Make Linux "Gorgeous," Says Ubuntu Leader

OSS_ilation writes "They say beauty is only skin deep, but when it comes to Linux and the free software movement, people like Mark Shuttleworth think looks have an important part to play. On his blog and an article on SearchOpenSource.com, Shuttleworth and a slew of open source end users say that the look and feel of open source is also a matter of wider acceptance among enterprise players who are used to Windows, yet crave Mac OS X and the functionality of Linux. 'If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful,' Shuttleworth said. "We have to make it gorgeous. We have to make it easy on the eye. We have to make it take your friend's breath away.' With the early success of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Shuttleworth and company may be onto something."

Comments

Wow, and accurate assessment!

[Salvance]

Finally, someone who is addressing the root cause of why Linux continues to trail market leaders in desktop share. In addition to making it "beautiful", developers need to continue adding out-of-the-box widgets/features to prevent someone from ever needing to modify a script or enter a terminal window if they didn't want to. If they could address both of these 'issues', Linux would have a fighting chance against Windows desktops.

IMO - Microsoft doesn't dominate because it is better, it dominates because of great marketing and ease of use (even for groups such as the disabled). My grandmother can use XP Home, but if I have Linux up, she completely freezes. Sure, there's some grandmas that know perl scripting, but who wants to jump in and start compiling code just so they can play bridge with their friends over the net?

Re:Wow, and accurate assessment!

[14CharUsername]

Linux is great for beginners. And its perfect for experts. But it doesn't work very well for those people in between... the "Power Users". They get on a linux box and the first thing they say is "where's the C drive?" Then next its "where's Program Files?" Then they bitch about when stuff is installed it gets spread all over in places like /usr/bin, /usr/share, /usr/lib, /etc, etc. (see what I did there?).

For beginners its great. "where's My Documents?" "How do I get on the Internet?" "How do I log out?" After a few minutes they figure these things out and are on the way.

The experts get to the console and type ssh, rsync, grep, sed, find and the like and they're in heaven.

But the "power users" have so much knowledge of registry hacks and all the little things that you have to do just to make windows work. They know that the hard drive is C: and if you have more than one hard drive, the second on is D:, if not then D: is the cdrom. Apps are installed in their own folders under C:\program files\ (unless you specified something else in the installer) but you can't remove them by just deleting the folder, you have to go to add/remove programs in the control panel. If that doesn't work then you nuke the app from the registry and then delete the folder in program files. To all the "power users" out there, that is how computers are supposed to work. Show them anything else, then they are just as helpless as the beginners. They don't want to give up all that windows specific knowledge without a fight.

Don't make it beautiful, make it Just Work (tm)

[blackcoot]

and when things don't Just Work (tm), make it Really Easy to Fix (tm). gui eye candy is nice and all, but it does no good if the underlying software is flakey and generally hard to use.

Doubtful

[mpapet]

In principal, I agree.

In practice, it's not what makes people switch. They will switch when there is an overwhelming need for something that is not provided by their current PC.

Otherwise, they don't switch.

Despite Apple's temporarily high visibility (pre vista media onslaught) these days, they know from experience getting people to switch even -if- you have a beautiful desktop and good advertising marketing budgets is tough.

Re:Imagine...

[Mikachu]

It really doesn't matter. You're not competing against a world that has never seen a computer before. You're fighting against a world where Windows owns the market share, and Mac OSX is often shunned aside, where Linux is called the nerd OS.

So essentially, Mark Shuttleworth is right. It's not enough to be just barely the best in anything when the market leader has almost all of the market. You have to truly jump miles above the market leader before people will notice. It's unfortunate but true.

How do you think the Apple iPod worked so well? When it came out, nerds said "less space than a Nomad, it's shit." But what happened? If you really compare, the iPod blew the Nomad away in terms of ease of use and beauty. Not to mention marketing, but that's a different story altogether.

Ain't gonna happen

[melted]

Too many people need to give up their egos, use GUI toolkits they don't like, and admit they don't know jack about what looks good and what doesn't.

Better yet

[Cereal Box]

Instead of making it look "gorgeous", how about focusing on making Linux look "consistent"?

Windows and Mac OS sure didn't achieve their easily identifiable "looks" by promoting dozens of inconsistent GUI toolkits.

Re:Do or do not. There is no try.

[shmlco]

Unless you're planning on creating a new ideomatic language and teaching it to the rest of the world, we're kind of stuck with that whole letter-word-sentence-paragraph thing. Which gives rise to the idea of a page or document or file or folder that encapsulates a bunch of them.

Most sites or interfaces that try to overlay reality with other metaphors fail, usually because the metaphor doesn't communicate (why is the home page the "Town Hall"?) and because most graphical systems aren't as dense as text. To take your example, do I want to navigate a virtual building trying to find Fred's desk, or is it faster to find Fred in an alphabetic list and click on it.

I actually expect search and metadata (aka Spotlight) to take us further than 3D spinning virtual worlds...

Re:Do or do not. There is no try.

[budgenator]

Yeah like I really like how in windows app where hitting OK sometimes closes the present window and sometimes opens the child window.
How about how if you open your browser, a single click on a hyperlink follows to the links URL, but the file-manager that looks just like the browser needs to double-click the links (shortcuts)?
Here's a good one how about downloading an executable to a user's desktop, then right-clicking and run-as admin, ever try that it don't work, Windows says admin has insufficient privileges! Then you get sneeky and down-load it to a shared folder, and run-as, but that still doesn't work, you have to copy it into the shared folder, I've pleaded with every windows guru for 3 years to tell me how to do that, nobody knew! as far as I can tell I'm the only one! This is so unintuitive, admin is untrusted and to make a file shared, it has to be moved into a shared folder, and downloading into the shared folder doesn't count!

I don't want to to things the "new" windows way, I want some sanity, I want the old tried and true, rational, expandable Unix way!

Re:how about making Ubuntu Gorgeous

[injury0314]

I totally agree, that the color scheme is hideous.

So when I upgraded to ubuntu dapper for my parents back home, I made an effort to set up a better color scheme.

To my surprise, when they began using the computer, they were disappointed that it didn't come with the ubuntu color scheme they love so much. And no, they have had other os'es and distros setup in their computer Win2k,XP,Mandrake,Debian.

So, maybe it just boils down to people's preferences.