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Top 10 Things Wrong With Linux, Today
An anonymous coward sends in this link to a list of the top ten things wrong with Linux today. He's noting things that are "wrong" not with Linux per se, but with a user's experience with Linux; most of his points actually have to do with KDE/X. The KDE 3 bug he's talking about is a user-interface change in konqueror: form elements can be changed by mousing-over them and turning the scroll wheel, which is very bad. Hopefully the KDE guys will roll this change back to the previous behavior.
I suppose everything he says applies to freeBSD, except in one or two cases more so.
But who wants general adoption of linux anyway ? Look what happened to the internet when it got popular...
graspee
i really dislike those that tell people to fix it themselves. not everyone has the expertise or experience to be able to code an application, and no operating system should be so complicated that it can only be used and enjoyed by those that can do so.
Weird HW detection...sometimes after a reboot i have to rmmod sb/sbawe/soundcore/etc by hand and restart them.
To watch divx5 movies, it is not enough to download a codec like with WMP, but you have to recompile your media player, upgrade your ALSA, upgrade your kernel... in fact, this is the reason i ditched linux and returned to 98. I prefer reboots to downloading endless MBs and recompiling for hours and not being sure it will work.
It is slower. End of story. No matter what you say, no matter what benchmarks or other stuff you come up with, qt/gtk widgets are STILL slower than win32 widgets, watching dvd with XINE takes 40% of my CPU while under windows it takes 5%(five), process spawning is slower (under windows if i run iexplore.exe repeatedly, it pops up new windows at a rate about 5 windows/second. Under linux, the best i could do is 0.5 new windows/sec. Dirty test, i agree, but...
What else?
Lack of Games. To those of you who say that linux is not a desktop os, why do i see all these projects spawning everywhere about SDLs and stuff?
And why instead of getting together and workin in teams, i see a sagan of different apps that are supposed to do one thing, but NONE of them is perfect? Sure, you might say "but windows isn't perfect either!" but don't you want your linux to be?
Lyx owns, blah blah blah, but under windows, to do word processing/type setting, it is 10 clicks away to write in my native, non-english, language. Under linux, i can't even find a faq for it. I don't even want to think what is necessary to actually print.
As i remember new ones i will add them.
IF YOU THINK I AM WRONG ABOUT ONE OF THESE, INSTEAD OF TELLING ME "YOU SUCK!! YOU GOT IT ALL WRONG!!" *PLEASE* tell me what to do to correct them! i am NOT bashing linux! i WANT to use linux! i WANT it to get better!
*sigh*
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
You can't be serious. Someone complains about poor X configurability so your solution is for him to write his own program to fix the problem? Nothing would make Bill Gates and MS happier than to see lots and lots of exposure for that kind of opinion, since nothing will make it easier for Windows to fend off Linux on the desktop.
3. Cups - redhat uses lprng (atleast it did last time I used it) cups is much easier to configure
Red Hat Linux 7.3 now includes both Cups and LprNG. I agree with you, for many reasons, cups is better.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
"That's not a bug, That's a feature"
Remember how much fun we had when MS responded to a bug report with that line? Well in a lot of cases it was the pot calling the kettle black. I See far too many cases where someone pointing out a problem is greated with insults instead of being thanked for filing a bug report.
"We have met the enemy, and he is us" /. flame directed at people who point out areas that need addressing.
Pogo (Walt Kelly)
This is often true of the Linux fanatics who chase away new users by making it sound like nobody is intrested in solving issuses. They seem to think that everybody working on free software can quit coding and surf for porn because the software has reached perfection. Thankfully there are people who are working on the code while the hotheads are working on the latest
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
I believe that you truly exemplify the Linux attitude that is keeping is out of mainstream. You are the quintessential Linux user who has had to suffer (if you don't consider it suffering then you probably need to get out a little more) through the FAQ and all the HOWTO manuals and now you want all Linux users to suffer though these needless complex and cryptic manuals and instructions. Not everybody that uses a computer really wants to know how to program a computer to use it that is why the majority of people purchase MS products and choose not to use Linux. So now you not only want me to teach my mother how to use her computer but teach her to program so she can write an app to configure X.
