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Asa Dotzler on Why Linux Isn't Ready for the Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "Asa Dotzler of The Mozilla Foundation compares the explosive growth of Firefox to the anything but explosive growth of Linux and what it needs to do to get there for the "regular user" AKA mom, dad and grandma Bootsie."
f that was required for people to switch no one would ever move to Apple.
This is the third or forth time I've seem mention of this on this thread. I think you all overestimate the number of people switching to Apple. How many users have they actually taken from Windows? A million? Two million? It certainly isn't much more than that. I know it's apples to oranges, but Firefox gets about that many IE switchers _every_week_. How did we go from one or two million users total just a couple of years ago to many tens of millions of users today? In part by making it work the way IE users expected it to work (without dropping innovative and powerful features like tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking.)
If there is a better way of doing things why not do it? I think constraining yourself to the way Windows does things is a little pointless.
Why not do it? Because users don't like change. Because sometimes habit and comfort are more important than making it marginally better. Unless you can make a dramatic value addition for the user, change is probably a bad idea.
I think desktop Linux is looking good, and it's just a matter of time before it manages to carve out its niche.
I'm a big fan of Linux (and Mac and Windows, too) and I want it to be successful. I didn't write a blog post saying "Linux can't and won't succeed," I tried to point out the areas that I think are conditions for its success. I think there's a big opportunity pre-longhorn to show that we've got the right stuff. That window is closing and things will be much more difficult after that. I think it's dangerous for us to think "it's just a matter of time."
- A
This is silly. It's been raised on the Ubuntu lists time and time again. Nonetheless, they refuse to enable it, because Canonical can't guarantee security updates for it. That's also silly, in my books, but then I find the whole idea of a Universe repository very silly indeed; it's simply not possible for a distro to ever be 'finished' like that.
Unfortunately, whilst new means of distributing software are being developed, the distribution developers generally strongly dislike them and sometimes go out of their way to cause difficulty for them. At some point there'll probably be a new wave of distros derived from the current ones that take the last "easy steps" to make Linux really usable for family and friends. Hell I'll do it myself one day if need be. Fedora is so close yet so far!
Still ... it's easy for Asa to criticise now. But think about all those years that Mozilla lumbered on with essentially zero popularity outside of the geek world. It wasn't until Firefox (which took years to develop) reached version 1 that things really took off. Linux is still in the Mozilla Seamonkey stage: cute features are being developed but that last stretch hasn't been reached yet. Arguably, it hasn't even been started.