interesting article, for all those who think Ubuntu is already easy

[Matthew Garrett]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 11:43:03PM +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 May 2006 22:17, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > No, because you're assuming that configuration options have no cost.
> > They don't. If you have 30 configuration options and never need to
> > touch 25 of them, how likely are you to find the other 5 that you /do/
> > need to touch?
> >
> advanced tab?

What defines whether things are "advanced" or not? And that only pushes 
the problem further back - at the point where you have to give people 
instructions saying "Go to this window, click on the advanced tab, go to 
the checkbox marked 'Enable DMA', reboot" you might as well go with 
"Edit this text file as root" - making it pointy clicky isn't actually 
easier. And then you end up with a checkbox that is effectively either 
"make my computer work" or "break my computer", and it's *impossible* 
for the user to know which catagory they fall into without risking 
breaking things.

When something doesn't work, we should *make it work*, not add band aids 
that make it easier to ignore the fact that there's a problem in the 
first place.

> > The answer to "I don't have DMA on my drive" is not "Add a checkbox".
> > It's "Figure out why you don't have DMA on your drive, and then fix
> > that". Have you filed a bug?
> 
> It was for breezy

I'm afraid I can't find it (there were a couple of other DMA-related 
issues that I've responded to). Could you give a bug number?

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org