The Linux slogan--Dammed is you do, dammed I you don't
An example is OutLook and OutLook Express. The slimming down of the offical manuals has reduced many functions to the realm of lore, especially if the user does not know the official jargon with which to ask a question in order to get an answer.
The online help is getting better, but is still infuriating.
The situation in Linux basically is that much of the system is Lore Based. It may be superior in all other regards, and some things may be inherently complex and difficult, requiring study, but the bottom line is that it is still Lore Oriented and Lore Based. It is in fact, to some degree a way of life.
Many consumers are not Lore oriented. Some never learn to set the time on the VCR. This forms a barrier to the introduction of Linux to the Broad masses, the "I just want it to work" crowd. Never mind that other systems often never really work right in the first place. Why would people accept the idea that "computers just crash" otherwise?
This is the problem the Lore Masters face: How to make something that is Lore oriented and Lore based accessible to people who aren't
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I've been saying this all along. There's nothing wrong with Linux, per se. It's the user interface and the complexity for the user in setting it up and configuring it.
As a developer, I develop where the money is, which right now is Windows. Were it Linux, believe me, I'd be happier.
I might disagree with what the top 10 problems are (a lack of freecell wouldn't be very high on my list), but simply an ease of configuration and basic apps (as he mentioned, browser, e-mail, and so forth). By basic apps, I mean apps that are as simple to configure as their Windows counterparts.
What happens the first time you run Outlook Express? It asks you for the bare minimum of information to receive and send you e-mail. No more than that. Look how simple IE is to run and configure.
I'll grant that the problem with IE now is that people are building web sites that are IE specific. I'd link the article, but I'm too lazy, but it was just in the past few days, so go look yourself.
This problem is simple to fix. Emulate MS. Copy what their browser can do, and you're now compatible. Is that giving in to them? Not so much as it's taking away their advantage.
Same with everything else. Where MS does well, (either by UI or by dominance), emulate and improve.
I use Linux, but I use it for a single thing that I know it's good at: It's my firewall. And frankly, being a very compentent programmer and having almost two decades of experience with the internet, I find IPTABLES to be a bitch to configure. It's more complex than it needs to be. Just like most Linux software.
Here's the general aim at our company with our software: Make it simple enough for the average idiot, but make it configurable that the advanced user can do what they want. If Linux developers would do the same, Linux would benefit a great deal.
Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
UGG, this pervasive mentality is going to keep linux probably where it belongs.. only with the geeks.
I own a 21" monitor that can do 1280x1024 at 100hz. I don't see my model in the list of monitors in Xconfigure and that leaves me with two options. Brave the XFree86 config file, or live with a less than optimimum solution.
Gawd, point 10 as the original author stated is probably the biggest embarasment in the open source community. I would venture to say it's a complete failure of human interaction that non OF THE DISTORO'S I HAVE TRIED have fixed this.
CTRL-ALT-+/- works great if your config file is setup correctly, but it's not a likely, and where do you set the frequency?
I would say 80% of the linux geeks can't rant off their frequency-ranges v/h of their monitor. Who keeps the manual ?
Geezus, sorry for the rant.. but this topic has hit a cord with me.
I work as the IT Manager of a small corporation. Throughout my day, I am asked a number of relatively simple questions, such as how do I find out when this file was last created or altered.
My users, which is synonomous with most users, have to be walked through that process practically every single time. Sure, a few of them know how to use the search feature to locate a document and a few even know how to do a few slightly more complicated tasks. However, for the most part they are quite limited in what they know regarding the use of the computer system.
It is far from their job to know how to do anything. From what I have seen. I could set them up with a fully configured KDE3 desktop with all their applications right in front of them and they would still have the same problems.
Making things easier on a computer does help, but there will always be new features and options that negate that ease of use. More options = more difficulty. Lowering that difficulty allows more features to be added.
A modern Operating System is really no more easy or difficult to use then an Operating System that was in use nearly ten years ago.
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Looks like you read the questions but not the rest.
He's saying that these things should be easy+intuitive.
Sure, YOU and I know the incantations, key combinations and so on to get things done, but if Linux is to enjoy widespread use among the not-interested-in-RTFM population this stuff needs to get easier. Like bleedin obvious.
