The command line method clearly warned, “You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase ‘Yes, do as I say‘”.
But people often do not care about warnings. Linus Sebastian went ahead with it and ended up with a broken system that cannot be logged in graphically.
It’s almost as though reading warnings / error messages is helpful! Imagine that! Sure, it may take an extra minute of one’s time, but that’s just too much, man!
It is not too much to ask people to read something prefaced by a warning label. Don’t understand it? Ask for help!
Roads have warning signs, cars themselves come with a booklet explaining the check engine light and its meanings, microwaves come with warnings about putting metal inside, and cleaning supplies have tons of labels about potential hazards in case of misuse. If one can learn to understand different warnings for these, one can learn to understand computer warnings.
Good point, my general expression of new users is often, not always - there are exceptions, that even if you spoon-feed them they still cry. If you entirely design the OS around this problematic, lots of power-users are getting salty because it ends up with more clicks, and more time-wasting doing simple tasks.
This is why the new Windows 11 design for example gets criticized even by their own community, you overall need more clicks doing or finding the same stuff among the newly created inconsistency because they try to get rid of old stuff while replacing it with new stuff.
I especially always find these design decisions difficult, because most noobs actually do a perfectly fine job navigating their computers without randomly clicking on every button nor changing every setting.
It’s basically designing your software, so that 5% of users cannot fuck up in 0.1% of situations.
And those exact users usually have someone to help them with their computer anyways.
It’s almost as though reading warnings / error messages is helpful! Imagine that! Sure, it may take an extra minute of one’s time, but that’s just too much, man!
It is not too much to ask people to read something prefaced by a warning label. Don’t understand it? Ask for help!
Roads have warning signs, cars themselves come with a booklet explaining the check engine light and its meanings, microwaves come with warnings about putting metal inside, and cleaning supplies have tons of labels about potential hazards in case of misuse. If one can learn to understand different warnings for these, one can learn to understand computer warnings.
Reminds me of this classic IT scenario:
User: “Something went wrong! I got an error message!”
Technician: “Okay? What did the error message say?”
User: “I dunno, I just closed it.”
It’s like shooting your OS in the face with a pistol, turning to the camera, and asking why Linux is like this?
Good point, my general expression of new users is often, not always - there are exceptions, that even if you spoon-feed them they still cry. If you entirely design the OS around this problematic, lots of power-users are getting salty because it ends up with more clicks, and more time-wasting doing simple tasks.
This is why the new Windows 11 design for example gets criticized even by their own community, you overall need more clicks doing or finding the same stuff among the newly created inconsistency because they try to get rid of old stuff while replacing it with new stuff.
I especially always find these design decisions difficult, because most noobs actually do a perfectly fine job navigating their computers without randomly clicking on every button nor changing every setting.
It’s basically designing your software, so that 5% of users cannot fuck up in 0.1% of situations.
And those exact users usually have someone to help them with their computer anyways.