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

Article Summary

[Drunken Coward]

After finding herself stuck behind the times using Windows 95 in 2002, the author took it upon herself to convert to Linux. After trying Mandrake, Lycoris, SuSE, RedHat, and Knoppix, she found them all seriously lacking and has since switched back to using Windows 95,

If a computer literate technical writer can't even get Linux working properly, how can we expect it to be widely adopted by the masses? Linux is not ready for the desktop.

Re:Article Summary

[Pyromage]

Your attitude is why Linux sucks so much.

I use it every day. I don't have Windows installed on any of my systems. I *still* think it sucks.

Why do so many people think that it's always the users problem? Bah, it's so stupid I won't even argue this one.

The thing is, why hasn't anyone tried to make a *good* distribution yet? We have Debian "we have ten thousand pounds of shitty, buggy, out of date software, but hell, that's a lot, so its good". There's slackware (my favorite) which just has this "you had better know how to do everything because I aint helping you" attitude. Mandrake is as broken as the above. RH is as broken as the above.

Most niches have decent software in them. There are some genuinely good word processors for Linux. Ditto for web browsers, email clients, etc. Why package 45 shitty ones in a distro?

And on the topic of hardware support, I'll just paint an analogy: BeOS. BeOS supported almost no hardware. It has worse support than any other OS I've used, in terms of quantity. But what it *does* support, it supports perfectly. Swap video cards? You won't get any messages. The new one will just work, same resolution, same bit depth (assuming they both were supported, but that's not avoidable). THIS is what support should be: when it works, it should *work*.

When I installed my HP722C a while back, I had to manually write a magicfilter print filter because no existing system supported it at the time. Unacceptable.

And people like you come along and make jackass comments like "You're not l33t enough to move to Linux, because you're still running Windows 95! Only Win2Kers are cool enough to join my OS!". Asshole. Shut the fuck up.

Re:Article Summary

[agentkhaki]

[sarcasm]

Why package 45 shitty [insert software type here] ones in a distro? Choice, my man, choice.

[/sarcasm]

Seriously, the parent is 100% on the money. Linux wasn't, isn't, and probably never will be ready for the masses, because the masses want things to just work. Now, before everyone jumps on their anti-microsoft steed screaming 'Microsoft's stuff never does what I want it to do,' remember the following:

1) As crappy as it might be, Microsoft offers real, live human support for their products, assuming you purchase them and don't pirate.

2) If something doesn't work, one doesn't have to play 'find the config file and learn how to use whatever sort of configuration options the author decided to implement.' One simply a) doesn't use the product and returns it or b) finds someone to get it to work for them, which is much more likely if they're running Windows or MacOS than if they're running linux.

3) Why *are* there so many different ways of doing things in Linux? How about one or two *good* ways, instead of half a dozen not-so-good ones?

Joe user wants things to work. He wants to go to Best Buy, grab the latest game, gadget, whatnot, and he wants to go home, plug it in, idely stand by while it installs God-knows-what spy-ware, and then he wants to use the product, even if he has to jump through a few hoops to do so.

And probably the biggest reason why Linux will never make it to the main stream population: UI design. Sure, Apple's got a better one than Microsoft... Or is it the other way around? The truth is, it doesn't matter - they have the money and resources to hire someone who knows a thing or two about UI design, and they have the same money and resources to conduct focus groups and research and all those things that open source simply can't do, and they can figure out what works the best for the most number of people, and not just the geeks and their playmates who happen to have written the software.

Re:Article Summary

[neuroticia]

Linux doesn't suck any more than any other OS that's out there. They all have problems--name it, and it has a problem. People tend to choose their OS based on which set of problems interferes the least with the work they are hoping to accomplish on their computer. (Or they choose it based on what the shiny-piece of plastic they bought at the local CompUSA has installed... But we're not talking about them now, are we?)

Win2k->Linux *IS* a much easier migration than Win95->Linux, because Win2k has more tools available, has a user paradigm closer to that of Linux (ie: actual security, user profiles that are not just "profiles", etc.) We're not saying that only Win2kers are "cool enough"--hell, I've seen a few WinME'ers migrate over to Linux more easily than Win2k'ers, we're just saying it's an *easier migration* because there's less to learn. (Assuming the migrating party bothered to learn Win2k in the first place)

There are REASONS why Linux advocates say what they say--often reasons that extend past the snottiness you sweepingly accuse them of.

As for your complaints about the distros--it's all a matter of personal preference. If you don't like it, you're not required to use it, you know? You do sound like you'd be far more happy on Windows, OS X, or even BeOS. Or are they more sucky, resulting in you staying on the Linux-side?

