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What Does Open Source Need for Mainstream Desktop?
HesAnIndieRocker asks: "So what will it take to make open source technology a mainstream alternative on the PC desktop? It feels like we've been on the cusp for many years now and the applications available for most common tasks are certainly competitive, but we still hover around a 5% market share by most accounts. I've recently written an article in my weblog about some possibilities, but I'd love to hear what others think."
Foobar2000
Seriously, it has to be the most awesome audio player I had ever used, and Linux doesn't even offer an alternative (other than running it on WINE) that comes close to the pure awesomeness of it. I like Rhythmbox and whatnot, but seriously, Foobar2000 could do it all. I mean, it even cured a cold I had once!
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
One thing that has definitely turned me off of Linux is installing things. I don't want to apt-get anything, I want to click on things with my mouse and make them install.
Debs, slackpacks, rpms, etc are a bitch to mess with. I don't want to alien -d xxx.rpm; dpkg -i xxx.deb every time i come across a file of that type. The linux distros should make packages that run on any pc running any distro. also, apt-get, yum, and emerge should come together to make a single repo, so all the linux systems are up to date with everything. this would make our systems much more compatible with eachother, albeit it would take some time.
Little things like real replacements for common programs... not half assed attempts.
;-)) of the flagship Intuit product.
There are applications that I NEED on a daily basis that cannot be emulated and there is no equivalent. Don't get all bent out of shape about this, it is just a fact that noone as yet has been able to 1:1 replace Dreamweaver.
Also, if you are bound to some program for your business or home use you kinda have to go with what works.
3 simple examples:
Dreamweaver - NVU is not a replacement by any means... and the sad part is NVU is about as good as it gets in the OS world.
Quickbooks - No, emulation is not an option... it is sluggish even in windows. And don't try to tell me that the dozens of disparate accounting projects on sourceforge or freshmeat are going to come anywhere near the simplicity and dependability (damn straight it is dependable... lots of backups
Radmin - Remote Administrator by Famatech will not work on a *nix box with emulators... some forums have some well meaning people saying "So what if the keystrokes don't work, you can copy and paste text instead" - Thanks... but no. I have a hundred clients with radmin licenses and when compared directly to Radmin I would rather eat glass then install the latest VNC variant. If I had started out with VNC it might be different, maybe if I started out with VNC I wouldn't be agonizing over trying to switch to *nix.
The plain fact of the matter is, there are many programs that are not directly replaced. I have been trying to switch to a distro for 5 years. I install a new distro on a relatively modern laptop everytime one comes out. It sits on my desk and I genuinely try to use it. So far I really like the debian distros (Like Ubuntu minus the constant sound effects), where 2 years ago I would have been hard pressed to use anything but SUSE.
Everytime I make a legitimate attempt to change over I run into a half dozen piddly little sub $100 applications that I cannot emulate or replace.
I have seen Linux make great strides in the last 5 years I have been following it. I have moved most of my servers to linux and bsd (web and mail), I even replaced my SBS2k3 server in favor of ClarkConnect Home 3.1 (so sweet) to run my windows domain.
I used to get my ass kicked trying to install an HP JetDirect printer, then CUPS started coming preconfigured in the distros... man was I excited! Then I would find that dual displays were troublesome... again that has changed for the better.
All I have left are DreamWeaver (not just wysiwyg, but the templating and ftp site synchronizing) and Radmin since all my windows clients have it. I manage 50 or so client computers and a dozen windows servers in Alaska from Seattle with RADMIN... so it is kinda important to me. If I can figure out those hurdles then I am on the way.
Sometimes it is just the little things.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
I'm sure I'll be flamebait, but i'll have to file you under "you still don't get it". (that and shamlessly promoting your blog.)
/etc. Thats playing with fire.
Not only don't you get it, you won't listen. Sure - argue that I'm wrong. Willing to take a bet which one of us will still be right in a year? Two years?
You said: "Instead, the problem with Linux is that not enough people are getting it preinstalled on their computers."
Bzzzt. Wrong. Do you think everybody would automatically love Linux if it was dumped on them? No. Not by a mile. Remember, Linux is FREE and can't compete on the desktop with stuff that isn't. Stuff that is generally either put out by an evil empire, or a fruit company
I stand firmly behind JWZ's statement: "Linux is free if your time is worthless".
99.9% of the people out there use their computer as a tool. They aren't interested in tinkering with it, or even worse, fighting with it to try to get something done. I don't want to have to screw with my computer for simple things any more than I want to screw with my car just to get to work. THESE ARE SOLVED PROBLEMS.
If you want to get Linux accepted on the desktop, I suggest you take a good hard look at trying to do even the most simple things that people do on other platforms every day.
-play music
-configure a printer
-move files around the network
-play games
-adding/changing hardware
-etc
These are simple and linux still has plenty of problems with them.
