of the GUI by default. Sure you can add it yourself, but it's completely hidden away beneath 3 submenu levels. I'd argue Linus' issues with handling the file are just as much a Dolphin / KDE issue as it is a Linus issue; imo the UX for this task is poor and you shouldn't use the notification centre for showing important info relating to your current task. There's a reason it's been standard across almost every popular OS going back decades to show a pop-up progress bar / info window prominently near where you are carrying out the related task. There are ways to design it to be less clunky and intrusive whilst still sufficiently informing the user of what's going on; Dolphin / KDE's approach doesn't satisfactorily do this imo.

 

On 12/8/2021 at 3:51 PM, mamamia88 said:

We all do things slightly different and linux is tailored to that. So if you can't figure something out slow down, take a deep breath, and google it. Or just spend a few minutes digging around in the right click menu. Really comes off as condescending when you spend more time criticiizing a ui element like lack of a refresh button when it's just a design decision not to have it available by default but, allow the user to change it. 

 

You just said yourself that we all do things slightly differently and Linux is tailored for that. But then when Linus wants to do things differently on Linux, you're suggesting he's wrong to do so. I don't think that's entirely fair.  If Linux is supposed to be welcoming to users of different tastes, experiences, and needs, I don't see why that should exclude users with a Windows background. There's nothing wrong with a few accommodations here and there that make life a little easier for users transitioning to Linux, so long as they don't intrude on the experience for those who are already very familiar and confident with Linux. Even something as simple as adding in "snipping tool" as a search alias for a given screenshot utility can help.

 

On 12/8/2021 at 4:13 PM, finest feck fips said:

I tend to be highly suspicious of any talk of ‘intuitive’ user interfaces. In one of the previous official posts on an official episode, one user related the experience of baby duck syndrome, which I think is a very useful concept here.

 

That's a fair point. It can definitely be difficult to discern what's truly "intuitive" and what's just accommodating established expectations. And "intuitive design" has long been a bit of an empty buzzword in UI, UX design and related areas. I still think it's important to do what we can to make interfaces that make sense for new users though, whether they're new to computers entirely or just new to Linux. 

 

On 12/8/2021 at 4:13 PM, finest feck fips said:

I recently encountered a very interesting old paper on the research and acceptance testing that went into the first Windows release to include a start menu. There's a lot in it to suggest that what may now be easy to think of as ‘intuitive’ is very much a matter of learned convention. Take for instance the ‘standard’ Windows behavior of single-clicking to select and double-clicking to launch. The paper describes the following as a ‘key finding’:

 

Or consider that many users like Linus and Luke might describe an experience where right-clicking on the desktop offers options for changing the desktop background but not the screen resolution as ‘unintuitive’. But how intuitive are context menus?

 

Good points. I hadn't even considered the desktop context menu example, I could indeed see that causing some confusion / frustration for ex-Windows users. That said it's very easy to find your way to the display settings so I don't think it's too inconvenient or confusing to people. It's also an instance, imo, of Windows having a bizarre and arbitrary way of doing something which wouldn't be intuitive at all unless you're already used to it.

 

Ultimately it's a matter of balance. I feel sometimes we're a bit too diametrically opposed to the idea of doing something "the Windows way", or even accommodating Windows users. But I also feel there are plenty of things in most Linux distros and software that are outright unintuitive, even to those who've never used Windows before. 

 

One important note though; research data from the Windows 95 era isn't guaranteed to be entirely relevant / accurate now. User familiarity with and expectations for computer programs and interfaces were vastly different then; computers were still relatively new to consumers, and they were yet to become entirely commonplace. And of course smartphones, which have had a massive impact on user familiarity and expectations with tech and software in general, didn't exist. The "baseline" expectation of users in 2021 isn't comparable to that of ~1995 because as a whole we're so much more intimately familiar with using computers.

 

On 12/8/2021 at 4:13 PM, finest feck fips said:

For a more potent example, consider the behavior of the ‘show desktop’ button on KDE Plasma, which temporarily minimizes all windows, but restores the position of all windows once you move away from the desktop and open any window. Is actually minimizing all windows an intuitive behavior for new users, given that

To me, it seems more intuitive that a button meant to show you the desktop does so with as few catches as possible. By trying to pre-empt user intent, I think it risks confusing / frustrating users who don't use it as the designer expected. I mean that's kind of unavoidable to a point in UI design but hopefully you can see what I mean. Imo, it'd be better to have the Windows-like approach by default and allow users to choose the current approach if they prefer it.

