Why the World Is Not Ready For Linux

eldavojohn writes "While many users reading Slashdot embrace Linux, ZDNet is running an article on why the rest of the world isn't ready. One note for Linux developers: 'Stop assuming that everyone using Linux (or who wants to use Linux) is a Linux expert.' While a lot of these topics have been brought up as both stories and comments on Slashdot, this article pretty much sums up why Vista could be absolutely terrible, and people would still believe there is no other option." From the article: "The one area of Linux ownership and use where it becomes apparent that there's an assumption that everyone who uses Linux is an expert is hardware support. Your average user doesn't have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty. Also, they usually only have the one PC to play with. Hardware just has to work. There's a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility — it's what people want."

Comments

Re:Strange premise

[jimstapleton]

and why shouldn't people use closed source drivers?

I am of the mentality that I could care less of the open/closed source nature of my software - it just has to work, and work properly, that includes the drivers.

I've found killer closed source drivers, and crap closed source drivers. Right now, if I could get the closed source windows sound driver working on my notebook over the open source driver, I'd use it - why? Because I don't want something that crashes my machine when certain thigns are done by the sound processing unit.

Open Source doesn't mean better, Open Source simply means that it's worked on by the comunity and it's content can be verified by an individual outside of those that prdouced it. I've no intention of looking at the code of my drivers, so why do I care if they are open or closed source?

Article simply wrong?

[Todd Knarr]

I notice a few things about the article that're just plain wrong. Hardware support, for example. For the most part, when I install Linux on a computer all the hardware's autodetected and the correct drivers installed by the installer. No updates, no vendor driver discs, once the install's done everything's there. The only thing that isn't typically done is installing the proprietary video-card drivers, and even then basic drivers are installed that support the full range of the video card's capabilities other than 3D accelleration. When I had to reinstall Windows XP last week, by contrast, the install was only the start of the process. Once the install was done I had to go through the process of installing all the vendor drivers: motherboard chipset, network interface, sound, IDE, printer, scanner, keyboard, mouse. Then I had to install the video-card driver and the monitor driver, then reconfigure the display settings. None of that comes with Windows XP, all it has are the most basic generic drivers that lack support for most of the hardware's capabilities. And once that's done, there's the several-hour slog getting all of Windows' defaults changed from it's initial assumptions to ones that work on a reasonably-designed network (eg. "No you will not contact Microsoft for time, you'll query the timeserver you were told to in the DHCP response."). And this isn't some ancient system, this is a fairly recent P4-based system.

For applications, the same thing. On a Linux system I just select from a list of what I want during install, and it's installed. On Windows if I want a word processor, or a spreadsheet, or a graphics program or just about anything, I have to go to the store and get it and then walk through it's installer. When it comes to Linux apps it's just a much easier process than with Windows. The exceptions are, oddly, the stuff that isn't from the Linux community: commercial software or things like the proprietary ATI and nVidia video-card drivers. The only stuff that's hard to install on Linux is the commercial, proprietary software. Why should Linux take the heat because the big software companies with millions of dollars in revenue can't write a basic shell script that queries the system for some locations, copies files to the correct places and creates a few symlinks?

The only thing it's right on is the state of gaming. And even then, I don't think Linux is to blame so much as Windows. Doom 3, Quake 4, they run nicely on my Linux system. But they're written to use OpenGL, so it's easy to port them to things other than Windows. Games like Everquest 2 that use DirectX are all but impossible to port, so they're not ported. DirectX is, oddly, a "standard" controlled entirely by Microsoft that changes at it's whim (see DirectX 10 for an example). And of course it wasn't Linux that crippled OpenGL by giving users a choice of running OpenGL only through an emulation layer that mapped it (poorly) to DirectX or giving up the new desktop rendering system that's one of the main attractions of the latest OS release.