Provided that widespread use is the goal of your project (I think it's safe to say Gnome/KDE has that goal) it's wise to listen to complaints like these.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
You can have multiple monitors defined in your XFree86Config file, and since X v4 detects hardware at startup time, changing monitors should not be difficult (disclaimer: I've never done this so I may be completely wrong).
This "solution" isn't very good. Why should I have to restart all of my apps to change displays?
"You have changed monitors. Please restart for these changes to take effect." This is what we've been making fun of Windows for for years.
People like 0x0d0a seem to think that's acceptable, apparently simply because it's X and Unix. The attitude is, "if you don't know how to handle every obscure option required to do what should be simple things, then you're a moron -- go back to Windows."
I can do all the things that have been suggested. I've used, administered and programmed Linux and other forms of Unix for more than a decade.
The point is, it's stupid to think that a hard-to-use system is somehow a good thing. It's unproductive, elistist, and boneheaded.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Not once have I ever had to "do a little homework" to figure something out on my Mac, nor on my PC. Everything I know about those two computing platforms have been learned from experience and trial and error.
I cannot say the same about Linux, where I frequently had to search google to find out how to do things that should be (in my opinion) simple.
I find it especially ironic that you're arguing over whether an obscure keystroke used for changing resolutions is good or not, when the problem could be solved by adding a 'monitors' applet to the control panel (which no one can be bothered to write). As is so common with Linux, it doesn't have to be good, just 'good enough'.
So why don't they make one of these front ends accessible by right-clicking on the desktop? That's where 99% of new users look (often in vain) to find the screen settings.
I'll call your bluff.
Oh, and Konqueror is a take on Netscape Navigator, which is the proper name of the browser that you're calling Netscape.
Outlook, Kmail
Powerpoint, Kpresenter
Acrobat Reader, Xpdf
Visual Studio, GNU Compiler Collection
May we never see th
What, desktop users don't get the much-touted benefits of open source software? We're just stuck with Microsoft because the people in charge of the OSS movement don't want to change any more than Microsoft does? Linux isn't for me, but neither is Windows. I use Windows now because it's a lot closer to what is for me than Linux, but that doesn't mean I'm statisfied.
For myself, I was really happy with BeOS. I found it to be the happy medium between a hardcore roll-your-own OS like Linux and the don't-touch-that attitude of Windows. When Be died, I moved back to Windows because Linux has little to offer me. I've messed around with it in the past, but I've found I spend more time learning to use the system rather than using it.
With Be gone, I'm not left with many options. I could take the plunge into Linux, hope my box doesn't get rooted in the time it takes me to figure out how to secure it, or I could stick with Windows and be pushed around by Microsoft. I have hope for distros like Mandrake, but I find they're often incomplete. If I want do Linux right, I have to get down in there and screw around with stuff I don't know how to use.
The deciding issue is whether my reluctance to trudge through Linux is matched by Microsoft's attempts to control what I can do with my computer. Does my ignorance prevent me from doing what I want in Linux more so than Microsoft does in Windows? I have a feeling things will swing the other way about the time Windows 2000 ceases to be a viable option or when distros like Mandrake become mature enough that I can trust it to handle the small stuff.
THANK YOU! Exactly my point! If your going to have Anti Aliased fonts then dadgummit make it easy to use by god! I don't mind delving a text file for sendmail.....at least you'd feel good if you got sendmail to work....antialiasing, well, just looks, um, nicer, but doesn't really do anything productive like sendmail does.....it just makes it look better. I can put up with the ugly text. I can't put up with a no working mailserver so into the text file I go! :)
Gorkman
I would call it a bug, but it's not solely Konqueror behavior. IE does this too (although you have to have clicked or tabbed to select the control).
I know several people who have gotten bitten by this behavior... clicking on a drop-down box to select something (say a date) then trying to scroll down to the bottom of the page to hit submit. Unknowingly they just changed the month of their flight from June to July!
