Re: Desktop NetBSD needs your help

[Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen%iki.fi@localhost>]

On 07.02.2009, Eric Haszlakiewicz wrote:
> Another important point, that I don't think is stressed enough, is that  
> the "nice"/"Just Deal With It" modes are also useful for non-novice  
> users.  Just because I _can_ download tarballs and use pkg_add directly  
> (or fdisk+disklabel, or whatever low level interface) doesn't mean that  
> I _want_ to do so all the time.  Making things convenient, easy to do  
> and pleasant to interact with benefits the expert users as well as the  
> novices, and frees up more brain cycles to go think about more  
> interesting things.

This is indeed an important point to emphasize.

I know many brilliant system programmers who deal with low level interfaces
(and count blocks better than megabytes, as someone wrote), but absolutely
hate to deal with such things as spending hours to setup a functional
workstation. While I am not entirely convinced about the choice of software
and "user-friendliness" generally, in my opinion it is a big and
misfortunate fallacy to assume that an option for desktop environment would
only cater hordes of Ubuntu users, so to speak. If the desktop NetBSD will
attract even one able kernel hacker, it is already a win for the system as a
whole.

- Jukka R.