Play sound? ALSA or OSS or something else. Barf. And doing something like adding a new graphics card? *shudder*. The ensuing Xwindows pain in the ass makes me sweat just thinking about it. "You've bought the latest wifi card? Oh sure, you just need to grab this patch, patch a kernel module, recompile, reconfigure, modprobe, and you're set!!" OH COME ON!
If the only way to set something up is to edit a config file, YOU FAIL. Period. This is not open to discussion. You will not win on the desktop. When my mom/dad/sister/grandma calls, I can walk them through GUI's to change settings. I can't/won't dare have them editing some random file in
I contrast this with windows. A recent event for me: the onboard firewire port on my laptop died. I bought a firewire PCMCIA card. I plugged it in. Windows detects it, finds the drivers, installs them, and is done. I plug in my iPod and up pops iTunes, it syncs, and everybody is happy. IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE THIS SIMPLE.
And i'm not even going to go into the KDE/GNOME/whateverdesktopyouchose wars and inconsistency nightmares that are going on.
(And even more, i'm not going to go into the incompatibility issues with the different distros and system configurations. AIEEEEEEEE)
It's not an exposure issue. Linux still isn't there yet. If you think it is, I suggest you go over to an usergroup like mythtv-users for people setting up that particular media server. You wouldn't belive the fucking nightmares people have to deal with for things like getting digital audio working out of their box.
THIS IS ALMOST 2006! PC AUDIO HAS BEEN A SOLVED PROBLEM FOR A LOOOONG TIME FOR THE REST OF THE UNIVERSE.
To replace windows Linux doesn't need to be as good, it needs to be BETTER. I'll tell you I'm perfectly willing to pay $100 for windows/MacOSX for the shear amounts of headaches it saves me vs. trying to run linux on my desktop (and yes, I have done it). If you think paying $50-150 (arguably, whatever the OEM cost is) for windows over a 3-5 year windows product cycle vs. the amount of trouble it saves you is too much money. Well, I'll just have to say we must live in two very different worlds.
I am soooo not a microsoft fan, and I think a lot of their user interface work is junk, but they **still** beat linux's ass when it comes to general usability.
As someone who's not particularly adept with Linux, but has attempted to use it many times over the years, allow me to say that this may be part of the problem. Linux is absolutely nowhere near the cusp of acceptance for mainstream desktop usage, and for good reason:
For starters, drivers. Rarely, if ever, have I installed any flavor of Linux (starting with Slackware back in '99, having since used Redhat, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Knoppix and SUSE, not necessarily in that order) and had everything work. You need to futz with obscure config files to get something as simple the mouse wheel working, much less buttons 4 and 5. Video drivers are rarely up to snuff; as I've had ATi cards for the past few years, I've yet to even play Chromium BSU. Sound? Forget it. Basically, and I think this is the single biggest issue, virtually anything requiring a driver in Linux is a hassle. No one wants to spend hours pouring over forums and HOWTOs to install a bloody driver.
Then, there was the package dependancy hell, which has been somewhat resolved by package management systems. However, my experience with these systems has been that they're unbelievably unintuitive, and have an awful interface. Take Ubuntu's system, for example: it's 2005, yet its interface (at least when I last used it, maybe 7-8 months ago) looks like a circa-1990 BBS.
On top of it all, there's the hideously outdated UIs. There's little, if any, consistancy between apps in appearance, and most of the default themes I've seen in the various Linux distros still look like a clusterfuck of a Win98 box. They don't even match up to WinXP's level of consistancy and polish, much less OSX's.
Linux really does have the functionality to put it on par with Windows and even OSX in a lot of cases. The problem is that Linux is, by and large, an OS developed by hobbyists and developers for hobbyists and developers. Its level of polish is orders of magnitude off from Windows, and not even on the same plane of existance as OSX. It's just a hassle to install and configure, and not particularly nice to look at. Sure, it's less of a hassle now, but it's still just not good enough.
At this point, I honestly don't see what point - other than being free of cost - that Linux on the desktop serves. Sure, more competition is always welcome, but Linux is already a phenomenal medium/heavy-duty OS - does it really even need to be on the desktop, too? And more importantly, without a serious overhaul by a group of artists and GUI designers, does it even have a chance? My guess would be, on both accounts, no.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Course this would be moot if there were linux drivers, right? But as you also mentioned, thus far many Linux drivers assume that "you are at least this smart" to install it (my Linux ATI drivers, for example... So my latest kernal didn't come with the source code... how do it get that...). I suppose more users like me (nerds who enjoy the odd hw/sw issue) asking for Linux support then it'll get better, but there are things WE can do as well I believe. Starting with nicer application names (what the hell does "NDIS" mean anyway!? And "abcde" is a what? Oh, a CD ripper, I guess I should just know that, huh?).
