*nix

First off, my Sun blog should be coming sometime this weekend/early next week. If I post anything interesting there, I’ll be sure to cross-post it.

This morning at work, while reading Digg, I came by two interesting links that got me thinking: 5 Reasons Your Parents Should Use Linux and Ten Things Linux Distros Get Right (That MS Doesn’t). Now, I’ll admit, my *nix experience is pretty much limited to Linux. I’ve used BSD a few times, but only as pre-built images for embedded systems like my Soekris boxen. I’ve used Solaris mainly just as a user/web developer in SSH at work. And while I now have a work computer running Solaris 10 and a SXDE image on my laptop, I’m still relatively new - and, given that I’m now doing hardware support and wireless work, I don’t even know what I need another machine in the office for.

That being said, the second link got me thinking. Specifically, about something I read in The Art of Unix Programming [Wikipedia] by Eric S. Raymond (available online here) with regards to interface design. One quote that I was able to find in the online version, comes from Chapter 11, under the subtitle “Tradeoffs between CLI and Visual Interfaces”, “Resistance to CLI interfaces tends to decrease as users become more expert. In many problem domains, users (especially frequent users) reach a crossover point at which the concision and expressiveness of CLI becomes more valuable than avoiding its mnemonic load. Thus, for example, computing novices prefer the ease of GUI desktops, but experienced users often gradually discover that they prefer typing commands to a shell.”

There is another similar quote in the book, mentioning how resistance to the CLI drops as typing speed increases.

Unfortunately, in some areas I’m still bound to Windows. Though my only personal use for it is to control an ancient Umax Mirage IIse SCSI scanner (with only Windows and Mac drivers), I ultimately need to touch it now and then - whether on my mother’s box (she claims she has to have Windows and MS Office because “that’s what businesses use”) or as admin of the four boxes at the Ambulance Corps where I volunteer.

However, whenever I am (unfortunately) pushed into the task of working on a Windows box, I always feel something lacking. To be blunt, I don’t see how experienced users can deal with it. And this isn’t just an issue of multiple desktops, or reliability (I expect my desktop to have months of uptime, and my servers to have years). This isn’t just pro-Linux, it’s anti-Windows. Linux is great. Solaris seems wonderful, and I can’t want to move my servers over. And, believe it or not, due to playing around with the Solaris Management Console, for the first time in 5 years, I plan on running X on my servers. What this is, is a talk about total workflow. Years ago, I reached the point where I am more comfortable at the command line, or in an Ncurses-style GUI, than in X.

I an attribute this to two factors - verbosity and speed. The CLI is as verbose as anything can get. I remember setting a static IP on a Windows box. I had to navigate the Start menu, open up the control panel, the network thingy, click on the network card, and work through a series of dialogs. In Linux, I clicked on the terminal icon, typed “sudo ifconfig eth0 up 192.168.0.211” and then a password. Done. Likewise, refreshing a DHCP lease on Windows requires a whole bunch of “repair connection” nonsense, whereas in Linux all it requires is “dhclient eth0”. The bottom line I know what I’m doing. Windows should have an option to let me quickly do it.

Speed is a related issue. Click, click-click, drag, click, click…. what about just typing? Even for people who aren’t CLI-friendly, there’s Ncurses. YaST2, the SuSE/openSuSE administration tool, has both GUI and Ncurses interfaces. I always use the Ncurses interface. Why? Because I’ve been using it for years. I know that if I want to add a user through YaST, I hit the down arrow 7 times, tab once, down 5, enter. Tab once more to bring up the add user dialog. I can do this in well under a second. What’s the bottom line? Well, first of all, my hands are already on the keyboard. That’s where they like to stay. That’s where they’re comfortable. My fingers need to move a *lot* less to navigate with the arrow keys, tab, and enter than they do to use a mouse. If you know what you’re doing, if you already know what you’re looking for, then a mouse is slower than the speed of thought (or reaction).

So where’s the Windows bashing? Simple. How do people at Microsoft deal with this? How does the guy who *wrote* that network settings dialog deal with navigating the GUI every time, even though he already knows exactly what he wants to do - and probably the system calls to do it?

The bottom line is that every time I sit down at a Windows machine, I wonder how the most popular OS is one that doesn’t give any thought to advanced users. I know that I can type faster than I can move a mouse, why don’t you let me use that? More importantly, why didn’t Microsoft ever think that people would use computers on a network? When I installed Solaris, I wanted to edit a config file. I hadn’t customized anything yet, hadn’t installed any other software, nothing. Yet, I was able to open up a terminal and grab my .emacs file from my laptop in one line (scp).

To be totally honest, the question running through my mind is something like “everything is so much quicker on Linux. How do experts deal with Windows?”