Yeah, the Linux community does tend to be a bit short tempered. They're more than happy to help you work out issues, but if you keep complaining about the OS they're also more than happy to tell you to go back to whatever OS you feel most comfortable with. There's plenty of newbies that aren't whining, are more likely to listen, and less likely to waste our time by complaining about how Linux can't do X, Y, and Z--completely forgetting that their "favored" operating system can't do X, Y, or Z reliably, either.

Anyone who's a negative little fucker is going to have a very negative experience with ANY community they venture into, and ANY OS they attempt to use.

-Sara

Re:Article Summary

[Pyromage]

I'd like to clarify a few things a bit.

I admit I was a bit (bit? Whatever... understatements are fun) negative in my original post.

I mean to say that many people (not necessarily a majority, but more than 5) here on slashdot bash people for being stupid, for not knowing this or that random command.

I just think it's in poor taste to flame the author of this article for not getting things to work. Or for not searching hard enough. Or for not having spare computers for internet access.

I just mean to point out that the aforementioned part of the population writes these flames far too much.

I apologize for ripping on the various distros so much; I meant only to illustrate that there isn't a distro out there that has a stated and executed goal of making a distribution that is genuinely good and that works well, for the average user (Say, the author).

Slackware provides nothing. Perfect for me, but not our average user. Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, etc. all provide many useful tools, but they are too fragile. Debian has some things better, some worse.

The reason I mention debian is important: the optimal distribution for the average user doesn't provide 10000 packages, like Debian does.

It provides a few packages, maybe a couple hundred, that have been reviewed, checked, and polished. That don't crash. That are well documented. That do the job. Why not include the best 2 products for a task, that have been looked over first and polished to perfection, rather than just shoving in many others that halfway do the job?

I think the author is presenting an exaggerated view, because of her perspective. That's OK: it's a relatively average user's perspective. I just get annoyed when her exaggerations are flamed by slashdotters that exaggerate as much in the other direction. Nothing personal, but seriously folks, think before you insult.

Re:Article Summary

[harriet nyborg]

"I think the author is presenting an exaggerated view, because of her perspective. That's OK: it's a relatively average user's perspective."

i like skiing.

i've tried snowboarding, but for me, it's about as much fun as watching paint dry.

funny thing is that despite my opinion about snowboarding, lots of other people seem to really dig it.

no shit.

you see them all over the place, wasting their time on those miserable snowplows when they could be skiing.

sitting on their asses at the top of every run.

slogging along on the cattracks like wounded animals.

to a skier, you could think of them as the lowest form of life.

or you could notice that these worms pump money into the lift systems.

and force "ski" areas to change their way of thinking.

i credit these scumbags with the phenomenal expansion of back country skiing in america. 10 years ago you couldn't cut through the woods without getting your ticket clipped, but today most mountains are opening up their backcountry. it is the biggest advancement of liberty since the signing of the declaration of independence. a fucking revolution (excuse my french.)

now i'm off piste.

my point is that the author's "exaggerated view" is more distored than exaggerated. she's a skier who got on a snowboard and got pissed off and frustrated when she couldn't turn. she wants to do all the same things she can do easily on skis, but no matter how hard she tries, snowboarding puts her on her ass.

instead of complaining that snowboarding is not skiing, she should get back on her skis and thank all those dirtbag snowboarders for making skiing a better experience.

The Real Problem...

[JJahn]

is that most people don't understand that Windows is not the universal basis of good operating systems. People expect everything to work the same as it did on Windows. Of course that has to be the case for wide-spread desktop acceptance, but IMO that is not the way it should be.

At least Linux is reliable and after you get used to working with it, is powerful and useful. And also I don't seem to have so many damn device driver problems as in Windows...with those clueless vendors writing garbage drivers (I'm thinking Creative and ATI at the moment, grumble)

Re:The Real Problem...

[Teancom]

Did you read the article? Or even skim it? One of her main problems was not that it doesn't work like Windows, but that the various installation routines and setup programs would either not work the way they were supposed to at all, or work sometimes and not others. I'm thinking specifically of her redhat 8.0 problems, where didn't see her soundcard at boot until she ran snconfig, then it saw it the next time, and offered to configure it for her (too late!); and the knopix random segfaulting and mouse cursor disappearing; and mandrake not seeing that it was connected to the 'net even when it was; and various cd burned programs not seeing her drives, or burning coasters; etc, etc, etc. You can't claim reliability as a plus to linux, unless it is actually stable and reliable!

Now, before you get your panties in a twist, I think you have to differentiate between the kernel and the gui. I will agree that on average, the Linux kernel is more stable than windows 9x, me, and 2k (I've never used XP, couldn't tell you). *However*, the Linux GUI is just as unstable and crappy as those listed. Now I personally take that as a challenge, and help out with various KDE projects, with bug reporting/fixing, and the like. But pretending that the general state of the GUI in linux is that of stable, reliable, user-friendly, and intuitive programs would be self-deluding.-

nice quote

[mrpuffypants]

Well, you shrieking geeks

that's a nice way to endear yourself to the readers. I'd like to read some of her technical writings...

