[haiku] Re: Who is Haiku for?

Nicholas Blachford <nicholas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Who is Haiku for?
> 
> Who will the end users be?
> 
> This question came to me out of the GUI discussions, is a very  
> important question because much in the design of the GUI and how it 
> is  
> used is based on the answer to this question.  It also determines how  
> many people end up using the system.

If you mean design as in "how is it thought out" then yes the goal is 
to make it user friendly. If you mean "graphic design" then i guess 
there is simply no time or motivation to do more work on it right now 
as the project is still trying to get out of the alpha stage. But i for 
one would be open to full theming support in the future, as i don't 
think the quality of this OS lies in the shape of it's buttons or the 
yellowness of it's tabs. It has to be done right, but i see no problem 
per se.

> 
> There are plenty of OSs out there designed by geeks for geeks.  They  
> are often technically brilliant but a pain to use and not a great 
> deal  
> of attention is paid to the user interface.

You must be thinking of linux, but i can't believe that a good 
explanation for it's user unfriendliness comes from the "geekness" of 
it's developers. This is my personal analysis but i mostly think that 
the problem is that there is not much interest (read money) in desktop 
linux. On the contrary, it is friendly to server admins or cluster 
maintainers, it can run the internet, wall street and predict climate, 
that's were the real interest for linux is, and that's were it is "user 
friendly". The fact that we can run it as a desktop is just a side 
effect. Look at the figures, it runs 90% of the top-500 supercomputers, 
a large part of the web, but hardly a few percents of the desktops. 

Haiku is made by the kindest people i've ever worked with, they are 
brilliant but by no means different than what you define by the "casual 
user" when they want to watch a movie or send pictures from their 
vacations to grandma. Of course they also want a nice API as 
programming is one of their favorite games, but that's the only 
difference.
As it is made to please themselves in the first place, i'm totally 
confident that this OS will meet your expectations.   

> 
> What an OS offers will be different depending on who it is designed  
> for, geeks like to know whats under the hood and will appreciate good  
> design.  Casual users* neither know nor care about whats under the  
> hood, however casual users are the vast majority of computer users.
> 

You defined "casual user" but what is a geek?

I understand your concerns but i think that the marketing gurus have 
invented a lot of those "gategories" of people, simply because it's 
easier to sell something when the customer feels it's designed for his 
own kind. Look at how music is categorized, it sometimes makes sense, 
but most of the time it's totally artificial. As Duke Ellington said, 
"There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind.". There 
is no good music kinds or  bad ones, as there is not a music kind for a 
kind of people. This is my own interpretation but it has worked quite 
well for me.
All that to say that Haiku is in my opinion a good OS and as such should 
satisfy anyone that appreciates good things. You can already see that 
by looking at the diversity of people that use it or develop it.

>
> So, who is Haiku for?
> 
> 1) Casual users
> 2) Geeks
> 3) Both
> 

3 of course. But i don't recognise those categories nor do i find myself 
in any of it :) Casual geek? I mean, i do many things besides playing 
with computers!

Kind regards,
Alex

Other related posts: