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Newbies and Magic

Posted by grouch on · 12 comments
LXer; By Terry Vessels 		Mail this story
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LXer Feature: 17-May-06

New users of GNU/Linux must be handled with patience. Most come from years of a consistent user experience that trains them to consider computers to be magic boxes. They typically have strange beliefs, such as restarting the computer as a magic pill to cure the imbalance of software humours, which must be gently removed and replaced with logic.

[Contributing Editor, Terry Vessels, guides the experienced hacker through the sometimes patience-testing task of assisting GNU/Linux newbies. - dcparris]



The most commonly seen computer operating system consistently presents the users with problems while withholding information about the source of those problems. It also lacks a good set of tools with which to solve the problems. Problems mysteriously appear, with little or no indication of a cause. Undocumented herds of problems mysteriously disappear when the magic restart is applied. (Alas, almost always, the magic fades and the problems return after a short time). Cause and effect are divorced on that system.



Wizards are called from the box to configure things which have hints of magic properties. Whiz kids wave the mouse or delve within the cryptic depths of the "registry" and exorcize corrupting spirits. Users are bombarded with advertisements for generalized cures for generalized ailments of computers -- if your computer is acting strangely, just pay the price and click "OK" to make it so. The awesome powers are jealously guarded behind the solemn and foreboding license. This is information clearly too powerful to be seen by mere mortals.



Many of these users have experienced that ultimate magic ritual, the reinstallation, sometimes called a restore. When the computer is sufficiently possessed that it no longer responds to reboots or whiz kids or wizards or purchased pills, the user is advised to wipe the altar clean and begin again. Taking the oath of the EULA again is often required before the user is permitted to regain that (short-lived) purity of function that came with the computer. Incomprehensible "keys" must be incanted to get the software to rise from the shiny talismans and take up residence on the computer once more. The user who performs the rituals correctly is rewarded with familiar buttons and icons and pictures and sounds.



This systematic training is typically the largest stumbling block faced during the newbie's transition from the world of Microsoft to GNU+Linux. Free software pulls back the curtain to let you see what the wizards do -- action 'x' results in effect 'y' which may be changed with modification 'z'.



There is no pretense of a magic cure-all that deals with all effects. Your refrigerator doesn't suddenly decide to spew its contents onto your floor and neither should software. If a program misbehaves, there is a reason and, usually, a reasonable response that targets that particular misbehavior. The new user must learn, for instance, that rebooting the computer does not magically repair the user's typographical errors in a configuration file. (Yes, it appeared just as silly to the newbie I watched perform this strange act, after it happened. The previous training to believe in magic is what caused it).



It takes time to break old habits. If you understand why the new GNU+Linux user does illogical things with the computer, you can help ease their frustration and help them laugh at the old ritual cures. Try to stay calm if they resort to a reboot to try to start a dial-up connection to the Internet. The newbie is not an idiot for asking why double-clicking on an advertisement doesn't install the program. The newbie is likewise not an idiot for asking about the need for the latest anti-virus software.



The computer is a literal idiot, but the newbie has been trained to believe he or she is too dumb to use it properly and must therefore rely upon magic, and those who can call upon the magic, to operate the computer. If you can wear away that old training, you will be rewarded. There will come a truly magical time when the new GNU+Linux user realizes how much control of the computer was concealed and withheld that is now within his or her grasp. It's worth all the repetition and effort when the newbie reaches the point of realizing, "Hey, I can do this!"

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Comments (12)

Black Magic

random ·
Interesting article. I think even now the human mind is still very primitive. People believe what they believe.

I think it's a great point that people would be much more comfortable with much more information. The problem is people don't know what's going on "under the hood." They're reduced to making guesses and profiling by applying what they know already. If they know absolutely nothing about a modern PC, it's going to be a rough start.

You could apply this to anything. People don't immediately go to the doctor because they self-diagnose it as no big deal. It will go away like everything else has. People don't rush to the mechanic when they hear strange noises because they don't know what's causing the noise. People don't know how to fix their own PCs (or even know how to articulate the problem) because they don't know how it works.

For a lot (most?) the PC is simply a tool. They have a task that can be done much faster, cleaner, cheaper, whatever on the PC. They don't care how a BIOS works. They don't care about codecs and formats and components and all the other absolute nonsense we put up with.

So now, we have users who want it to just work and makers (of PCs, software, whatever) who just want to get it into homes, businesses, etc. So they make it as seamless as they can. But because of that seamlessness, it makes it harder to know what's going on under the hood.

In the article it mentioned a pop-up and a newbie asking why that didn't didn't install the product directly. I think that's where seamlessness is a bit of a problem (er, maybe there's a better example than hapless users wanting to directly install programs from pop-ups). Advertising is generally made to be off to the side. At the top and/or sides of a web page or newspaper. In between TV shows. Now they get a pop-up which may or may not resemble a dialog box. A local dialog box asking to install something will install something. A web "dialog box" asking to install something could just be an advertisement. Where they have to go the site. And download something. Don't forget to register. Oh, and it only works for a few days before you have to pay. And that's not even what we call 'malicious'.

So, from one side, makers are trying to simplify these systems and processes so that users don't need to know how it works. But because they don't know, they can't fix it and will probably have trouble trying to explain to someone who can help. And then it's possible it will happen to them again. Then from the other side, we have malicious programs that take advantage of the fact that users won't know what the hell they're doing.

I sincerely think people are not as stupid as others assume they are. They just don't have all the information. Information needs to be free.
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jimf ·
>"I sincerely think people are not as stupid as others assume they are"

I'd like to believe that too... Experience tells me otherwise.
grouch Story submitter ·
>'A local dialog box asking to install something will install something. A web "dialog box" asking to install something could just be an advertisement.'

