Lmao the part about Linus actually wanting things to be obtuse and difficult is almost true I remember reading it somewhere else one time. He made an argument against handholding and forcing people to learn for themselves because it's good for the community to have skills.
I half agree with him when looking at how bad zoomers are with tech.
His argument is wrong because learning should be done within a social context, not individually. "The user should be able to figure it out by themselves" is how we got stuck with smartphone GUI hamburger bullshit instead of CLI.
CLI is extremely frustrating to figure out on your own and is a complete turnoff for the vast majority of people. CLI is also a lot easier to teach to and be taught by other people. Anyone who has ever tried supporting people on the phone would recognize this truth. Getting people to type the right commands in cmd is a huge pain in the ass and extremely tedious, but it can be done. Worse case scenario, you just spell out the command: "i as in ivan, p as peter, c as in charlie, o as in open, n as in nancy, f as in fred, i as in ivan, g as in gary." Tedious as fuck, but still doable.
Meanwhile, I've easily had times where I wasted 30+ minutes because the boomer behind the phone clicked the wrong shit and the complete clusterfuck of us not being on the same page.
"Click on the blue button."
"Okay." clicks on the red button
"Now, the window should have X and Y. Click on X."
"Uh, I don't see X."
"What do you mean you don't see X? X should be there. You did click on the blue button, right?"
Lies: "Yeah."
"Okay, then click on X."
"Okay." clicks on some random shit to get to another window
"Now, you should be a window with A, B, and C. Do you see them?"
"Uh, no."
"Okay, read what's in the window."
reads a bunch of shit that doesn't match what they're supposed to be in
"Okay, let's start over."
"How do I do that?"
"Just hit cancel."
"Okay" clicks on next instead of cancel
And it goes on and on and on and on and on and on. Damn, this is already starting to piss me off lmao
I'm in the middle. I hate mobile phone design and also hate fucking with command lines
If I wanted my PC experience to be staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen and typing obscure commands I would hop into my time machine and go to 1987
I think the broader issue is that tech bros have co-opted the phrase "user friendly" to mean "immediately approachable". This is good for selling a product but it sucks when it comes to something where the initial investment of learning a language or metaphor for how a program "behaves" is far outweighed by the way it allows you use it many times more proficiently than you would be able to if it was just big shiny buttons as have been normalized as "modern design".
Example: It would have been easier for you to sit down at the computer for the first time and hunt-and-peck on the keyboard with one single finger, and maybe you can get kind of fast at that over time, but it will never be comparable to sitting down with the express intention of learning to touch type, and once you've learned to touch type a little bit all future typing is reinforcement of a better way, rather than wasted time on a dead end like hunt-and-peck would be.
Sort of off topic, but people have found that the touch-type method isn't really any faster, and that two-finger typing is not actually synonymous with "hunting" and "pecking". Referring to 10-finger typing as "touch" typing is also a misnomer.
As a kid I HATED touch typing for a few reasons including that it was a harder barrier to learn as I was still memorizing the positions of keys. But also because two-finger typing is significantly more flexible for when you're switching between one-handed and two-handed control of the keyboard, it's better for accuracy when you have to hit non-letters a lot, and it's better for holding Shift or Control for multiple letters. Basically home-row typing makes no sense for PC games.
Back when I got decent-ish at Starcraft Brood War, a game with no remappable hotkeys, I was able to consistently hit P, L, O, N, and 8,9,0 with my left index finger without looking at the keyboard at all, and then return my ring finger to A.
The standardized WPM is CPM divided by 5 including spaces. The best RTS players are exceeding 750 CPM/150 WPM even into 1000CPM/200WPM mostly with one hand, and that's mostly with the left index finger. That's apparently faster than 99% of typists.
Personally I don't practice speed typing really at all but I still hit like 80-90WPM with two fingers.
I think perhaps the benefit of 10-finger typing is that a lot of energy has been put into teaching it effectively. I can agree that my style of typing is not inherently better than my 2-finger typing friend, and my version of 10-finger is certainly in some ways heterodox from what I was "taught" to do, but that doesn't change that I was forced to learn 10-finger typing and it taught me to actually type well, and my friend can't type for shit, to a degree that it genuinely prevents him from thinking through a keyboard as effectively.
I don't think this is true at all. Linus has repeatedly talked trash about distribution making things complicated. Like most people he doesnt like wasting his time fiddling around with bullshit. The renaissance man mentality is a problem among FOSSbros, but Linus isn't really a great example.
He will lay in to people who submit low quality patches, but the expectations of a kernel developer are very different than an end user.
Lmao the part about Linus actually wanting things to be obtuse and difficult is almost true I remember reading it somewhere else one time. He made an argument against handholding and forcing people to learn for themselves because it's good for the community to have skills.
I half agree with him when looking at how bad zoomers are with tech.