These people never meant to use the scroll wheel to select the value of the control, so it doesn't occur to them to check that they didn't just change something.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
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:-)
Mozilla-based browsers are the best. They render most pages correctly and enjoy the commercial support of being the basis for Netscape. However, Mozilla is not integrated with any desktop environment, making tasks such as printing, accessing the file open or save dialogs, and cut-n-paste unpleasant
I disagree. First, I take issue with the misuse of the word "integrated". "Integration" is not a good thing from an engineering standpoint -- it's a bad thing. Having compatibility between two pieces of software, or conforming to a standard interface, has nothing to do with integration. MSIE is "integrated" into the Windows operating system -- bits of each rely on each other, a break in one bit breaks other stuff, and updating or removing one messes up the other. Modularity -- not integration -- is a good thing. Of course, having modular software with standard interfaces and supporting standard IPC mechanisms is important.
** END QUOTE **
I think you are wrong. What he means, and it took me time to think of the right word, but every time anyone uses the word "integration" (besides billg), they mean "works well with...", "can take advantage of `public features' published by...". IT DOES NOT MEAN "WIELD DISSIMILAR PROGRAMS TOGETHER TO MAKE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE COMPETITION!!!"
One good example of the real meaning of "integration" (or lack thereof, actually) revolves around the KDE printing infrastructure: Mozilla does not use it, even though it would let Joe Schmoe Average User decide if he wants duplex printing, multiple pages per sheet, etc. from an easy-to-use dialog box and not have to pull some serious voodoo to make things print out the way he wants it to.
(Ditto with OpenOffice, though on my Gentoo box it did detect CUPS and tried to use it. But I'd prefer if it used the APIs and facilities provided by KDE, it would make my life way easier.)
The day your average non-geek user will see everything "under Linux" work together and interact seamlessly, as one sees it under MacOS or Windows, will be the day the Unices will be able to challenge the Redmond behemoth.
And to repeat myself, I don't want, say, Konqueror to be welded into the core KDE libs and whatnot. I just want my RealPlayer 8 to be able to bring up Mozilla (or Opera, or...) when I ask it to when I select "/contents/web sites/MusicNet". THAT would be proper integration.
I find that sometimes I have to use Ctrl-C/V and other times I have to hilight and middle click. It can be a little annoying at times.
I *much* prefer to know if my filesystem might be totally trashed in a minute than to just have it happen because a system blindly started guessing what to do.
Well, maybe you're more l33t than me, but when it asks me if I want to fix inode xxx my questions often are:
- What is referenced by this inode?
- Why does it need to be fixed?
- What will happen if it isn't fixed?
Looking at a bunch of inode numbers and having to go through and say Y/N to them is, for me, pointless.It's like a car mechanic coming to you and saying "your car is broken, shall I fix area 7 of the car?" without offering (or allowing you to ask) anything about what area 7 is, whats broken with it and what will happen if you don't fix it. In the end, you shrug your shoulders and say "well, I guess so".
Bad analogy i know - but it's the best i can come up with.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Even though I consider myself a quintessential computer geek, it even gets tiring for me having to figure out things like why KDE 3.0 won't compile according to the directions. Sometimes I just want it to work, because I have other things I need to be doing instead.
I'd like to make sure that I also state how incredibly cool KDE is, as well as many other linux-based apps. Kudos to all of the developers who have contributed their time and talent. BUT...I hope that we move away from a seemingly pervasive mode of thinking that says, "oh well, they'll figure it out...". Linux developers need to start thinking like end users. Even if it means covering the smallest of details, what you end up with is a very polished app that leaves little to go wrong. This is not time unwisely invested, because even for users that are technically inclined, it's still annoying when things don't work as they're intended.
info is a humunguous pile of shite which is a pain to navigate and a pointless excercise in confusion. There's a perfectly functional existing standard which is the man page. If you want a pseudo-hypertext manual, what's wrong with html?
I want my documentation on one page, so I can grep it or in a sensible hypertext way, so I can slouch back, slurp my coffee and browse through it with my mouse.
dave
Don't make things easy so people are forced to learn how to do things on their own in order to use their computer? That's insane.
Where do you draw the line? Maybe I think you're an idiot because you don't do everything in binary. Yeah, that's it. You've just had it too cushy with your fancy assembly language.
Let's force people to interact via a series of switches mounted on the front of their box. That way we'll be sure that they really understand exactly what is going on. If you don't want to exert the effort required to master such a system, screw you. You're not worthy anyway. No great loss.
Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, but does this make sense?
load "linux",8,1
If they were all very good at doing what they do - that's fine. Sadly, they're not. Whenever I'm in Linux I *always* yearn for IE when I'm browsing, no matter what browser I use. The author's point is that all the current options aren't that amazing, and all have pretty big faults.
Are you serious? I'll assume you are. I personally (and I'm sure a lot of other Linux users are the same) can't stand IE. It has its good points, one being the almost perfect offline browsing, but the rest? I can't stand it's boring as hell user interface (where are the tabs, and why no google search from the location bar?), and the way it completely screws up processing web pages. It's also been weighed down by MSN branding recently. However, if you must have IE, you can run it in the latest builds of Wine I've heard. I don't think it's perfect, but it's certainly usable.
Yeah, good viewpoint. Why make things easier and more intuitive when the users could just get off their lazy asses and go study to use the machine!
A few months ago, I would have agreed with this statement. Maybe it's Linux turning me into an elitist or something ;) However, really, there is a limit. Computers are hundreds of times more complex than cars, and it takes months to learn how to drive. Some people seem to think that you can continue to make things more and more intuitive and easy until you don't even have to think to operate computers. I'm beginning to think that's wrong. There will always be people who drop off the end, those who can't or won't learn new things.
You can add all the online help you want (and Linux does need better online help), but the idea that somehow if the user can't figure out how to do something it is by definition the developers fault is flawed. Maybe the developer could have made it better - but there is a limit.
Ever tried ctrl-alt-escape in KDE? Obvious and transparent, no?
Huh? And I guess Ctrl-Alt-Delete to kill processes is more obvious? Having a nice little button to do this would be pointless waste of screen space, this is just something that people will have to learn if they need it.
You'd have thought more of the more popular editors would have it (at least as an option). It's a pretty basic thing to have.
If I understand this right, emacs in text fill mode does it. For editing text, this usually isn't what you want, for writing documents you should be using a word processor. It is possible however.
A good accountant, knows the tax laws and all standard accounting procedures. It can take a tremendous amount of time just to gain that knowledge let alone to keep up with the latest in accounting practices. Like many professions, there is a continuing education requirement, which puts Certified Public Accounts in schools at least every other year. They simply don't have the time, and many don't have the inclination to learn all the whiz-bang features of their computer, the applications they DON'T use and the esoteric features of their Operating System. An excellent accountant practices only accounting. An Average accountant attempts to be something else at the same time.
A very good engineer spends his/her time practicing their engineering discipline. While some may have a hobbie with computers, it doens't make them a better mechanical engineer because they know how to configure a Linux machine for desktop use. What makes them a good engineer is that they know how to use the standard symbols, which have been altered a few times in the past ten years. They also need to know how to operate the application that they primarily use for their engineering discipline. An average engineer will spend time in other pursuits, while a great engineer will spend his/her time living and breating their chosen field. Most of the time that doesn't include how to configure Sendmail.
As for a marketer... True, they are mostly evil. However, to be a good marketer one needs to know the human mind, psychology and how to handle the media. They may need to know how to create a Powerpoint Presentation, generate a few documents. They have no need to know how to configure the Apache web server. That is what the guys in IT are for. They have need to learn how to program PHP, CGI or any other language that is used in Web-page design. They might come up with a layout, but that is for some IT guy to put together.
Tell me why the above professions need to have knowledge that is similar to what most IT people have? How will that make them better in their fields? How will they find the extra time to keep up with all of the endless data that comes out of IT, when they have to do the same thing for their field?
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I'd sure like to know what you're using and how you're trying to cut and paste, because (at least in X), 99% of everything responds to the standard select-copy and middle-button-paste. That is, hilight the selection and it's automatically copied. Click the middle mouse button someplace to paste. (I think StarOffice is about the only exception to this I've ever run into.)
Maybe this isn't "intuitive" to a windows user, but you know, so what? C-x,c,v aren't intuitive to me... why should I have to press extra buttons? In the end, it all comes down to a little learning about and investigation into your software environemnt. When exactly did ignorance become OK?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I hope it all gets fixed soon!
I reported this bug to bugs.kde.org a long time ago. There were other people that reported duplicates of the same bug, all complaining about how annoying it is. Try using the mouse wheel when you have Slashdot moderation access! More than once I have accidently moderated someone. Or, try navigating Freshmeat.net, where the long filter bars at the top use onChange to trigger them as soon as the mousewheel touches it. That is bad in itself, but worse with this Konqueror bug.