Remember integration of the browser and the desktop? The grand scheme was to make it irrelevant whether data resides on your hard drive or remotely. That kind of twisted version of NFS leads to the confusion between what's a web dialog box and a local dialog box. Web sites are magically part of the local desktop, no longer confined to the strange "My Internet".

It's much worse than simply a lack of information. It's deliberate misinformation.
dcparris ·
>>"I sincerely think people are not as stupid as others assume they are"

>I'd like to believe that too... Experience tells me otherwise.

I just can't help but wonder if we're all as stupid as we're allowed to be? Call it "Don's Theory of Situational Stupidity...
jimf ·
>I just can't help but wonder if we're all as stupid as we're allowed to be?

if you say 'as we allow ourselves to be', I might buy into that.
dcparris ·
> if you say 'as we allow ourselves to be', I might buy into that.

That too.

Wow!

Penguin_Pete ·
Spot on 100%!

I remember my days of proprietary system usage. I was so ignorant; for all I knew little elves inside the box made it go. And yet my friends looked up to me as a wizard, simply because I'd developed an instinct for when the computer was going to freeze up or I knew which sites to avoid if you didn't want to get viruses.

This is the most damning thing of all about closed, proprietary systems: they keep the user stupid! Again and again, I must always remember that the new user isn't dumb by nature, but has simply been conditioned to think of computers as witchcraft.
Kagehi ·
On the other hand.. I don't mind, when faced with an old computer with USB1.1, having my attempt to insert a new 2.0 USB thumb drive simply fail, or succeed on a newer one, without having to dwelve into the guts to create entries for the damn thing or find out why or even "if" its not being detected. There is something to be said for having a few of the more ludicrous things taken care of for you, instead of having to dig around to find how to do them.

I want to have the control if things "go wrong", not from moment one, where I need to be an expert or have a print out of 6 pages of stuff from some website, just to get it to work "right" in the first place. In this respect some Linux versions are making progress, but its still a pain in a ass on most of them.

Put simply, I don't mind magic, just so long as "I" know how it works and can change it if I want to. Windows doesn't tell you either, Linux insists, for the most part, that you have to nudge each individual quark into place to turn lead into gold, because letting you say Abracadabra would be just silly.... Both approaches are a pain in the ass imho.
Teron ·
OS X? (Though I'd prefer a more automated Linux, but whatever)
grouch Story submitter ·
>"Put simply, I don't mind magic, just so long as "I" know how it works and can change it if I want to. Windows doesn't tell you either, Linux insists, for the most part, that you have to nudge each individual quark into place to turn lead into gold, because letting you say Abracadabra would be just silly.... Both approaches are a pain in the ass imho."

MS Windows will go to great trouble to ensure you never know why something works, why it doesn't, or why it fails sometimes and works at other times.

Half a dozen years ago, every distribution of Linux I used required some amount of "nudge[ing] each individual quark into place". That's not typical, today. I can't remember the last time I had to recompile the kernel for any reason other than just wanting to try the newest one.

One measure of the "magic" in current GNU+Linux LiveCDs is the ability to take a handful and pop each, in turn, into the new user's computer until he or she likes the view. I haven't had a serious hardware issue in a very long time. (Laptops are the exception). Once they've chosen, then it's time to deal with details of making it suit their preferences. That's where they learn that the "magic" is just altering the software's behavior.
pogson ·
I expect my computerized experiences to be magical. It helps that I am only five and a half decades old and remember the bad old days when millisecond cycle times were useful and we optimized the innermost loops of programmes to get a lot more zip out of some crate. I like to share the magic with my students. We set up some task that takes a person a measurable length of time like a bit of maths. Then we put it in a loop and do it 1000 times, then a million times and finally, a 1000 million times. Their mouths drop open when they realize the power of a modern CPU that you can buy for $100 and run in equipment that costs less than $1000. Further, we investigate the throughput of the caches, the main memory, the bus, the interfaces and the drives. Then we serve pages over the LAN instead of via the Internet. The raw power of these systems cannot be revealed using clunky systems from Microsoft that were obsolete six years ago and filled with bugs and malware. I teach the curriculum here entirely with FOSS and the kids never look again at Windows as a complete solution for anything. It takes kids a single lesson to reach the level they have obtained with years of exposure to that other OS and they find no limits in front of them.

I have met students who have little interest in the hardware and software but they all enjoy the web. Being able to set up their own server in five minutes and adding their own content with nothing to buy brings a joy being told what to do by Bill can never do. Being able to put on the server a database of a million digital images with searchable annotations and ratings is a joy for the visually inclined. The musical kids love stuff like Audacity. The artists love the Gimp and its relatives. Find the right approach for each kid and they lead, follow or tell me to get out of the way.

I have used GNU/Linux exclusively in my classrooms and labs for six years now and would not think of going back. Before my conversion, computers in the classroom appeared to be insipid but necessary evils. When I found the quality and variety of FOSS brought magic to my classroom running on anything, my life changed forever. I have introduced hundreds of students and teachers to Linux and recommend every Linux user to introduce a hundred newbies this year. Vista would be blown away.
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Good point

Kandalf ·
I think article is good written. Sitting at the help desk, I've seen almost all kinds troubles of new users. Even I do support Windows as a part of my job, GNU/Linux troubles of new users are alike with Windows ones.

The best practice is to train help desk and also users so they can use the tools they have and clearly express the trouble. Such as "e-mail client crashes and this output is generated and I attached it".

Such outputs and also using terminal tools are not magic, but simple logic.

Thanks for the article.

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