Elf Sternberg

Have to agree with you. When sis decided to start wearing three sets of clothes a day, Mother decided enough is enough and took us both into the laundry room and showed us what was what. Whites and other stuff that will take it (towels, unmentionables) go in hot, permanent press goes in warm, dark natural fibers in cold. And from that day forward, whenever we wanted laundry done, we darn well did it ourselves. That ended up being one of my Saturday chores, was to do *all* of it.

Of course, one advantage of having a house rather than (most) apartments is within-premises laundry.... but I digress.

As for control.

I think it's best to have user-selectable degrees of control. Have good, least-surprise defaults, and drill-down buttons that let you get into the goodies if you want to, but at the same time hide all the crap if you don't want it.

My Canon camera is like that. You can put it on "P" for program, and just point shoot and drool, you can program in various semi-automatic modes where you set one variable and the computer fills in the rest, or you can set it to "M" and you have full control over the whole enchilada, shutter, aperture, focus, etc. and the built-in flash doesn't fire but the hot shoe does go off so you can do really fancy stuff with bounce or whatever...

And it does it all with one simple rotary dial for the major function, and one simple thumbwheel for the minor function. The user interface is clear, crisp, intuitive, you hardly need once you know what the major modes are.

OTOH, GNOME did the opposite approach; when GNOME went 2.0 they took out all the neat whiz-bang stuff that made GNOME kendaer's UI of choice, and dumbed it down to the point where it actively annoyed him. While I agree that your Aunt Matilda isn't going to even know to be annoyed that certain things aren't customizable, your average Linux user *is* going to notice.... D'OH!

The freedom to learn, grow, and change that decision instead of freezing it for all time immemorial right at the get-go.... that is what I want. I may know jack all about the current subject right now. That does not mean that I won't go out and buy the proverbial O'Reilly on the subject and be conversant with the experts on it next week. I want the control to be able to change my mind.

And sometimes I might want to just leave everything to the computer and not worry about it. And sometimes I might want to do it full-manual, just for the technical challenge.