Now configure sendmail; you know where the sendmail.cf file is, you twit!

Re:nice quote

[Pharmboy]

You think average is upgrading every new release?

No. I think average is upgrading every 3 or 4 releases. Letsee, 95, 98,me,2k,xp (which has been out 2 years) and now she is average? No, the average person may be running 98 or me, but not 95.

a file is set immutable, by something or other.

I have installed more distributions of Linux and every other OS than you can imagine. Never have I ever had an installer do that. I have never had software set an immutable bit. I googled it and can't find much either. Nope. Not likely. Not impossible, but I am betting I have installed a couple hundred more boxes than you if you think this was the problem.

And then you insult her: she wrote an honest critique of her experiances.

I could write a critique or review of Italian suites over $1000, but you know what? I still wouldn't know shit about $1000 suits. I am not going to "be sweet to her" simply because she wrote an article. It wasn't a good article. The information is flawed, the premise is flawed, the execution was terrible. And I don't use Linux on the desktop, Im not advocating anything. I don't HAVE a favorite OS. I use them all. 95-XP, bsd, linux, and even OSX when I can. But I know a lame article when I see one.

Whatever. I'm tired of reading posts by pricks that can't take one whiff of honest criticism. Go smoke another with Ellen.

Thats the problem: you are the prick that can't take me criticising her article. If someone doesnt want to be criticized, then they shouldnt publish. She is touted as a technical writer, but I question her credentials as well.

And Ellen is entirely too young for me to be smoking one with. Maybe in a few years.

Newbie? I'd call her an expert!

[DeadSea]

She's installed half a dozen distributions. That's five more than I've ever installed. Such bravery.

I have had similar frustrations trying to get my printer at home to work. I've never been able to do it properly. Its an HP USB inkjet and it works just find from Windows 98. I really wish I had a postscript laser printer, since those are so easy to set up from Linux. (Never mind that Windows makes it harder than it should be to install one.)

As far as the CD burner goes, she had problems getting it to work on Redhat. I've found that whatever version comes with RedHat is pretty bad. Upgrading to the newest version of XCDRoast solved all my problems. They even have RPMs that are a breeze to install in RedHat. Yes you have to run it as root, but only once. You can give anybody permission to run it from its graphical interface.

plain old troll

[blastedtokyo]

It's funny how the author posts misconceptions about WindowsXP in the first page to say why they'll never try it. Then they go on to bash everything else in sight.

Sounds like one of those people who love to complain and are just looking for an audience.

Not a lot of variety

[1nsane0ne]

Let's see 12 distro's tested. Of those 8 are red hat / mandrake and 2 were suse. To give linux / alternative operating systems a try there should be more choices. She never said that linux was her only choice she just thought it best met her requirements. Seems to be that FreeBSD or any other BSD would be a good choice to try at as they meet all the requirements. Or if your hell bent on linux at least use a bunch of different distros just not red hat and mandrake. Doesn't seem like she gave enough alternitaves a try. I'm personally a fan of using what works best, be it windows, unix, linux, bsd, mac, beos, or whatever. It varies from person to person and from situation to situation and from computer to computer. There is no end all perfect for all, hardware, situations, and uses operating system and until there is one, we'll be stuck dual booting or using windows in some situations or whatever. Anyways thats just my two pennies.

Re:Not a lot of variety

[overshoot]

Let's see 12 distro's tested. Of those 8 are red hat / mandrake and 2 were suse. To give linux / alternative operating systems a try there should be more choices. She never said that linux was her only choice she just thought it best met her requirements. Seems to be that FreeBSD or any other BSD would be a good choice to try at as they meet all the requirements.

Help me here -- she's having trouble with Mandrake's installer and you want her to try the BSDs?

Re:Not a lot of variety

[Twirlip of the Mists]

OpenBSD/NetBSD is definitely not up her alley, and the FreeBSD ports tree would probably scare the bejesus out of her.

Not scare. This is a common misconception among Linux users, that complicated things scare us. (By us I mean the non-geeks and ex-geeks of the world, those of us who, in Tsu Dho Nimh's words, do not consider computers to be a hobby.) It's not true. Complicated things, like the ports tree, and for that matter all UNIX and UNIXesque operating systems other than Mac OS X, do not scare us. They piss us off. We get pissed off when things that should work, won't. We get pissed off when things that should be easy to find and use, aren't. We get pissed off when things are harder, more complex, more time consuming, or more needful of our attention than we want them to be.

That's the key, you know. The ticket is not to ask yourself, "What can we do to keep from scaring the users?" The ticket is, "What can we do to keep from pissing off the users?"

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.