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
"The computer should do exactly what the user wants, whenever the user wants, without the user having to think about it. This means extensive end-user testing and brutal simplification. The user should never see anything unrelated to exactly what they want to do. The folder heirarchy they see on the drive should ONLY contain things relevant to their activities. They should be able to re-arrange everything on their disk and still have it all work. They should never have to edit a config file. They should have to wade through "interface spam" of a million options which one in a million users will ever actually use. And yes, this means extensive high level architecting of everything that goes into the system, something OSS isn't traditionally good at doing."
Yes.
And additionally:
1. Stop writing code from the kernel up, and start from the user's external experience, and work your way in.
2. Calendaring and Scheduling.
3. Go read Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines.
4. Calendaring and Scheduling.
5. Sleep/Suspend/Hibernate
6. Did I mention Calendaring and Scheduling?
7. Forget everything you know about How Computers Work, and think like a user who has never seen a computer before.
8. Pervasive distribution of user state.
9. oh, and Calendaring and Scheduling.
Here are some basic things that are wrong with my very slick ubuntu system:
1. Sound doesn't work without massive fiddling. I think I happen to have gotten unlucky in this, but it took me a huge amount of effort to get sound working. I am not sure what I did to get it working. I think it was one of several support libraries that wasn't installed. Moral: don't unbundle. Throw in everything the user needs. If you are a moby geek, sure, go for a slimmable distribution, but if your target is the other 95%, it has to Just Work, out of the box. So sacrifice disk space for functionality. X has to successfully probe the monitor and correctly identify the modes that it supports, as well as its physical dimensions; when a new monitor is plugged in, X has to be able to cleanly identify the new modes that are available, and support multiple monitors, and all that crap that Windows and OSX Just Do, completely transparently. Because Xorg is so dependent on static configuration, if something blows away the magic config you put in xorg.conf (which happened to me recently), you're in for an hour of hacking on the part of a serious geek to get it working nicely again. Most people are simply going to wind up with a configuration that isn't optimal, and not know what to do about it. Impression: linux is ugly. It isn't if it's configured right, but it's hard to configure it right. My linux screen looks really nice now, but it took a lot of extremely geeky fiddling to get it that way.
2. UI is massively inconsistent, and massively clunky. You want a person's first experience of Linux to be "wow, this is a lot easier to use." If it's "wow, this is a little funky," then they're going to stick with Windows. The 5% that are running Linux are early adopters, and they're willing to suffer to be on the bleeding edge. Most people aren't early adopters; for them it has to Just Work. Say what you want about Windows - after it's installed you're going to be sorry - but it works out of the box, for the most part, and when it doesn't, it's a matter of downloading a few drivers that install easily with installshield. Linux is better technology under the hood, but the usability isn't there.
3. Consistency. My laptop moves around a lot, and peripherals change a lot. My trackpad doesn't work if I start X at my desk, because I have a trackball and keyboard at my desk, and these throw off the device probing. You hear a lot of stories like this. I put my machine to sleep, and nine times out of ten it comes up with a blank screen and I have to hard boot it to get it back; the other time, it works fine. Things sort of work, but they're fragile. If something works, it's got to keep working. This kind of inconsistency is just not something anybody but an early adopter is going to accept. It looks like the problem with X is that it's simply not probing APM correctly, which is because my system does ACPI, not APM. The X wizards probably already have a solution for this, but it's not on my running system, Ubuntu Breezy, so it's not helping me.
4. None of my data transferred over (I switched from Mac), except for IMAP email, because that uses IMAP. All my address book information is stuck on my Mac where I can't use it. My calendar is on my Mac too. There's no interoperability, nor even a way to transfer the data over once and leave it. Given that there are standards for exchanging this data, it ought to be possible.
5. The sights are too low, so even early adopters are underwhelmed. Linux doesn't try to do anything new - it just does what MacOS X does, only not as well. Under the hood it's about the same as OSX, and much better than Windows, but from the user's perspective it's not as good as either of these two competitors. It's hard to compete, because Windows and Mac are both single corporate messages, and Linux is a free-for-all; both its strength and its weakness.
You'd think that free word processing and stuff would make a difference, but people would ra
If a user has to go through HOWTOs to know how to edit obscure config files you know something is wrong. Golden rule: the user must not be forced to dive into config files. NEVER. Too often a simple question like "my printer (model XYZ) does not work!" ends up in "type find -name balau848$""U(" -rh [{\48 20} and then edit /etc/blah/abc/xx__jht/rtkjc, check lsusb, copy the XYZID, check in /proc for bus ID 409482....."
Provide a GUI for EVERYTHING. And provide a good, self-explaining GUI. Rule of thumb: if the user has to look in a manual, the interface design failed. An exception are very complicated applications - there, you need a manual. But then, write a GOOD one. manpages are *NOT* good for non-gurus.
Also, distros should have something like autopackage pre-installed by default, to m make decentralized, easy setup files for linux possible.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.