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Alan Cox Interview
cuvavu sent in a lengthy interview with Alan Cox. He talks about his responsibilities at Red Hat, Microsoft, the Linux Standard Base, etc.
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He was great to talk to. This interview is exactly how our conversation went. Alan is very forward thinking and understands the role that larger companies take when partnering with Linux. Interesting to note that he said in the article that Linux has had a tough time entering the desktop market. When I met him, he was claiming that the desktop market had already been penetrated. I wonder why the switch in ideology.. Go figure.
That was pretty much how the quake3 install went under linux.
Most software I want under linux doesn't come on cds anyway... it's freely available on the net, and generally I just run apt-get to grab the program I want... which is pretty easy. There are even some GUIs for it. The end user can kind of look at it like they look at Napster or Morpheus... a list of all the files and programs they can install if they click the button, except in this case it is all legitimate.
Ease of installation isn't really what's holding Linux back... Linux won't really do much on the desktop until it's preinstalled by OEMs and the user just buys their computer. The majority of desktop users out there aren't going to install any new kind of OS on their system, much less an upgrade to Windows. They get the latest version when they get a new computer. Until Linux is an option in that arena (and given MS's tactics with OEMs, it will be slow going), it won't make too many grand strides. But again, the reason isn't that it's too hard to install a program, it's just that people don't get it by default.
Most people keep the defaults.