Law Students

second worst dialog I saw during a recent Ubuntu upgrade

By Luis

This dialog gets points for being graphical, and loses many, many, many points for presenting no information that any reasonable user could possibly get any use from unless they already previously understand (1) what FUSE is (2) how to get FUSE plugins (3) who the ‘first user’ is (4) what the ‘fuse group’ is and (5) how to add users to the ‘fuse group.’ And if you know all those things, you didn’t need the dialog, so kudos for being both useless and intimidating.

The worst dialog was actually a terminal wrapped in the upgrader GUI which stalled my entire upgrade in order to ask me what my terminal encoding was, helpfully presenting a list of 28 possible encodings, of which UTF-8 was 27th and the default was some obscure encoding I’d never previously heard of. (The other times the upgrader stalled the upgrade to ask for input it told me I’d modified config files I’d never previously heard of, much less modified, but at least those had basically the same useful-ish debian config file dialog I’ve been used to for ages.)

Linux has come a long way (the upgrader helpfully offered to do a partial upgrade instead of complaining and dying like previous debian/ubuntu upgrades), but still has a long way to go too.

(These weren’t the only problems I saw; Gerv has a good list of some of the other ones, though I didn’t see all of the ones he did.)

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on April 11, 2008 (boomark / email).