Faith in moral paradigms

[argoff]

During WWII, Charles Lindburg went over to germany, looked at their massive numbers of factories and aircraft, and concluded that the USA could never win the war. I suppose also, that in 1950's USSR, many people saw their huge building projects, factories, and the space program and concluded that the USA would never beat out the Soviets which at the time seemed more elloquent and "sophisticated" in their approach. But if you believed that people had inaliable rights as dignified human biengs, and believed that freedom was an end in itself - then there was only one way to go.

Well the same is true with Linux. Some Microsoft features may seem more "sophisticated", others may see Microsoft's huge amount of cash and never believe that they could loose to Linux. But if you believe that copying things is not a sin, but a human nature; and you believe that property rights derive from physical truths and not from artifical monopolies imposed by the government - like copyrights. Then there is only one way to go, and that way will free and benefit the people who believe in it over the long run, and destroy the people who don't.

Brief comment

[smoondog]

1. It must have a GUI interface for installing and configuring the system. I'm a lousy typist, and text mode is not an efficient way for me to interface with an operating system.

No, you probably just aren't familiar with the shell. Many very good typists get very frustrated with UNIX because of the need to understand the shell.

BTW - Is anyone else totally baffled by the choices Mr. Gates and co used when developing MSDOS many years ago? The MSDOS "shell" has commands that are totally crazy. Some, like "dir" (and its output) are a little more intuitive than the default "ls". Others, like md are (arguably) less intuitive than mkdir. Still others are inexplicable, like using \'s instead of /'s for directory structure. What's up with that? It's almost as if they said, we need to create a new shell that looks like UNIX but is different, so lets randomly change a bunch of stuff.

-Sean

Re:Brief comment

[richi]

The different direction of slashes is due to MS-DOS using '/' as a way to denote command-line options (e.g. DEL /S/F *.* ). Early version of DOS didn't have a heirachic filesystem, so when MSFT added the concept of directories, they couldn't easily choose '/' as the separator, so they thought that they should use '\' instead.

Muscle memory sanity for people switching between DOS and Unix wasn't exactly seen as an issue to those guys ;-)

r.

Before everybody piles on...

[Fritz Benwalla]

I have to add that this was my experience too.

Let me preface this by saying that I run a web design company, I maintained our servers for the first few years, I put in my time on PETs and TRS-80s, and APPLE IIs and Windows 3.0 and 95 and NT and 2000 and Linux. Take my word for it, I'm a seriously fucking technical guy. I offer as further evidence the fact that I'm posting to Slashdot on the Linux holy war at 9pm on a Saturday night.

I made an honest go of making my home main OS Linux, but I quit in frustration. The main problem is that it's not that Linux isn't *capable* of doing everything I need, but the tiny things that are slightly greater hassles in Linux end up being a death by a thousand cuts.

If there's one main way I can think of to characterize my regular use of my main OS, it's "freewheeling." I need it to be a transparent conduit in my productivity, whether it be hitting the Net, writing documents, personal finance, etc. Linux was *always* functional, but *never* transparent. I constantly had to tweak little things to make it work, find new libraries, etc. That's fun when I'm using hobby time, but not fun at all when I have shit to do on a deadline.

Honestly, I don't know how you're going to fix this aspect of the OS without doing what Microsoft has done - compromise fundamental stability and security in favor of useability. Personally I hope the debate stops, and we stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Let MS spend their money catering to the masses, let's keep Linux stable and robust for hard core needs.

I think we'd be doing the world a lot more good putting Microsoft's server products out of business than their desktop products. I'd feel a much greater sense of accomplishment knowing that I helped get the world's credit cards onto a Linux server than the world's Mom's on a Linux desktop.

-----

Re:Before everybody piles on...

[J. J. Ramsey]

"Honestly, I don't know how you're going to fix this aspect of the OS without doing what Microsoft has done - compromise fundamental stability and security in favor of useability."

Stability is not antithetical to usability. If anything, reliability improves usability, since it means that things work more consistently. Security can be a pain, but basic stuff like having separate root and user accounts isn't too much of an issue.

IMHO, the problems with Linux's usability have more to do with the availability and quality of GUI config tools, and the lack of a standard target for third-party developers to build against, which in turn makes it tricky to install third-party binary applications. Making Linux usable by the masses is doable. Both the technology and the standardization efforts are in place. It just has yet to gel.

Unrealistic expectations,Unfair without benchmark

[NZheretic]

"Migrating to Linux not easy for Windows users" article in Linuxworld, while somewhat informative, is unfair and one sided, because it is based upon expectations that not even Microsoft's Win2k and XP can live up to. Tsu admits as much

Note: Requirements 2 and 3 eliminate WindowsXP as an upgrade route I would need to buy a new computer, probably new peripherals, and replace some eXPensive software to get the dubious benefits of product-activation codes and embedded functions I don't want and can't delete.

