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Trivial Barriers to Personal Linux Use?
saintp asks: "I'm currently multitasking: building a computer for my girlfriend, and also trying to convince her to put Linux on it, so I've been thinking a lot lately about the barriers to adoption of Linux by Normal Everyday People. One that seems to be a major problem is that Windows users are addicted to downloading every piece of crapware that comes down the tubes -- hence the popularity of Gator and subsequent popularity of Ad-Aware. While geeks the world over sigh at this behavior, it makes a lot of people really happy, and they are very chagrined to discover that they can't do this on Linux without some command line mucking about, compilation, etc. What other minor, apparently trivial barriers exist to personal Linux use? Is anything being done to address these, or do many of the major vendors seem to be focusing exclusively on the business market, possibly to the detriment of Linux in the long run?"
Your girlfriend might download alot of software just to try it out, but everyone I know is too scared to.
I know back in the day before I had migrated to Linux, I would install various programs just to play around with them. However, I never installed crapware like Gator, it was usually just stuff from sourceforge that sounded useful.
Maybe you could try giving her a distro that uses RPM, then show her freshmeat and sourceforge, and teach her how to install any programs she might want. That should satisfy her urge to try out new things.
One thing that I've been thinking of lately that is really a limitation for end users to adopt linux in the desktop is the (un)ability to easily share resources in a LAN environment.
I might be wrong at this, but I haven't seen in either GNOME or KDE something like 'right button click' -> 'share this folder' option, to get a list of the known users and automatically add it to the samba/nfs shares/exports list. If someone knows about some work being done in that direction, that would be a Godsend.
Regards,
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
Lindows is trying to solve the very problem you are looking at. Sure, people bitch about them (mainly due to the elitism of many Linux users), but I heard it's a nice solid distro, and things like click-and-run make it very easy to install software.
Every few months for several years I have downloaded a couple of Linux distros with the express purpose of trying install it on my PC. Sometimes I tried clean installs, sometimes dual boot.
As much as I would love to use Linux and OSS, I have an even greater need of a working system that handles my basic needs. Right off the top my system has to handle a USB and parallel port printer, HP scanner, Palm sync, Internet connection, access to the Windows boxes on our small network, and allow the Windows boxes to use the printers and see my files.
If all of those work, I can spare the time to wade though the great morass of information that Linux calls "documentation" and learn the obscure tricks that are needed to manage a Linux system.
What I can't afford is to have a system that does only some of the things above. Thus far installing Linux has always left me with at least two of my needed functions absent. I already know that trying to find out how to fix them will consume days if not weeks.
With Windows 2K (and driver discs) everything above "just works" out of the box.
Just for the record: Mandrake (a few times) RedHat (3 times), Suse, Caldera (long time ago), Knoppix, and at least two others.
Three Squirrels
once I finally got it installed and working with my hardware, was the selection of text editors found in the Linux distributions I've tried. The graphical ones are getting better, but vi and emacs are very difficult for most newcomers to learn. mcedit is a bit more familiar, and comes with many distributions, but it wasn't until years later that I noticed it was there.
My mom's computer was popping up ads every couple minutes under windows, so last summer I set it up as a dual-boot Debian box. Installed mozilla, gaim, openoffice, & the usual basics (my mom had to have solitaire & mahjohngg), and showed them how to switch back & forth w/ the lilo menu. I also set up gdm w/ the face browser, & set it so they don't have to type in a password (although my 16-yr-old sister opted to have one anyway, 'cause "it's cool!").
Next time I went home, they had me switch the default to Linux so they didn't have to sit there when it booted up. My mom, sister, and stepdad (who can't even figure out how to use the DVD player) have been using it quite happily since then, and aside from having to install flash for my sister (which I was able to do remotely via ssh, another plus), they haven't complained at all about not being able to install shit. They're just damn happy they can read their email (they use mozilla), chat, & web surf w/o being bombarded by popups all the time. They're also quite impressed that they can each have their own web bookmarks and desktop pictures (first thing my sister did was put up a Pirates of the Caribbean background). I don't think they've booted into Windows much at all since then.
Only real problem they've had is that there's currently no way I know of for them to switch users when my sister has xscreensaver locked, short of killing X.
1. no uniform installer w. no uniform uninstaller 3. permissions... :)
4. a billion configuration files
5. how do i talk to all my windows stuff
6. drivers, see #1 and #2
And lastly Why does every one have to have their own distro, with their own package manager. Linux is supposed to be this great free software movement, Lets get it together and find A path.
I want to help. let me know what i can do...
Jeoin
I guess the subject ties all I really have to say in together nicely enough.
