Linux UI vs Mac?

don_pettengill_at_spamgilent.com
Date: 03/10/05 

Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:39:24 +0000 (UTC)

My wife will soon need a computer for business and she has vetoed the
idea of using Linux for it. She wants to be able to get done what she
needs without having to call me every time something goes wrong. She
finds e-mail attachments particularly awkward to deal with (save to
file, remember where you saved it, open application and then each app
looks in a different place for your file, etc etc).

No problem, thought I. Just get Konqueror or something suitable working
for file browsing and let her drag and drop just like she does on her
Mac at work. So I do that and send myself an e-mail with attachment
(using Mozilla for e-mail). Ah! There's the attachment - let's just
drag it over to the desktop. Oh, I see it wants a file name - well
that's inconvenient but I'll live with it. Enter file name and save and
there is the icon on the desktop. Click on it - nothing. Open it any
any app - nothing. Look at properties - it's *one byte long*, ie empty.
Saving the attachment from Mozilla opens up the dreaded file/directory
box, but I do save it and verify - nothing wrong with the attachment and
I can open it - once I have saved it by typing in name/location etc.
GUI drag and drop? Forget it.

Oh well, let's drag'n drop instead onto a Konqueror window. The
Konqueror window disappears and a seg fault window comes up to "report
this bug", or whatever.

!@$!!! I thought this would be easy, but it really isn't. It doesn't
look possible to recreate "the Mac experience", or something close, on
my KDE desktop. (Running Debian sarge btw). So i will probably get an
i-mac mini for my wife, instead.

Does it have to be this way? My usage is very different, all command
line and only a little gui use. But if one wants to be able to "just
use it" for business, sending/receving attachments, dragging files
around, click to open (on Mac you can even open an attachment you are
about to send by clicking on it - to check, if you want, that it's
correct; not on Linux/Mozilla), and so on - I am having a hard time
seeing how any of my desktops, or any Linux desktop, can do that
reliably, where "reliably" means - it has to work every time the same
way.

Maybe I do better by carefully selecting the applications? Does anyone
else have any experience/suggestions for setting up a Linux box as a Mac
substitute, with primary requirements ease of use (especially
consistency of user interface), and reliability? I have been a Linux
user for about 7 years and there's plenty of stuff *I* can't fix.
Example: the Mozilla printer pull-down, where I can't for the life of
me keep stuff I don't want, permanently out of it, like "blah@64" etc
etc. I just want the printer (by default) and maybe an option to print
to a file. I edited Mozilla startup files several times but the other
entries aries from the dead after a few uses. !@!~!! Or on the pdf
reader apps, how to get rid of kprinter as the default and have cups be
used instead. I am sure there are config files for some of this but
many of the application quirks appear unfixable; different apps have
different use designs and that's it.

BTW I have used a Mac and can't say I like it much, personally (nothing
liek a perl one-liner for getting real work done :-)).. But I can see
how the computer non-literati like the Mac - it really is easy and *it
works*. I am pretty frustrated that after all this time, the Linux
desktop can't get it togther to do the same, at least not my desktop
anyway :-) I can do many things the average Mac user cannot - decipher
unknown attachments, change file formats, and so on ad infinitum, but
this "simple stuff" is just beyond me.

Thanks,

Don Pettengill

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