The expectation that Linux will fulfill the hardware driver installation off the distribution CD, when you admit that you may have to replace the entire hardware for XP, is inherently unfair and beyond what can be reasonably expected in any operating system. XP is not without it's major problems when it comes to older hardware ( especially scanners ) support and driver conflict problems.

The lack of any relative comparison in your article to the Microsoft alternative, paints Linux in a far worse light than is the reality. Compare your article to the recent articles by Joe Barr, comparing Linux installation with XP and Windows 2000.

Also, given the rapid improvement of Linux distributions, 18 months is in my opinion, too long ago to represent the current state of Linux on the desktop. See Michael C. Barnes updates look at leading desktop operating system options on the market.As with Joe Barr's article, it benchmarks Linux against Microsoft's offerings.

There is nothing inherently wrong with pointing out faults, in fact any *constructive* criticism over current releases of Linux is both welcome and necessary to the Kazan like rapid improvement of Linux. However, just repeating war-stories without acknowledging either that the issue has been fixed in the lastest release of that distribution, or similar problem also exists with Win2k and XP, does nothing but provide fodder for Microsoft's trolls. I am surprised that this article in it's current form, made it past the editors at Linuxworld.

Not all linux distributions are targeted for the non-technical deployer. For example: Lycoris, Xandros and ELX are more likely to have SMB functionality preconfigured on install.

However, does not someone also re-configure windows for your colleagues? When they log in, is the SMB shares,printers and defaults always pre-installed for them? If not, who ever provides techsuppport for you is not doing their job properly.

Deployment, day to day management and just using a computer, require a different level of technical knowledge, no matter what operating system you are using.

Although many non-technical people to install and with windows often reinstall the operating system, that does not mean that they do a good job of it. I have been too often called in to repair a screwed up home based 98 to XP systems to personally attest to that.

That some Linux distributions, for example RedHat 8, do require a lot more knowleadge to deploy, once properly deployed and configured, they are a hell of a lot easier to remotely manage on a day to day basis, even using GUIs. ( hint - ssh -X root@TARGET-IP ). The quality of the technical knowledge from Linux user groups and distributions forums, especially in comparison to phone support from Microsoft, can more than make up for the difference in relative difficulty. That Tsu Dho Nimh set up a a pre-requisite that no external support was aceptable, is unrealistic even for windows XP.

Dispite the absolute terror of the Microsoft advocates, Linux is NOW a more than adequate as a desktop for the enterprise, a replacement for XP and an upgrade from window98 and NT4.

At work , we have upgraded 80% of our ghosted win98se desktop from Microsoft Office 98 to StarOffice6 and Mozilla

Article has a bad tone

[lkaos]

Being one of the lucky open source developers who gets paid to work on Linux for a living, I love reading constructive feedback about how to improve Linux. I did not like this article because:

1) It was degrading. I'd rather not be condescendingly referred to as a "shreiking geek".

2) She says she has problems that are absolutely absurd. For instance, "Root gets locked out of files". If this is occuring, then Linux has some serious security problems...

I hear so much complaining about how Linux developers aren't helpful to new users and such. Well, I'm sick of new users who aren't helpful to Linux developers and just sit around complaining about how things don't work like they should and then fail to explain how they should work or make general statements like "all my old legacy applications should just work".

End-users of Open Source software have as much, if not more, of an obligation to be helpful to developers as developers have to be helpful to end-users.

Re:Article has a bad tone

[Kourino]

I'm so discouraged by this I just need to stop and agree ...

I've been sitting in the IRC channel for a popular icculus game recently and every day someone brings up (again) the "we need OpenGL support" topic.

Now, you can't do this in general, but today on LKML I saw what I consider to be a contender for greatest message ever ... damn, did it make me laugh XD

From: Alan Cox
Subject: Re: poweroff problem

On Sad, 2003-04-05 at 07:08, Anant Aneja wrote:
> also i cant give u the complete listing of the cpu
> registers since it occurs at the last stage
> of shutdown and i cant copy it to a file
> and am too lazy to write it down

We are too lazy to help you.
Goodbye

Alan

Bull, bull, and bull

[freeweed]

I've been a faithful Windows user for almost a decade now. Mostly because it's getting expensive to buy software every time I want to do something new, and mass piracy is turning my stomach, I've been looking into this whole 'free software' thing. Also, my current co-op work term required me to learn Linux and Solaris.

Ok, so at work we have about a dozen test machines. At home, I have a couple of spare machines. Broad range of hardware, from cutting edge XP1800's and 128mb video cards, to barely usable p100's with 64mb ram and 1mb video. ISA, PCI, AGP, sound, network, scsi you name it, it's here.

