I’ve been using Linux since 1992 or so. I don’t remember the date, but the distro was SLS 1.03 and the kernel was 0.99.14. Linux has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of usability since then, but it still has a LONG way to go. Mac OS X has gone from 0 to way, way better than Linux in the course of 3 or 4 years. It’s amazing.
Some Linux developer considered this a decent error dialog. Can I get a “Sheesh” from the crowd?
One of our tech guys has a screen shot of a real error message from a Mac (but probably earlier than OS X) that says “Error -87 This is probably a bad thing.”
OK, I made up the error number. Shoot me.
I wrote an error message once, for a Mac application, that said, “Something terrible has happened.”
I like to think I’ve matured since then. And that’s really what useless error messages are – a sign of programmer immaturity. You write error messages like that until you realize that it isn’t funny to confuse the user. The point isn’t to rub it in the users face that you’re smarter then they are, and they should just give up hope of ever understanding those computer things – it’s to help them fix the problem.
It only took a few years in tech support to teach me this.
As an aside, I see it as a bad thing that developers these days get straight out of school and go directly into dev jobs. In my day (gawd, I’m old!), you spent some time in QA first. Then maybe you spent some time in Tech Support. And then they let you start writing code. Maybe was related more to being a small company then it was related to the time.
All I know is that kids these days just don’t understand users.
I can live with open source Linux being kinda crappy, but not the commercial distributions, like Red Hat and SuSE. If they’ve got money pushing them, they need to get their act together, period. If they’re going to bother offering 3rd party software packages, it would be nice if they kept the versions updated. They’ll have package versions that are at least a year old; it’s insupportable.
That’s a lovely error message, but it’s much more informative than the way my mother’s lexmark p/s/c stopped working on her mac mini; the jobs got queued, and that was it. No error messages, no alert boxes, nothing but c*ps reporting the printer as offline and not bothering to print anything.
(And I know it’s c*ps because I had to open up a terminal window and dig around the box to even have the slightest clue what was going on. The gui interface was completely useless, which was *particularly* annoying because I’d grown used to Macos and Windows boxes actually producing useful error messages when something went wrong.)
Yup, I think I sent you an email years ago saying “no way” to your assertion that Linux was ready for prime time. OSX is king, and OSX still sucks. This operating system business is a tough nut to crack.