The problem is that as far as I know, the KDE team completely ignored all of the bug reports (there were several) about this. KDE has done a wonderful job with a lot of features, but I'm worried that it has a case of featuritis (or at least app-idis). People work on new eye candy all the time, and add new enhancements (look at the plan for 3.2). Rarely do I see any actual bugs fixed, though, other than crashes and security holes. Granted, those can be the worst kinds of bugs, but user-interface bugs can be just as bad when they get publicised like this!
I started using Linux back in the day when every version number began with a "0." including the kernel. In those days I had such a hard time getting Linux (Slackware) working but I did with the help of a friend. Configuring things like sound meant compiling the kernel again - which took a long time on my 386.
I gave Linux up for the past 2 years or so to be using OS X and Windows XP because "they worked". I deal with computer (WinNT, Win2K and Solaris) problems all day at work - it's not something I wanted to do when I got home. Using ones home PC shouldn't be like work.
I recently got rid of XP and installed Mandrake 8.2 (on my laptop none the less) and my god how the Linux world has changed while I was gone. The PCMCIA configuration used to freeze Dell laptops (you had to edit the config.opts to make it not prob a certain range). Sound used to be much harder to configure (ESS Maestro 3 support is a newer feature). And the NVidia X server was much harder to configure.
When I loaded it up this time I went to the console ONCE after installing and following the easy instruction at nvidia.com to install X. I then edited the inittab file (although even for that the system prompted me after testing and asked to do it for me).
Upon bootup, gnome asked what I wanted the system to look like (as opposed to assuming for me and making me look for the theme configuration), asked a couple basic questions concerning mail configuration and I was in. The configuration tools in Mandrake and Gnome are MUCH better than the Windows counterparts (comparable to OS X's).
It works now, it's back to being my stable system not because I want to learn how it work like I did several years ago but because it works - it's the best tool for the job.
I'm Microsoft free (at home) now - not because of moral standings but because they don't make a product that I want to use.
If Linux ever wants to see widespread use outside the programming community, there must be an easier and more straightforward way of installing programs. If Linux is ever going to grow beyond the programming community, they must keep in mind the average user. Not necessarily the dumbest user (as MS does) but the person that doesn't know how to tweak source code. I don't know how to edit and compile the kernel to include some new piece of hardware, and I don't want to.
I shouldn't have to learn every little in and out of Linux. That's what programers are paid for. I'm a chemical engineer. Give me a word processor, a few math programs, and some readymade Fortran code and I'm good to go. That's all I ask. Windows delivers, so that's the OS I use 90% of the time. I'd love to avoid the watchful gaze of MS, but I can't invest a large amount of time into learning Linux for only a small reward.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've managed to make a pretty solid (and enjoyable) living by underestanding computers and networks better than the majority of the population. I do not, however, mistake technical competence for intelligence. There are plenty of people who are smarter and better educated than me whom I would advise to get a Mac or Windows box rather than worrying about the inner workings of Linux.
X actually provides a mechanism for the apps to negotiate what information they give/get in a cut and paste operation, which allows them to cut and paste anything, as long as both sides understand what it is.
The problem is that most apps don't use it, or they only ever the X clipboard for text. Theoreticaly, X can handle things just as well as Windows or MacOS, but too few developers use it.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
- Access became much cheaper and more ubiquitous. Checking your mail at a net cafe wouldn't have been possible without a popular net. neither would purchasing broadband at current rates.
- Suddenly there was a vast quantity of information and application avaliable through other media that was now avaliable through the net. Your Lord of the Rings trailer wouldn't be visible on the net so easily nobody was watching.
- Monetary incentive meant new and better sites / apps. Google wouldn't exist without their adwards, which in turn wouldn't exist without an audience
- It became possible to meet people outside the geek world on line, and share your mutual interests (cars, ham radio, dessert recipes, whatever)
Imagine an engineer who worked for a motor company in the early days complaining that horseless carriages were ubiquitous and that the roadways were filled with idiots who didn't know how to rebuild an engine.You do know how to rebuild an engine, don't you?
I clicked on setup.exe