Qubes Usability Discussion

[deeplow]

Hi @unman. Thanks for you input.

@unman

This sort of thing gets said over and over, and it probably makes
people feel good about being the “few privileged ones”.

I think you shouldn’t judge people’s motives so quickly. I brought this discussion because I feel its an important issue since I’ve struggled myself (with the basics as well) and seen others struggle too.

@unman

I’ve yet to see any hard evidence for it.
It’s perfectly possible for a non technical user to use Qubes
effectively - perhaps with some initial set up and advice.

I think the opposite, but only user research will answer those questions. Anything other than that will just be anecdotal evidence.

@unman

(If anyone doubts this there’s a
YouTube video of someone installing Qubes, without having read or
understood anything . Good for comedic value.)

I’d love to see that! (do you have a link, perhaps?). But the fact that it has comedic value only goes to show that we’re not yet there – why else would it be funny?

@unman

It’s perfectly possible for a non technical user to use Qubes
effectively - perhaps with some initial set up and advice.

I’d argue there are still a few rough edges. Here are some examples:

GUI-only

Terminals are not beginner-friendly, so I think eventually will need to have GUIs for at least:

• software installation
• template upgrades / management

I don’t mean to say that regular people can’t use the terminal. It’s just that they’d rather not - and if forced to, many may be driven away.

Discoverability

It is know that users don’t like reading manuals. Most would like to jump straight into qubes without reading any documentation. So it’s important that the OS leaves out clues that let users adjust their mental model of how Qubes works into a more accurate one.

Just to give two examples:

• software installation - users will likely come from windows or mac where, to a great extent software is installed by downloading a binary. On Qubes (or linux in general) it is through repositories (most of the times). One way of going about might be by including a “Install software” icon on each VM (it currently exists but leads into a broken application).

• clipboard copy - this is a trivial thing. But not coming across this knowledge can be very frustrating for users (it happened just a few hours ago to a user here). So there should be a way to make the user find this feature.