Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

So with the release of Hardy Heron, an Ubuntu-using blogger puts the new system to the “girlfriend test” — he gives his Windows-familiar but Ubuntu-n00b girlfriend a list of tasks to accomplish, and watches her try to accomplish them (she’s able to do most, but not all, of the tasks without any instruction).

This blog post has gotten a lot of attention in just a few days, and with good reason — it touches on a lot of hot-button issues regarding Linux and Ubuntu. The blogger says, “Linux won’t truly be ready for the desktop until someone computer illiterate can sit down at a the computer and with little effort do what they want to do” — and he considers his intelligent, tech-savvy girlfriend’s failure at a few of the tasks to be a sign that this isn’t the case. This is a problematic assessment — many of the tasks he chose are the kinds of things only power users even think to do (Photoshop a picture, download a torrent). A truly computer-illiterate user or even an ordinary non-power-user would be interested in much more basic tasks — e.g. I installed Ubuntu on my mom’s laptop a few months ago (hi, Mom!), and she hasn’t had to ask me for tech support, presumably because she only uses her computer for a handful of things and those things are easy to do.

That said, this type of test is definitely a useful way to see what aspects of the interface are more and less user-friendly; for example, installing Flash, which is one of the first few things I do on any new installation, is completely non-obvious and requires command-line usage — not a good idea for something many non-savvy users will want to do right away.

Of course, there’s always going to be the double-standard folks who will use any non-user-friendly aspect of a Linux distro as an example of how “Linux is too hard”, while ignoring any program that’s buggy, interface that’s confusing, or task that requires the command line on another OS. Their counterparts are the “Linux isn’t Windows!!!” people (”Linux isn’t Windows, so don’t expect someone used to Windows to be able to use it easily”) — I agree, Linux isn’t and shouldn’t be a clone of Windows, but if you want Windows users to switch to Linux, you should care about making Linux easy to use for people used to Windows, just like if you want new computer users to be able to start out on Linux you should care about making it easy to use for people who haven’t used a computer before. Fortunately we’ve seen a lot of progress in these areas in the past few years, and I’m confident that Linux developers will continue to produce distros that are easier and easier for all levels of users.

Oh, and for the “Linux users don’t have girlfriends”(/”girls don’t use Linux”/”there are no girls on the internet”) people? Get over yourselves. It’s not funny, it’s not original, and it’s not true… in fact, I happen to live with a Linux user who not only has a girlfriend but had her install Flash for him :).

Even leaving aside the tacky-at-best practice of referring to people with a strong thinking preference as “Vulcans”, something’s a little off with David Brooks’s review of Al Gore’s new book. Most notably, this phrasing struck my attention (emphasis mine):

As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This sentence doesn’t sound like something only a graduate student could come up with; in fact, it sounds like the sort of reasonable yet straightforward analysis tht you might find in an intelligent high schooler’s paper. Curious, I did a little Wikipedia-ing; as if we needed confirmation that Brooks should know better, he has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Chicago! I’d assume that even in 1983 they don’t hand out such degrees to students who can’t write clear sentences about simple historical trends. So Brooks is presumably aware that the “graduate school” epithet is a little silly here. Throw in descriptions of Gore’s prose as “pomposity” that the reader needs to “steel yourself for”, and it’s clear that Brooks is taking a deliberately exaggerated version of the position that Gore is too intellectual to represent the American people — and in the New York Times, a publication popular primarily with educated liberals. My interpretation of “graduate school” in particular is that he’s trying to play up Gore’s supposed over-intellectuality for a mostly college-educated audience; they wouldn’t be intimidated by a more realistic description, since it would sound close to their own backgrounds. I wonder what makes Brooks think alienating (literally, with the Vulcan reference in the article’s title) Gore from NYT readers is so important, and if it’s working.

Meanwhile, over in Slate, William Saletan, whose straightforwardly factual presentations I usually admire, ends up saying something a little weird when talking about the new no-period Pill:

The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won’t shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They’ll do it to satisfy others. On menstrual-suppression Web sites, you can find testimonies from women who hate their periods for making them too moody for their boyfriends or too tired to go to the office. Their menses are getting in the way of their men.

The boyfriend comment I can understand, but if I can’t go to work or can’t work effectively because of low energy from blood loss, not to mention crippling pain, that’s far from my “menses getting in the way of [my] men”. That’s another example of how menstruation’s side effects can be a more than minor obstacle to the “emancipation” that comes from being able to perform at your best in any job or activity, regardless of whether men are involved.