still think their install/running instructions are punk presumably because they don’t want to admit
they are using a Linux operating system.
I agree that their install/setup instructions are poor, and strongly encourage a user to run their install/setup program, and a whole raft of apps that are only necessary if you want to do remote access. I’ve had a moan about this on a number of threads here, and even contemplated writing an ‘alternative setup guide’ that is incremental, rather than the ‘just push these buttons to install stuff without understanding why’ approach the UM suggests. When that goes wrong, the poor user has no understanding of the process, or what has gone wrong, or how to fix it.
WD’s argument for this ‘push button’ process will be that, for most naive users, it will work, and be the easiest way to get all the services installed and running in one fell swoop.
If you skip past a lot of the initial setup stuff in the user manual, and start reading about using the ‘Dashboard’, the instructions are a lot clearer.
I don’t think WD are worried about admitting they’re using Linux; they make their source available, following the GPL. I just think they’re sensibly concerned about naive users tinkering with Linux and breaking stuff they don’t understand, because they typed a command incorrectly or in the wrong place, or thought that, since “it’s just Debian Wheezy”, they could use apt-get to install any old package they liked, and expect it not to break the MyCloud…(hint: you can’t, because the MyCloud uses a non-standard, 64K page size build). Hence the dire warnings about warranty and SSH access.
Command line Linux isn’t for the faint-hearted, or for the average, non-technical consumer user that the MyCloud is aimed at. The fact that you had to restart your device to get it to work shows that it isn’t foolproof; you really shouldn’t have to reboot a consumer device to make it work properly (because it shouldn’t be able to get confused). Even if IT support question #1 is ‘have you tried turning it off and on again?’…