So freeweed decides to try installing linux. Ooo, I've heard good things about this Red Hat. Download the isos, burn, start the install. Wow, looks as good as, if not better than, the current batch of Windows installers. Very slick and intuitive (as long as you understand drive partitioning, something required even in the Microsoft world). A short while later and I'm in Gnome thinking "huh. except for a really odd filesystem, it's like Windows with nicer graphics". So, I carry on. Mandrake. Debian. Slackware (ok, that was a bit of a bitch and I needed to ask for help :). Once they're installed, I poke around a bit, look for the GUI configuration tools in the 'start' menu, and bang, I can change almost anything I want. Hmm. Just like Windows, where every new version means you have to hunt and peck (mouse wise) for where they've moved everything, and for all the new features you're unfamiliar with.

So, I'm pretty used to installing linux at this point, and with all these different configurations, the worst I had to deal with was looking up how to get an old ISA network card to work. Huh. Just like Windows. Now, it's time to try using some of this software. Holy shit! There's an office suite installed, free! Mp3 player, ftp client, multiple browsers, packet sniffers, IRC clients, you name it. I have almost everything I need, without the 18 reboots and hunting down cd after cd after cd trying to install everything I use. Ok, let's see how hard it is to get something not on this system. Hmm.. download a package, double click it in nautilus, it's installed! No easy desktop shortcut or start menu entry, so let's try just typing its name on the command line (just as I've done for years in Windows). No pathing errors, this is pretty damn cool!

Summary: I've been a Windows kid since the early 90s. Installing linux was at least as easy as Windows (it even told me that 'root' was the linux word for 'administrator'). I can do everything I want, for FREE. So far it's been pretty easy, and I'm hooked.

This writer who's coming from Windows 95 obviously hasn't tried installing 2000 or XP, they're at least as involved as a Red Hat install. (Oh, and for the record, anyone with an older machine that finds Gnome/KDE a tad slow, try windowmaker. Nope, it doesn't look like Windows, but boy, is it fast!).

Linux printing is a nightmare.

[SlashChick]

My experiences mirror this author's.

Having administered Linux web servers for several years, I decided to set up a dedicated Linux print server at home. My printer is an HP Color Laserjet 4500 which installs easily with pretty much any Windows version; I decided to forego buying the JetDirect ethernet card for the printer and use Linux as a print server instead.

I asked my friends what to use on my AMD K6-2 300 that had been commandeered for the purpose of running Linux (no dual-boot attempts here.) They said "Debian." I shouldn't have listened.

dselect is the most nightmarish application I have ever seen. I spent a good 15 minutes reading the help files, most of which were of no use to me. I then somehow managed to exit out of dselect by hitting some keystroke. BAM! I was dropped into a console prompt with absolutely no packages installed.

Aha! I thought. Apt-get to my rescue! After all, that was the saving grace of Debian. I tried "apt-get install kde." Not the right package name. Okay.... "apt-get install gnome." No? I just need to apt-get some sort of GUI!

With tedious Google searching, I finally figured out the sequence of commands to install KDE, and I was off and running. (I think I ended up installing some calculator program that required the KDE libraries, and it went ahead and installed KDE for me.)

I rebooted and was dropped into KDE.... exxcept that Debian wouldn't detect my USB mouse. I ended up having to go into #debian on freenode and get the instructions on how to edit some mouse configuration file just to make Debian understand that my mouse was on a USB port. After my mouse worked, I started using Debian, except that I got this weird C error dialog whenever I ran any application. I gave up and tried Red Hat 7.3 (then the latest) instead.

Red Hat was much easier for me to use. It detected my mouse during the install program, which was nice. However, it didn't detect my printer. I finally got the printer installed under the "control panel" sort of thing that KDE had, only to find out that most of the computer's applications didn't recognize that I was using CUPS! I went back to IRC and asked what the deal was. "Oh, that's normal," was the response. "If you set up the printer under KDE, only KDE applications will recognize it! Then you have to go in and tell all your other applications that the printer is now defined under CUPS instead of LPR. A window manager doesn't control your entire system! You should learn the difference between a window manager and the underlying OS."

By this time, I was miffed. If I set up a printer in Windows or Mac OS under the Control Panel, all the applications realize that that printer is now my default printer. Why in the world couldn't Mozilla (to use one example) do this? As far as I was concerned, the GUI control panel was the system control panel. To force users to learn the difference between window managers and the underlying OS and to force users to understand that changes they make in the window manager won't apply to the entire OS is a usability gaffe of such proportions that it hasn't been committed since Windows 95 took DOS out of the picture 8 years ago.

It took me several more hours to set up Samba to share my printer out to my Windows XP box, most notably because of a bug in Samba that prevented sharing printers to Windows XP. I then had the printer working with over 7 hours of work. It was a very long day for me.

