No good deed goes unpunished.

I've been traveling to Amsterdam today and as usual for airtravel, you spend an awful lot of time with the security theater. Today cost me about ~15 minutes. Unlike the normal horror stories however, today was a notable exception. In fact, what happened today at the security checkpoint of the Stuttgart airport was a very interesting experience.

I was asked to take my notebook out of my bag and put it on the belt by itself. Easily done. Usually the security guys ask you to switch it on for a moment. No idea why that is though.
Anyway, this time it was a bit different, the security guy asked me if the notebook sporting the Linux advertisement (lovingly applied by Alex Maier) is actually running Linux. After confirming this and stating that it's only natural as I've been with Red Hat in the past, was wearing my Spacewalk Hacker shirt and am still doing Fedora work, the guy was very happy as he seemingly could vent his frustration with Linux at someone knowledgable.

The security guy was telling me that he's been using Linux in the past, but it's just not user friendly enough. His pet peeve was the need to mount and unmount removable media.
Especially the unmounting was a major hassle for him as it makes working with the system difficult for the inexperienced user.
I explained to him the technical reasons why the system is acting as it is, how the filesystem cache is playing it's part and the need to sync data before being able to remove a disk and how the eject button on his cd drive is disabled. After having explained the technical details of the kernel, I told him that the current Desktops do automounting of CDs and other removable media but that I wasn't sure about removal. This should at least partly solve his problem with the mounting. About unmounting, I have no idea as it has been more than 5 years since I last touched a CD. Fast Networks and PXE all but obsoleted optical media for my use-cases.

After this was cleared up, he mentioned another problem he considered important: The claimed amount of technical knowledge needed to expertly use linux.
I tried explaining my point of view, that a certain amount of technical knowledge is immensely helpful in order to understand the system and thus being able to spot problems and fix them accordingly. Without the technical knowledge, which can be picked up rapidly by the way, the user would be forced to always get help from a third party for each small problem. Not optimal either.
At the same time however, I stressed the fact that the current distributions are all trying very hard to be usable, even for the inexperienced user.

As a good deed for the day, I mentioned that F11 is being released today and that he should give the Live-CD a shot, he might like it. The security guy was countering that the Live-CD might be nice, but what he would really like is a Live-USB media with persistent storage. Luckily, Fedora can score big time here and satisfy that requirement: Live USB with added persistence was one of the main features touted at last year's Linuxtag.

As I had to leave for my plane which was starting to board, I left a business card with my personal email address and asked the guy to please report back on his experience with the Live-USB. Feedback is always good, especially if it is about a failure in our system.
It might give us some nice usability data and show where we can improve our documentation or presentation.
Anyone in Fedoraland interested in the possible follow-up?

But as interesting that chat was, no good deed goes unpunished: I'll have to find out now where these imbeciles in Schiphol lost my luggage with my documents and all clothes for tomorrow's meeting and my hayfever medicine.

*RAGE*
HATE U!