The Clueless Newbie's Linux Odyssey

overshoot writes "Just what we've always (said we) wanted: people who are fed up with Microsoft and are willing, even eager, to give Linux a real try. Well, she did. And did. And did some more. Not only that, she's a technical writer and she took notes. Not fun reading, but worth reading anyway."

Comments

what about from the other direction?

[timothy]

First: This article makes some very good points, ones that people who push Free and otherwise Open Source software on others to the point of being annoying (like me) often have to skirt around. This kind of criticism is really important!

Second: The author talks about the need (in her case) of a dual-boot system, and that's surely a common situation. However: What about Windows? If someone has a mostly happy, generally successfull Linux installation on a machine with a few tens of gigs of hard drive space, can Windows be nicely (non-destructively) installed as a novelty or ... for what Windows users use it for?

I have installed Mandrake Linux (versions 7.1 and 8.0) on Laptops which arrived with different versions of Windows, and contrary to the upshot of this article, those installs (dual-booting with Windows) went pretty automagically (though I regret that I ended up with a big never-used partition on each of those hard-drives ;)). However, that's because Linux distros know they exist in a MS-dominant environment. Microsoft seems to offer tips on removing Linux, but how difficult would it be to go about creating a dual-boot system the other way?

(This question is out of ignorance, and is not rhetorical.)

timothy

p.s. A very similar, just-as-damning article could be written about the various interface flaws that infest Microsoft Windows; a few recent visits to my dad, trying to help him set up wireless networking under Windows led me to show him how if I popped in a Knoppix CD, everything Just Worked, but we never did get Windows XP happy with his network.

Re:It's not a matter of lots of money

[Osty]

Putting

- It's made by developers for developers

and

So, why not one good interface?

together makes one wonder, what developers was (because like it or not, the various Linux distros are trying to target Joe Sixpack-type users these days) Linux trying to target? There are essentially three types of developers in the world, with variations on each:

• The casual developer. This guy likes quick&dirty tools, because he's focused on getting the job done. RAD environments like VB or Delphi make it easy for this developer to get his work done with a minimum of fuss. He doesn't spend time thinking about development issues or reading books to learn esoteric (to him) ideas. He pops open his RAD environment with a specific goal, throws together a form that does something (reads data, munges it, spits it out on a form), and is done. I'd say this is the most common developer out there, and thus is why VB and Delphi are so popular. I'd say this group also includes your average sysadmin, if you consider scripting languages to be RAD tools.
• The professional developer. This guy is competent, and likes a job well-done, but isn't obsessive-compulsive over having the cleanest or most elegant solution. He's usually writing code under deadline pressure, and it's more important that it works than that it's clean. These guys usually write in Java, .NET languages like C#, or C++, though they often use other languages like SQL or various scripting languages to support their work. The professional developer likes a good IDE, because it helps him get his job done, but he can get by without it holding his hand. He'll often buy books and learn new technologies. These guys are less common than the casual developer.
• The hardcore. This includes researchers and the unix-style system programmers. It doesn't matter if it took ten years to ship their product so long as it's elegant and clean. They're obsessive-compulsive about their development environment, and will rage on and on over their choice of editors. These are the guys you'll find in protracted debates about emacs or vi, while everybody else is using neither. They like low-level languages, usually C though some use C++ without being ostracized. They're also fairly uncommon outside of a University setting.

It seems to me that the last developer type is what Linux is targetting. Maybe it's a little short-sighted to target the least-common of developer types?

Regardless, all of that is more or less a red herring today. As I mentioned above, nearly every distro is moving towards one of two things (or both, in the case of Redhat) -- they're targetting servers, or desktop users. The hardcore developers don't really matter, because they know how to get all the tools they need if they're not distributed with the system, like you mentioned. The other types are more or less ignored -- there's no real RAD solution under Linux other than Kylix, and there's no single, coherent object model or set of interfaces (I just re-purposed the word "interface", because while I know you meant "user interface", I think it should also apply to programming interfaces) for writing software (there's GNOME, KDE, GTK, Qt, GNUStep, etc, none of which are guaranteed to be available for any given end-user, so they either have to make a conscious choice to exclude potential customers, or take pains to make sure the neccessary depenedencies are available at install time).