I used the print server successfully for a few weeks. I then went away for Christmas and turned the computer off. When I came home and turned it on, there was no print server (and yes, I'd made sure that all the correct services were set to run on startup, which was yet another annoyance I had to consider in the 7-hour setup process.) Instead of being frustrated, I remembered that I had an old Pentium 75 in the garage that ran Windows 95. 15 minutes later, I had downloaded the Windows 95 drivers from HP's website, clicked the "enable printer sharing" button,

don't go the upgrade route

[g4dget]

The right way for "normal" people to get a Linux system is the same way they get a Windows system: buy a system with Linux pre-installed. And the way to upgrade is to buy a new PC with a newer version of the OS.

Regular users should be discouraged from doing anything else: PC hardware is just too complex and messy to allow installation on arbitrary configurations. And that's as true of Windows as it is of Linux.

I'd have to agree

[Trepidity]

I use Linux (Debian) nearly exclusively, but I can definitely see where she's coming from. If I want to do pretty much anything I need to read a bunch of documentation and edit config files. Now this isn't too difficult if you know what you're doing and have spare time, but I can see how most people would find it unacceptable. In Windows and Mac OS, if you want to do something like, say, burn a CD, you just install the necessary software and it Just Works. In Linux you have to find a cd burning HOWTO and figure out how to change permissions so the cd drive is writable by your user (or set the suid bit on your cdwriting software).

My biggest pet peeve though? There don't appear to be any good GUI ftp clients for Linux. There's gftp, which is lacking lots of features and is crashy, and there's something-or-other from the KDE people that's not so good either. Nothing approaching Windows' BulletProof FTP or SmartFTP. So I use ncftp, which is a CLI interface. Works for me, but I doubt it would for most casual computer users.

Mandrake 9 seems to be the winner

[Pinball Wizard]

and as someone who sets up Linux systems for clueless newbies to use, I have to agree. Generally, this distro has been the best support I've seen for setting up a basic workstation, which means everything should work right the first time. I'm not a newbie, but I don't have a lot of time to spend on end users systems, so I appreciate an easy to use(for the users) distro that sets up correctly without having to go back and do a lot of tweaking.

I will say, from the progress I've seen over the last few years with Linux desktops, they are improving at a fast rate. The distros just keep getting better and better, and I think we will one day soon see a truly usable Linux desktop.

Linux sucks less (sometimes)

[David Jao]

If Linux "sucks so much" then why do you still "use it every day"?

This question is rhetorical. You probably use it every day for the same reason I use it every day--that being, although it sucks, everything else sucks more.

But different people have different needs. I'm one of the biggest Linux fans in the world. However, I happen to think after reading the article that the writer would be better off using Windows.

This is not because of l33tness, or because I want to be an asshole. The simple fact is that Linux is not yet ready right now for what our writer needs. The most distressing part of the article to me is that it took the writer 18 months to figure this out.

The reason why no one has tried to make a *good* distribution is that the set of people capable of making distributions (call this set A) is not a representative sample of the population of people who need a *good* distribution. Members of set A tend to be just fine with using command lines and writing printer magicfilters.

People often lose track of the following two points:

1. This problem is *hard* to solve. It is a classic chicken and egg. You can't create a distribution until you enter set A, but by the time you've entered set A what's good for you is no longer what's good for average joe.
2. There's no rush to solve this problem. People often fall into the trap of thinking that Linux has to grow in order to survive. But Linux is not like other commerical platforms. Linux is the most successful user-developed platform in history. Because Linux development is so open and accessible, Linux does not need popular success in order to thrive.

While I certainly agree that Linux should suck less, I also don't think that Linux can be all things to all people. Some users really are better off not using Linux. In time this problem may be solved, but that hasn't happened yet.

Actually they have a point

[gad_zuki!]

>Only Win2Kers are cool enough to join my OS!". Asshole. Shut the fuck up.

Why isn't this guy modded down as a troll?

Anyway, these people complaining about her Win95 machine have a point regardless. She's (or whoever, the name is an obviously a pseudonym, say it out loud, and probably a clever troll) has an old machine and most of her problems are driver/hardware problems.

Linux for the masses means the same thing Windows for the maasses means: preinstalled OS. An equivalant review would be someone taking an old Linux PC and trying to put windows on it only to find that she's missing the proper drivers. Now add the industy's lack of Linux support and she has no one to hand her drivers.

Linux on the desktop != supported hardware. It would be nice if there were drivers for everything, but that just isn't the case.

I'm curious. When she bought that PC from dell, or whomever, did they just ship a box with a bunch of drivers on a bunch of floppies with a sticker saying, "Good luck!" Yeah, I don't think so either.

No, she, like 99.999% of PC buyers got a PC with a working OS installed and working components because the manufacturer had to provide a working machine. Whether they installed drivers after the OS install or just got them to MS on time, is besides the point.

All this review is telling us is that installation is especially hard with her hardware. Fine, but that isn't saying much. We all know Linux's driver support is limited.

Re:Probably isn't author's real name, but....