His argument is wrong because learning should be done within a social context, not individually. "The user should be able to figure it out by themselves" is how we got stuck with smartphone GUI hamburger bullshit instead of CLI.
CLI is extremely frustrating to figure out on your own and is a complete turnoff for the vast majority of people. CLI is also a lot easier to teach to and be taught by other people. Anyone who has ever tried supporting people on the phone would recognize this truth. Getting people to type the right commands in cmd is a huge pain in the ass and extremely tedious, but it can be done. Worse case scenario, you just spell out the command: "i as in ivan, p as peter, c as in charlie, o as in open, n as in nancy, f as in fred, i as in ivan, g as in gary." Tedious as fuck, but still doable.
Meanwhile, I've easily had times where I wasted 30+ minutes because the boomer behind the phone clicked the wrong shit and the complete clusterfuck of us not being on the same page.
"Click on the blue button."
"Okay." clicks on the red button
"Now, the window should have X and Y. Click on X."
"Uh, I don't see X."
"What do you mean you don't see X? X should be there. You did click on the blue button, right?"
Lies: "Yeah."
"Okay, then click on X."
"Okay." clicks on some random shit to get to another window
"Now, you should be a window with A, B, and C. Do you see them?"
"Uh, no."
"Okay, read what's in the window."
reads a bunch of shit that doesn't match what they're supposed to be in
"Okay, let's start over."
"How do I do that?"
"Just hit cancel."
"Okay" clicks on next instead of cancel
And it goes on and on and on and on and on and on. Damn, this is already starting to piss me off lmao
I'm in the middle. I hate mobile phone design and also hate fucking with command lines
If I wanted my PC experience to be staring at a blinking cursor on a black screen and typing obscure commands I would hop into my time machine and go to 1987
me, with my terminal customized to show Eileen Gu in the background :cool-bean:
I think the broader issue is that tech bros have co-opted the phrase "user friendly" to mean "immediately approachable". This is good for selling a product but it sucks when it comes to something where the initial investment of learning a language or metaphor for how a program "behaves" is far outweighed by the way it allows you use it many times more proficiently than you would be able to if it was just big shiny buttons as have been normalized as "modern design".
Example: It would have been easier for you to sit down at the computer for the first time and hunt-and-peck on the keyboard with one single finger, and maybe you can get kind of fast at that over time, but it will never be comparable to sitting down with the express intention of learning to touch type, and once you've learned to touch type a little bit all future typing is reinforcement of a better way, rather than wasted time on a dead end like hunt-and-peck would be.
Sort of off topic, but people have found that the touch-type method isn't really any faster, and that two-finger typing is not actually synonymous with "hunting" and "pecking". Referring to 10-finger typing as "touch" typing is also a misnomer.
As a kid I HATED touch typing for a few reasons including that it was a harder barrier to learn as I was still memorizing the positions of keys. But also because two-finger typing is significantly more flexible for when you're switching between one-handed and two-handed control of the keyboard, it's better for accuracy when you have to hit non-letters a lot, and it's better for holding Shift or Control for multiple letters. Basically home-row typing makes no sense for PC games.
Back when I got decent-ish at Starcraft Brood War, a game with no remappable hotkeys, I was able to consistently hit P, L, O, N, and 8,9,0 with my left index finger without looking at the keyboard at all, and then return my ring finger to A.
The standardized WPM is CPM divided by 5 including spaces. The best RTS players are exceeding 750 CPM/150 WPM even into 1000CPM/200WPM mostly with one hand, and that's mostly with the left index finger. That's apparently faster than 99% of typists.
Personally I don't practice speed typing really at all but I still hit like 80-90WPM with two fingers.
I think perhaps the benefit of 10-finger typing is that a lot of energy has been put into teaching it effectively. I can agree that my style of typing is not inherently better than my 2-finger typing friend, and my version of 10-finger is certainly in some ways heterodox from what I was "taught" to do, but that doesn't change that I was forced to learn 10-finger typing and it taught me to actually type well, and my friend can't type for shit, to a degree that it genuinely prevents him from thinking through a keyboard as effectively.
If you peck enough you memorize were all the keys are. Edti: (Chiken sounds)
I'm largely a self taught typist and I hover around 90wpm. I used to always get a F in form when I took typing in school.
There's certainly a difference between "this is intentionally hard, on purpose fuck you" and "don't worry your little head enjoy the walled garden"
I don't think this is true at all. Linus has repeatedly talked trash about distribution making things complicated. Like most people he doesnt like wasting his time fiddling around with bullshit. The renaissance man mentality is a problem among FOSSbros, but Linus isn't really a great example.
He will lay in to people who submit low quality patches, but the expectations of a kernel developer are very different than an end user.
the problem is that making things inaccessible turns out to be a poor substitute for good design and better pedagogy