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Useability: Linux / Unix v Closed Software
By Martin English | August 7, 2008
A tweet from Linda Eastin pointed me at this old blog entry from Daring Fireball on Linux and Spray-on Useability, that takes aim at the Eric Raymond rant on Linux usability (the one where he can’t get CUPS working).
There’s an old engineering adage: “Fast, good, cheap: pick two.” (Where
“fast” regards development time, not performance.) Desktop Linux
software is cheap (free) and fast (release early, release often), but
it’s not good.Or, perhaps one could argue that it is cheap, and eventually it’s going
to be good, but it’s getting there very slowly.Windows and Mac OS, on the other hand, are fast and good. For the sake
of this discussion, it doesn’t matter which is better and which is
improving faster. What matters is that neither is cheap. It’s very
difficult to beat the fast/good/cheap rule.For example, look at how much Mac OS X has improved in the last three
years alone. Even if desktop Linux is improving — and I do think it is
— it’s improving at a much slower pace than Mac OS X.…..
More often than not, you get what you pay for.
Topics: *nix, Code, History, Microsoft, Open Source, Productivity, Web / Web 2.0, software | No Comments »
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