[Peyna]

It IS a pen name; or the person's parents have a horrible sense of humor. "Tsu Dho Nimh" or "Sue-Dough-Nim" or "Psuedonym".

It's not a matter of lots of money

[Jameth]

In response to your wonder about why there would be a hundred ways of doing something in Linux:

- It's made by developers for developers

What's this mean? It means that it's made by people who care that they can be as productive as humanly possibly with the least effort humanly possible.

So, why not one good interface?

People work in different ways. If you're writing code, you want to use every niftty feature you usually do, and you want to do it the way you have always done so. That's why there's VIM and EMACS (May God smite all who use that ghastly creation) and KATE and CoolEdit and cat+touch and every other thing you can imagine.

However, that doesn't excuse distributions. As far as I can tell, Distros add things that lots of people use. What they need to notice is that they can pitch all of the stuff that is only used by total Linux geeks. Why? Total Linux geeks know damn well how to './configure && make && make install' so they have every program out there at their fingertips.

The main reason that Designers don't do work for Linux is Linux doesn't want them to, not money. In a lot of design environments you have this:
Employee Type Coder gets instructions from Employee Type Designer and does them.
If Employee Type Coder is confused or disagrees, it asks Employee Type Designer for clarification because it doesn't get to tell the designer what to do.

In Linux you have this:
Random Person Coder sees a design suggestion and says 'Great, so why don't you implement it?'
Random Person Designer shrugs and walks off because he can't code that and he knows it.
- or -
Random Person Coder sees a design is, a bit confused, and has Random Person Designer try to explain it to him over e-mail and without any direct contact because they aren't physically co-located.

I'm good at design, and can code a bit, but I can't code a quality program and I know it. But if I put a post on a mailing list, it'll get ignored if I don't contribute something else, especially if it disagrees with what is the current trend in the group and, guess what that group is a group of coders who doesn't know shit about design.

God said 'Let there be' and there was.
Man wrote fifteen thousand lines of code and got a seg-fault because he missed a paren.
We've got a ways to go as far as programming languages are concerned.

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).

similar experience

[siliconwafer]

I had an experience similar to hers.

The first command I ever ran on my Linux box was "rm -rf /", as root of course. This was on Slackware 2.0. I was taking the advice of some people on IRC, in #linux on EFnet, and supposedly that command was "the one" to run. What a mistake that was.

That was my first, and last Linux installation. Don't get me wrong, I've tried to install other flavors of Linux since then, multiple times. Never been successful though. Mandrake installer would always freeze, or something wouldn't go right with the distro of choice at the time. Funny how FreeBSD has installed every time with no problems, and is remarkably stable.

In the end, I bought a Mac. I'm suprised that hasn't been mentioned more, as many comments are discussing Windows vs Linux. Try a Mac running OS X. Awesome GUI, very powerful, and stable. What more would you want?

I Couldn't Care Less

[nathanh]

I was reading the article right up to this:

Well, you shrieking geeks...

And then I switched off. I really couldn't care less whether she uses Linux or not. She's not the sort of person who is worth fighting for. How can anybody act so ungraciously when a community gives her a free gift of software, a free gift of their time, and a free gift of their knowledge, all with the goal of HELPING her? She can go pay for new hardware and Windows XP and avoid having to deal with all those "shrieking geeks".

If this lady is the sort of person that will be attracted to Linux if Linux is made easier to use then I think the current situation is fine. Keep Linux hard to use because that will keep these ungrateful brats away from Linux. Any valid improvements she might suggest are irrelevant if those improvements result in more users like her. She obviously considers herself to be a better person than the "geeks". I think the situation is exactly the opposite. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

You're missing the point

[wayne606]

To everybody who says "I never have problems installing linux", let me point out that this doesn't mean that nobody has problems. I don't have problems either (most of the time) but obviously some people do. Rather than acting all defensive and saying "Microsoft sucks too" why not see if anything can be done to improve things?

Also it doesn't make sense to say "what do you expect for free". If I pay RedHat or SuSE for a distribution I expect a certain level of quality. I wouldn't blame the authors of the individual GPL'ed packages, but I would blame the distribution people who let packages get on their CD without adequate QA.

To the distributors that the author specifically mentions, I hope you are taking advantage of this free QA. Either she is lying about the problems she had (what would be the point of that) or these problems really happened. If they did they should be fixed. Bugs are bugs.

The conclusion of the article is that Linux isn't ready for the mass market. If you disagree, fine, but don't claim it's perfect or more stable than Windows and therefore the whole article is BS.

Re:Article Summary - TROLL ALERT

[B'Trey]

She is not technically inept. She is a technical genius compared to many of the people I know. To many of them, running sndconfig is so far out of their league it isn't even funny. The very concepts of dual booting or partitioning a hard drive for different OS's is as foreign to them as the idea of performing a transplant.