Usability gems in GNU/Linux

My post Thank you, Ubuntu attracted some attention (hello, Hacker News!). A couple of commenters were skeptical of my assertion that GNU/Linux is more usable than the major proprietary operating systems— and rightly so, since I didn't really elaborate on it at the time. For example, commenter Dubc wrote:

I think Ubuntu is a fine choice indeed, but you are going to either have to use another word than usability, or redefine the term to meet your presumptions.

So I'd like to expand on a few of the things that make Ubuntu such a pleasure to use, for those who aren't familiar with its ins and outs, especially because I so rarely see people take the time to articulate some of these nifty constructs at a high level.

I will happily grant that at the application level, Windows and Mac OS have a much more consistent base of polished applications. And Apple has an attention to detail and psychology that others would do well to learn from.

It's often said that Apple takes the time to get the little things right. Unfortunately, at times I think they should have instead spent a bit more time thinking through the big things in Mac OS. There are some fairly glaring architectural/design/HCI problems on the Mac (and on Windows, too) that hamper users needlessly. And because these are issues with how one interacts with the system at its most basic levels, no amount of polish on the "little things" can really satisfactorily outweigh them.

What that boils down to is this: yes, you will wrestle with GNU/Linux for a few hours or days or weeks when you get it set up. But if you use Windows or Mac OS, you will wrestle with it every minute of every day you're using it. Forever. And that's just not what "usability" means to me.

Here are some illustrative examples:

apt

An anonymous commenter wrote:

in Mac installing software is a single drag-and-drop function

Oh, if only that were the case. The flow for installing software on Windows/Mac looks something like this (some steps omitted for brevity):

  1. Open a web browser and search for the software you want.
  2. Navigate to the vendor's web page, fish around for the download link, and start downloading the software. Wait.
  3. Find the file you downloaded and open the installer/archive.
  4. Accept the license agreement.
  5. Drag the item to the dock (Mac only).
  6. Answer some setup questions. Wait.
  7. Delete the installer/archive.

These steps are error-prone, and unsophisticated users will quickly find themselves with malware on their systems. We should help users to do the right thing by default when installing software, and subjecting them to the vagaries of the wide-open web isn't the right thing.

On Ubuntu:

  1. Open Synaptic and search for the software you want.
  2. Click install. Wait.

Whatever the heck you want, you can find it in Synaptic. And there's no distinction between software that was preinstalled with your system and software that you choose to install later. It all works the same way and gets security updates in the same way. And it looks like Mac OS is finally starting to head in this direction with the App Store for Mac software.

But, what's more, each of the thousands of pieces of software available in the Ubuntu (or whatever distro you use) repository has an audit trail, and— unlike the apps you get in the Mac App Store, or any "App Store," really— Ubuntu has the means, motive, and opportunity to do whatever it takes to make them "just work," no matter where and when and for whom it was originally written. There is a vast body of software that is just considered to be part of your operating system and is maintained alongside it, and Ubuntu will vouch for that software just as it will vouch for the software at the core of your system.

It's not clear whether you will ever see that sort of large-scale integration work in a proprietary OS. Package management is really one of the highlights of the free software ecosystem.

Remote access

X11 has pretty much decoupled where a program runs and where the program can be used. You have a few basic composable tools— SSH, X forwarding, and port forwarding— and all of a sudden the vast majority of applications can be invoked remotely. So you can, very easily, interact with a program that's using the resources (CPU, filesystem, network bandwidth) of a computer sitting somewhere else. There are a few gotchas with respect to X11 (watch out for high-latency network links, for example), but by and large it works.

"But wait," you say, "Mac OS has SSH and X11 too." Except that most of the apps you want to use can't be invoked remotely, because they aren't X11 apps. So you have a litany of tricks. VNC and NX are appropriate sometimes, but they're clunky. Mac OS has "Back to My Mac" which is a slightly more general tool (and costs $99/year). But typically, whenever you work remotely you have to work differently too. It's a far cry from the situation on GNU/Linux, where you have a critical mass of applications you can use remotely and they just work, more or less transparently.

The result is that Mac and Windows users are typically highly dependent on a single piece of hardware. If you have a nice light laptop, more power to you. They say the best computer is the one you always have with you, after all. But even better than that is not having to carry a computer around. It's incredibly liberating, not to mention convenient. You can actually go places without having to pack a bag.