 

It could be that I feel that way because of baby duck syndrome, but I've almost never used the button before so I don't think so.

 

On 12/8/2021 at 4:13 PM, finest feck fips said:

So here the path actually forks: does KDE want a behavior that is ‘intuitive to new users’ or one that is familiar to experienced Windows users?

 

I get the impression from bits like this in your previous comment that you already agree with that.

I think optimally it should be designed to be accessible to both. Which is a bit hand-wavey I know, but I think it's important to not just copy Windows' way of doing something, or just design something to be intuitive to those who've never used a computer before. It's all about balance, again. And of course there's a third part to that balance; the existing Linux crowd. I'm not advocating for a paradigm shift in Linux UI and UX design which completely ignores current user expectations and preferences, just that it should be a little more cognisant of and accommodating to those who are new to Linux.

 

On 12/8/2021 at 4:13 PM, finest feck fips said:

But I want to stress that in the context of an audience who grew up with computers in general and Windows computers in particular, it can be very difficult to separate out what is intuitive from what is familiar.

 

Absolutely. And it's only getting more difficult, as so many people's experiences and expectations are being shaped by daily interactions with their smartphone or tablet. There are kids and even teens now who've been using a smart device almost every day of their life. Leads to some interesting questions as to how things will further develop for desktop OS design I think.

[Paul Bridges]

On 12/4/2021 at 3:10 PM, syborg64 said:

Can the taskmaster clear up if signing a PDF was about digital signatures or just adding text ?

Both contestants and a lot of react videos seems to think that "sign a PDF" is to put the image of a physical signature over the PDF, THAT IS NOT SIGNING.

 

An electronic signature is a criptography of the file hash done with your private key. If it's done with a key pair recognized by your government, this PDF will have legal value.

 

Maybe things are done differently on Canada?

 

Edited December 10, 2021 by Paul Bridges
typos, lots of typos

[Nayr438]

35 minutes ago, Paul Bridges said:

Both contestants and a lot of react videos seems to think that "sign a PDF" is to put the image of a physical signature over the PDF, THAT IS NOT SIGNING.

 

An electronic signature is a criptography of the file hash done with your private key. If it's done with a key pair recognized by your government, this PDF will have legal value.

 

Maybe things are done differently on Canada?

 

In my work, which involves Banks, Lawyers, Insurance Companies, etc..  Signing a PDF means attaching a handwritten signature to the signature field, captured from pretty much any device that you can digitally draw on. I live in the U.S. and have never been asked to electronically sign something using a private key.

[Sho2048]

3 hours ago, Whiskers said:

 

The refresh button should be part of the GUI by default. Sure you can add it yourself, but it's completely hidden away beneath 3 submenu levels. I'd argue Linus' issues with handling the file are just as much a Dolphin / KDE issue as it is a Linus issue; imo the UX for this task is poor and you shouldn't use the notification centre for showing important info relating to your current task. There's a reason it's been standard across almost every popular OS going back decades to show a pop-up progress bar / info window prominently near where you are carrying out the related task. There are ways to design it to be less clunky and intrusive whilst still sufficiently informing the user of what's going on; Dolphin / KDE's approach doesn't satisfactorily do this imo.

 

 

You just said yourself that we all do things slightly differently and Linux is tailored for that. But then when Linus wants to do things differently on Linux, you're suggesting he's wrong to do so. I don't think that's entirely fair.  If Linux is supposed to be welcoming to users of different tastes, experiences, and needs, I don't see why that should exclude users with a Windows background. There's nothing wrong with a few accommodations here and there that make life a little easier for users transitioning to Linux, so long as they don't intrude on the experience for those who are already very familiar and confident with Linux. Even something as simple as adding in "snipping tool" as a search alias for a given screenshot utility can help.

 

 

That's a fair point. It can definitely be difficult to discern what's truly "intuitive" and what's just accommodating established expectations. And "intuitive design" has long been a bit of an empty buzzword in UI, UX design and related areas. I still think it's important to do what we can to make interfaces that make sense for new users though, whether they're new to computers entirely or just new to Linux. 

 

 

Good points. I hadn't even considered the desktop context menu example, I could indeed see that causing some confusion / frustration for ex-Windows users. That said it's very easy to find your way to the display settings so I don't think it's too inconvenient or confusing to people. It's also an instance, imo, of Windows having a bizarre and arbitrary way of doing something which wouldn't be intuitive at all unless you're already used to it.

