Linux and fonts and Firefox and human-factors design

Jason Stephenson jason at sigio.com
Tue Oct 31 10:30:30 EST 2006


RE: User interface (which is what this has turned into)

I find the best user interface is the most minimal. Something that isn't 
cluttered with a lot of buttons and gee-whiz googaw. I like the command 
line, and then simple GUIs for times when data needs visualization.

The problem is that everyone tries to solve every problem with the point 
and grunt interface. The interface needs to fit the task at hand.

Until the motherboard on my 7-year-old FreeBSD workstation (originally 
ran Slackware!) went kaput on me last week, I used BlackBox as my 
primary X-Windows interface. It has an easily configured root menu that 
I could put my favorite apps into. If I needed something else, I can 
fire up a rxvt and run something from there. It's simple, has a short 
learning curve, and works for the beginner and expert alike.

Now, I'm stuck using my Windows XP "gamestation" to do my work. With 
Mingw, MSYS, Cygwin, Firefox, Thunderbird, GNU Emacs, and Samba on my 
web/mail server, it ain't so bad.

This also opens the question of trying to win the desktop away from 
Microsoft. Wes Peters wrote an interesting article on this topic back in 
May (URL below). I think he makes a good point.

http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200605/dadvocate.html

It also begs the question of trying to make X more like Windows. Do you 
really want to imitate Microsoft's UI mistakes in order to win converts? 
What we need is something completely different, and I'm not talking 
about Mac OS X, either.

Now, on the topic of fonts in Linux/*NIX:

No one has answered this because the objections are real. Using fonts in 
*NIX totally blows. Witness all the different font servers that are 
available for X. Fonts need some serious attention. It seems that every 
X app does its own thing looking for fonts. Not to mention groff, TeX, 
and the others.

Anyway, just my pseudorandom thoughts while I wait for cvsup to finish 
updating ports on my server.--I need to update clamav and install 
cdrtools so I can get a more recent backup of my files off my old PC's 
/home disk.

Cheers,
Jason


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