On GNU/Linux, one barely even perceives the concept of "other computers." Every computer you use, no matter how far away it is, is so accessible to you, so immediate, that it might as well be the one sitting on your lap right now.

Of course, Microsoft and Apple don't really have any incentive to make remote access terribly effective. Since they generally sell you a license to use a particular instance of their software on a particular computer, it would cut into their bottom line to make remote access actually useful. So they won't.

Window managers

The Windows/Mac window managers (the part of your OS that lets you manipulate windows and switch between them) are pretty bad. They weren't always this way— they have become noticeably clunkier on the large displays that are so common today.

On large displays, maximizing (zooming) windows is not useful much of the time. Maximized windows are just too big. Instead you have to move and resize windows to obtain a useful multi-window arrangement on your screen. But Windows and Mac OS give you very little help in this regard. To produce these arrangements you usually have to click on some tiny button/target and manually move windows around.

For example, moving or resizing windows on Windows or Mac OS typically requires you to point at the titlebar or resize handle or window border— both of which are just a few pixels wide.

Fitts's Law? Bueller? Bueller? Having enabled alt-dragging to move or resize on any capable X window manager (I use Openbox, but even the Ubuntu default window manager supports this), the entire window becomes your drag target. The entire window. (Alternatively, if you use a tiling window manager, even the whole concept of manually moving windows around becomes basically moot.)

In fairness to Apple and Microsoft, they have taken some steps in the right direction recently. Windows 7 "docks" windows to one side of the screen when you ask it to. You can configure some recent Macs to let you drag windows with three fingers (or so I've heard). And Mac recently gained Spaces (i.e. virtual desktops) too.

Unfortunately, I think these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Mac OS and Windows users have waited for years only to get a fraction of the window management facilities that you could have set up in your X11 window manager. Supposing you spent an hour setting up your WM to your liking, I figure you would earn back that time in improved productivity in just a few weeks, rather than having to wait years for Microsoft or Apple to implement a sensible workflow. But more importantly, your blood pressure would go down, immediately.

People really are more effective when they can set up their computers to work they way they want. But on Windows and Mac OS they aren't given the tools they need to do so. I wouldn't disparage these operating systems so much if they came with window managers that could at least be configured to be minimally adequate. But they don't.

The window manager is the one program you're using all the time, even when you're using other programs. It's your primary vehicle for multitasking and your command center for managing your work on a second-by-second basis. So it's really important to get this right.

Conclusion

Having read this post, you might decide that you would brand these issues not as "usability" issues but as something else. Which is completely fine by me. A rose by any other name, after all…

Many of the cumbersome rituals that Windows and Mac OS have whittled away at over the years are completely unnecessary in Ubuntu. And this is why, while I've had occasion to use a Mac (at various times since 2004 or so) and Windows (only occasionally), sitting down at one always feels like death by a thousand cuts. They're superficially simpler, but really quite tiresome once you get beneath the surface. It seems that hey are optimized for learnability at the expense of usability. That is is exactly the wrong optimization to make, if you use a computer for a living.

Life is just too short for that.

Now, it's not like Ubuntu is a paragon of usability out of the box, either, though some of the things I mention above do just work by default. The difference— the key difference— is that you can make it into one without much hassle.

Instant messaging on Android

I've been using a Nexus One as my primary phone for the last few months now, and I quite like it! Upon reflection, the thing I most like about it, however, is not something I had anticipated at all when I got the phone.

Being able to search the web, read email, run apps, look at maps, and listen to podcasts are all very convenient. Though, there is not much to say about those things: I use those tools in more or less the same way I would use them if I had a laptop with me.

However, being able to send and receive IMs from my phone has been one of a small number of applications that has led to a qualitative change in the way I do things. I'm using IM a lot more now, at the expense of pretty much every other form of communication. And that's because instant messaging is the only mode of communication that actually feels convenient.

You can write and reply whenever you want, not just when it's convenient for the other person (unlike phone calls). You can have rapid back-and-forth conversations (unlike e-mail and voice mail). You can write messages of whatever length you want (unlike SMS). You can communicate unobtrusively, e.g. in a library (unlike phone calls and voice mail). You can read messages without going through an absurd interface (unlike voice mail). Your messages reach you on whatever device you're using— desktop, laptop, or phone (unlike phone calls and SMS). It doesn't cost an exorbitant amount of money (unlike SMS). (As for video calling, it has pretty much all the disadvantages and restrictions of voice calls, plus some more. It's a cool tech demo, but not something I expect to use on a day-to-day basis.)

If you think about where and when and how you can use each mode of communication, IM matches or surpasses pretty much everything else on most axes. Sometimes you need the phone or email for a high-bandwidth conversation or to deliver a large payload. But those occasions are getting to be few and far between.

Part of it is just the medium— IM is as synchronous or as asynchronous as you want it to be— but a good part of the goodness here is thanks to Android's implementation. You can dictate messages with your voice; for short common messages (e.g. "call me when you get home") it works quite well, so you can dash off quick messages using whatever modality is more convenient, keyboard or voice. And the Android notification system notifies you of new messages and lets you bring up conversations easily— but discreetly, without interrupting whatever else you are doing on the phone.

For me, IM is the killer app for carrying a smartphone in my pocket, ranking significantly above "browsing the web" and a fair amount above "making phone calls".

(Incidentally, the words "phone" and "smartphone" seem so inadequate after you have come to fathom this super-communications capability you have on your hands.)

Zeya 0.5

I'm pleased to announce the release of Zeya 0.5 (also— Hello, Reddit!).

Major changes since Zeya 0.4:

  • Playlist support. The 'rhythmbox' and 'dir' backends detect playlists you've saved (in Rhythmbox or as M3U/PLS files, respectively) and let you choose from among them (using the dropdown in the upper left corner).
  • PLS format playlists are now supported by the 'playlist' backend. The format of the playlist (M3U or PLS) is guessed automatically based on the extension. (Amit Saha)
  • Support for decoding m4a files. (Rainer Hahnekamp)
  • Bind Zeya to a single interface only with the new --bind_address flag. See the cookbook for more info. (Björn Lohrmann)
  • More UI.
  • Bug fixes. Zeya now "just works" under a wider variety of circumstances. (Samson Yeung and others)

Known issues:

  • The 'dir' backend doesn't work with Python 2.5. A fix has been checked in at git HEAD.

See http://web.psung.name/zeya/ for more information about Zeya, installation, getting started, and reporting bugs.

Thank you, Ubuntu

Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Meerkat, will be released in just a couple of weeks. That got me reflecting on the fact that I have been a happy user of Ubuntu for what must be over 5 years now. That's a long time!

The GNU/Linux variants are the only OSes I've used where I really have the flexibility to define my own workflow (example). So they are a pleasure to use (ok, most of the time). I use a computer for many, many hours a day nearly every day. And the time spent customizing software and learning it is a drop in the bucket when it's amortized over the months and years I'm going to spend using it. Sure, Windows and Mac OS are a bit more learnable and easier to get started with— but they are much less usable. And for me, and most other people who sit at a computer for a living, that is precisely the wrong optimization to make.

There's plenty more to love about Ubuntu: for starters, that it runs on every piece of hardware you throw at it; how with a modest amount of effort, you can make all the computers you use behave exactly the same; and how great apt is (really, it takes the fear and hassle out of installing software, and it's an experience that no proprietary desktop OS comes close to).

Ubuntu is far from perfect, but it is pretty marvelous, and all the GNU/Linux operating systems have come a long way in the last 5 years. When I step back, I'm a bit astonished that Ubuntu or anything like it even exists at all. It works, it's powerful, it's free of charge, and, with small carve-outs, all of it is free for anyone to do anything they wish with it.

One thing I rarely stop thinking about is how technology can be made to be an instrument of empowerment. And I believe that one necessary step in that direction is ensuring that you are the master of all these amazing devices you carry around with you all the time: that they serve you and carry out your will, and not the other way around. Ubuntu has this vast collection of software you can use as the substrate for doing anything, and the question isn't "Will the creators of this software give you permission to do this?" but rather "Who the hell is going to stop you?".

I find this an incredibly heartening idea, almost a cousin of the concept of Turing's universal machine— the possibility, realizable in software, that you are limited by nothing other than your imagination. Unfettered computation is really a magical thing. And Ubuntu is a wonderful demonstration of that assertion, though by no means the only one.

So, to everyone that helped to make this possible (Canonical; the Ubuntu community; Debian developers; kernel developers; upstream maintainers and contributors of all stripes; and yes, even the folks working on other downstreams, like RH/Fedora— your code makes its way into Ubuntu too):

You have truly helped to make something wonderful, and it's a real gift to humanity. Thank you.