 

Ultimately it's a matter of balance. I feel sometimes we're a bit too diametrically opposed to the idea of doing something "the Windows way", or even accommodating Windows users. But I also feel there are plenty of things in most Linux distros and software that are outright unintuitive, even to those who've never used Windows before. 

 

One important note though; research data from the Windows 95 era isn't guaranteed to be entirely relevant / accurate now. User familiarity with and expectations for computer programs and interfaces were vastly different then; computers were still relatively new to consumers, and they were yet to become entirely commonplace. And of course smartphones, which have had a massive impact on user familiarity and expectations with tech and software in general, didn't exist. The "baseline" expectation of users in 2021 isn't comparable to that of ~1995 because as a whole we're so much more intimately familiar with using computers.

 

To me, it seems more intuitive that a button meant to show you the desktop does so with as few catches as possible. By trying to pre-empt user intent, I think it risks confusing / frustrating users who don't use it as the designer expected. I mean that's kind of unavoidable to a point in UI design but hopefully you can see what I mean. Imo, it'd be better to have the Windows-like approach by default and allow users to choose the current approach if they prefer it. 

 

It could be that I feel that way because of baby duck syndrome, but I've almost never used the button before so I don't think so.

 

I think optimally it should be designed to be accessible to both. Which is a bit hand-wavey I know, but I think it's important to not just copy Windows' way of doing something, or just design something to be intuitive to those who've never used a computer before. It's all about balance, again. And of course there's a third part to that balance; the existing Linux crowd. I'm not advocating for a paradigm shift in Linux UI and UX design which completely ignores current user expectations and preferences, just that it should be a little more cognisant of and accommodating to those who are new to Linux.

 

 

Absolutely. And it's only getting more difficult, as so many people's experiences and expectations are being shaped by daily interactions with their smartphone or tablet. There are kids and even teens now who've been using a smart device almost every day of their life. Leads to some interesting questions as to how things will further develop for desktop OS design I think.

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It could be that I feel that way because of baby duck syndrome, but I've almost never used the button before so I don't think so.

Unfortunately I feel that many of your points are related to being exposed to Windows first and then to other operating systems, especially the point about the refresh button being a default or where the progress bar should be. A bit like the Print Screen button being so evangelized in this thread, while it's an inferior experience all around. Having all progress being made on the PC in one place, once you get used to, is awesome; I lose those small popup things everyday and it's awful to have them show up on task switching (as you end up with so much noise). And while you have a point about being welcoming, no, I don't think catering to Windows in particular is a good idea.

 

(Casually I have seen this video moments ago.)

 

Worth repeating that overused Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

 

In particular, I have never used a refresh button in real life lol. That paradigm is absolutely only a Windows thing, or a browser one that is obsolete ("refresh" obscures what's actually happening, refetching a content that could've changed, and front end developers moved away from that almost a decade ago).

 

[Rex Hite]

Acrobat Pro has a signing function that eliminates the need to go outside the acrobat document for any tools or steps to sign the document.

 

 

[Kilrah]

6 hours ago, Paul Bridges said:

An electronic signature is a criptography of the file hash done with your private key. If it's done with a key pair recognized by your government, this PDF will have legal value.

That's what it should be, but it's not what most of the business world does...

[Olgyd]

8 hours ago, Paul Bridges said:

Both contestants and a lot of react videos seems to think that "sign a PDF" is to put the image of a physical signature over the PDF, THAT IS NOT SIGNING.

 

An electronic signature is a criptography of the file hash done with your private key. If it's done with a key pair recognized by your government, this PDF will have legal value.

 

Maybe things are done differently on Canada?

 

The UK would like to disagree with you.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electronic-signatures

[Ultraforce]

15 hours ago, Paul Bridges said:

Both contestants and a lot of react videos seems to think that "sign a PDF" is to put the image of a physical signature over the PDF, THAT IS NOT SIGNING.

 

An electronic signature is a criptography of the file hash done with your private key. If it's done with a key pair recognized by your government, this PDF will have legal value.

 

Maybe things are done differently on Canada?

 

I don't do business really but in my experience as a young adult in Canada sign a pdf is either an image of a physical signature or a request to print out the pdf sign it and then scan the signed document(wet signature).

It might be different for people who take courses related to law or business but as a systems eng student and applying for jobs digital signature with a private key isn't a thing I've been exposed to outside of one network security course where we were given examples with it but not actually shown how to do it on a pdf reader.