Linux for Grandma

http://lwn.net/Comments/80910/
长话短说, 图形用户界面(GUI)不等于容易使用

I know it seems strange in this age where everyone just blindly believes
that "GUI == easy to use", but in MY experience, you'd be better off giving
grandma a command-line interface... I can already hear the gasps of horror
now... ;-) But, I think it's true... At least, I'll tell you that MY
grandmother immediately understood and grasped the simple concept of a
command-line interface... (It was an ancient version of DOS, in this case,
not Linux, sadly... She was determined to find a use for my ancient Tandy
1000HX 8088 machine, and that's not exactly a suitable machine to try to
get Linux running on... ;-)) She immediately and easily understood the
simple concept of typing in commands to accomplish certain tasks... It was
just a matter of learning the right commands to type... But, she really had
almost zero trouble with it... Now, most of the programs she wanted to run
(ancient word processors, card-making apps, label-printing apps, etc.) had
(character-based TUI) menus, which she found a lot harder to grasp than the
simple command-typing she picked up instantly... But, eventually, I got her
to understand how to use the menus... For the most part... She does still
have trouble with them sometimes... And, really, the only way she really
understands how to use them well is to know the correct hot-keys to hit for
the appropriate menu choice... She just doesn't really grasp the "navigate
to the menu choice you want to select and hit enter" sort of approach...
It seems counterintuitive to her... So, you can probably guess her reaction
upon being presented with any sort of GUI... I showed her one once, and
she just couldn't make heads nor tails of it... The concept of moving a
mouse around to point at a picture of what you want to do, and then clicking
on it was just as incomprehensible to her as if the interface were all in
Chinese or something... I tried to explain it to her a bit, but I could
see it just wasn't clicking, and was unlikely to ever do so... So, I let
her happily continue using plain old DOS, and typing in commands, which
she can easily comprehend and seems to be perfectly "user-friendly" for
her... ;-)