I migrated my wife to Linux a few months ago, after some skips and jumps migrating her IE Favorites over (had to write my own script to migate them over. Ask for the source if you want it) I had to move her mail client from Kmail to Evolution.
What a nightmare.
Just coverting between maildir to MBOX formats were a pain, getting her people in her addressbook was another fight, and in the end I decided, there must be a better way.
Anyone remember good old BeOS? In Be you had People... Every mail client used People as a master address book. It was clean, intelligent, and you didn't have to code up your own converter every time you wanted to switch mail clients. The same goes for Mail... The system saved mail on the hard drive in a specific place and format (Maildir, I think it really ended up being). All mail clients used it, and they all behaved well with it.
And finally, the browser favorites were located in one place, installed a third party browser? No problem! They all read the favorites from the same place. Coolest part, if you had to backup, just a few folders to drag from the users directory and all the important stuff was backed up to cd.
Here lately i've started working on a framework to unify People (address books) Places (Favorites) and Things (Mail) so that users can use any mail client they wish, with any browser, and everything stays (and, more importantly, keeps) updated, no matter what client one uses.
Oh, well. Someone get in touch if you want to bring back some of the cooler aspacts of BeOS to the world of Linux. It's not going to get any easier until we make it so.
On Windows the majority of well-written installers are single self-extracting .exe's or .msi's.
.dmg if you are lucky (and a .dmg.gz, .sit, or .dmg.sit if you are not). You double-click the .dmg and it mounts a virtual disk. You run the program inside. You try to unmount the virtual disk but it won't let you because it is in use. Then you close the program and unmount the disk. You still have to throw away the original .dmg and the archive (if it came in one).
With OSX you get a
It kind of sucks to have your OSX desktop cluttered with foo.dmg.sit, foo.dmg, and Foo, just for one program.
If it's in the manual, and you want somebody to hold your hand and read it to you slowly, then that's what paid support is for. Personally, I think we could do with less people with your attitude in this particular "club". I'm not being elitist, I just don't appreciate it when I try and spend it helping people in genuine need of help, and instead my time is wasted with people too lazy to read the manual.
The best part about the way OSX does this is that it is a completely 'UNIX'-y solution. OSX Apps are unix apps wrapped in a fancy, -standardized- directory structure, with their own text files for config descriptions, binary payload directory layouts, etc.
...
.app dir, bone up on a few XML'ish files that need to be included (hey, its a text file for config, thats UNIX right?!), and there's your package. gzip it and deliver.
... no sweat. Either -include everything you need- (really, there's no problems with doing this) in the .app dir, which means all the libs you think the user isn't going to have on their OSX box, or just put symbolic links (as in the file kind) in your .app's Library folder to wherever you've found the libs you need on their system...
.app package, theres no need for App vendors to -usually- touch any of the /System tree stuff ...
"OSX Apps", the pretty ones with icons that bounce, live in a subdirectory with a ".app" at the end of it. Finder (and not much else) knows that any time a user clicks on a file with ".app" in it, this whole subdirectory contains the full suite of resources needed to run that app
So, you can easily make a cmd-line, unix-style app, no sweat. Good old POSIX! Put it in its own
Okay, so your wonder-app needs access to 'standard libs', and has 'dependencies'
End of story. No 'registry key' to be configured (well, okay, maybe ldconfig is 'registry'-ish these days, eh?), no 'special program to edit registry entries' (just text editor), etc.
And since its all in a single
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
There definitely need to be brain-dead options. Click - done. At the moment doing anything with Linux is an uphill struggle even for someone like me with decades of experience with computers of various different types. I even gave up on a new Linux box simply because copy/paste between applications was so bizarrely different (and I'm already used to switching between C-c/C-v/C-y/C-k on my Windoze box, and remembering that yank has opposite meanings in my two favourite editors, so that's not the issue.)
/not/ thick, I just have better things to do with my time. At the moment, even though I want to use Linux, I know every time I turn to it that the least thing is going to be an uphill struggle of poor docs, thousands of dependencies, other software falling over, yadda yadda yadda.
Installing software is a joke. Where? Which RPMs do I need? Which RPMs need updating? What other apps fall over because their dependent RPMs have been updated without their knowledge? The number of times I'm like "oh for fuck's sake" and back to the old Windows box.
Click - done. This should be available. Of course, this doesn't mean that all the fannying around options should be removed for people who do want to use their brain, but not everyone wants to read gigabytes of bad-attitude HOWTOs for the slightest little thing.
I even gave up installing BitTorrent on my Windows box last night. What the fuck is a tracker? Where do I get one?
