My thirty-five editors...

Team Murder: Mockery IS the best policy

So, it's like two in the morning and the time has come to make a point. Looking at the GNU/Linux developer as all responsible for the "user experience" (again I use terminology that gives me the serious creeps) is a fucked up perspective. Developers try to keep you from crashing and if you do crash from burning. Making a "for dummies" application is going to take more than horribly dividing menus into a hundred little compartments or just wallpapering over the whole mess and hiding things. I don't think either approach works at all. The whole thing is conceptually pretty bogus since one of the principal tenets of *nix is to modularize (for reuse, for efficiency, for ease of the writer) as much as humanly possible and even to truncate inhumanely when it's necessary. GNU/Linux embeds rather well and it seems like making an appliance that runs GNU/Linux would be a lot smarter than trying to smash the whole thing into a framework of a virtual appliance. You can't lobotomize the smartest kid in class because he intimidates other kids. It isn't his intention. In fact, Brainiac Jr. is probably far more concerned with what's going on inside his own head then making the poor old normals feel all small and stupid. It all comes back to what I said earlier on about building an entire (and necessarily enormous) structure around some ornamental fixtures. Embed that shit, sell internet toasters to Joe Sixpack, and let me have my thirty five editors in the menu. It's very late. I will correct, append, and apologize when I've slept.