Ok, you can whine at me for being thick but that's rather missing the point. I'm
Back in the day I used DOS, 4DOS (a COMMAND.COM shell replacement) was the number one must-have software.
Simple, small, clean, fast, and with all the features a power user want, even more that you could dream of.
I even prefer its TAB completion over bash.
It was incredibly productive.
You've obviously never had to drive a British Leyland product, or anything with Lucas prince of Darkness electrics
But back on topic - you don't have to do that with Linux. I run RH8.0 at home, play games (such as RTCW:ET) that come for Linux, and spend no more time 'screwing around with it' than I ever do with Windows. My printer just works. The only bit of hardware at home I did have to fiddle around with was my ancient parport scanner, but you have to screw around a great deal to make the same scanner work under Windows XP, too.
I've got my Dad using Linux. I know he'd get infected by social engineering worms such as MyDoom if he was on Windows because every so often he moans that he can't download $SPYWARE from an email and I tell him "That's why you have Linux because it STOPS you downloading $SPYWARE and it means I don't spend an hour a week de-crapifying your computer!" After seeing the havok wreaked on friends by worms and spyware, he's stopped moaning about not having Windows. (And he'd only moan if I put Windows XP on his system because I'd lock it down so he couldn't infect the machine with malware).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'm honestly not sure of the point you're trying to make. Yes, I do cheerfully put up with it. I fix my own car when I can, pay when I can't do it or--and here's the key--when someone can fix it better and faster. I have better things to do than spend 16 hours replacing my clutch when someone else can do it faster. Sure, they charge, but how much is 16 hours of my time worth, again? What matters is that I have the choice to fix it or pay, as I like. Yes, I realise that I could pay someone to fix my computer when it breaks. But it shouldn't break in the ways I describe. When you use a hammer, it shouldn't shatter; when you use a wrench it shouldn't bend; when you use the tools a software company gives you, they shouldn't do the electronic equivalent of self-immolation.
Someone new to computers will not use something they have to constantly fix. They will not use something that requires a level of artistry to manage. They want a toaster, something that just GOES, and to hell with "but its free and open! Its cool!"
We're geeks. Huge ones. We like these things. But we wouldn't find it acceptable to have to reassemble our toasters to fit white instead of whole wheat, or get knife v2.13.02-rev3 to cut bagels instead of muffins. Linux is in a situation where its getting wonderfully better, constantly. Portage, apt, etc etc all make things simpler. But we're still rewiring our toaster for white, and there's those of us who feel that it's better that way, and if someone can't do that they should just eat cold bread and like it.
This does not have to be hard. It does not have to require fiddling. Yes, WE like the fiddly bits, but few others do. Yes, we lose bragging rights if granny can make her machine do whatever with 2 clicks. We're no longer l33t. Normal people might be able to--gasp! Shock!--use something complex without the pain we go through and the hoops we jump through with a grin.
Call me a waaaaahmbulance.
Clicky means anyone can use it. "Just working" means they won't have to fix it or tweak it to keep it running. MS and Apple figured it out and proceeded to pwn everyone else, since despite the hideous, obvious flaws, it works like a damn toaster when you want, how you want, without chicken slaying.
We need to make it so you don't need to fuck with it, but have the freedom to do so if you want.
Its not "free as in speech" if we make people use it a certain way because we think its better, now is it? MS does that, we howl to the skies how they force "their way" down everyones throats, horror horror gibber froth.
I say we should try not to be that guy. Its happening, slowly, and I love it. But it needs more. GUIs are not evil. "Easy" is not bad, y'know?
Exactly. This is what I have seen using OS/X as well. I have no idea why this is this way, and it sure does not look user-friendly to me.
I think installation on Linux is better, if it worked as the package creator intended. The problem on Linux is that the packages often don't work. Windows would be as bad if 60% of the windows installers crashed or failed with errors when you double-clicked them.
I think in the ideal system, what you get is a file that you double-click and it RUNS the program (it it is not and "installer" and not a directory containing either the program or an installer). Only if the program needs daemons or other system setup, it can then detect if it has not been installed correctly and offer to do that, or just let you run to test it. For 99% of the programs "installation" should consist of dragging that file to the correct directory so users other than yourself can see it. "uninstallation" should consist of throwing the same file in the trash, and any symbolic links or init or daemons that it "installed" should have enough smarts to delete or kill themselves when the program disappears.
Nobody (not Windows or Linux or the Mac) seem anywhere near this. Some of it seems to be complete brainwashing by the installers on Windows. We have discovered that people don't believe the installer works if it does not present them with a big scrolling box of text with an "I agree" button!