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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."
I believe in people. Sometimes it is hard to, but for the most part I believe that people can be smart or become smart. They are just not given the oppurtunity to be. Companies like Microsoft usually don't try to allow people be smart, in fact its usually the case that these companies develop a business model based around people being ignorant and lazy. You can tell by how they word their agreements, marketing material and by what they leave out.
The unix way (besides do one thing and do it well) however is to allow beginners and experts in, and help them leverage themselves so that they can be intelligent and productive in how they work. I don't care if everyone adopts Linux, but I do care if the people who want to work intelligently and are willing to be intelligent are shut out of it. I encounter people all the time who want to learn Linux for the sake of learning it. These are open minded people who want to be smart. Maybe they are smart, maybe they aren't. But honestly that doesn't matter, if they have the will, then Linux will probably work fine for them.
This comment is not meant to "save the world" or anything so grandious. It is only meant as a retort to jackass e-zine writers who don't have the desire to give it a try and have no faith in the concept of community.
I've been installing, troubleshooting, setting up Linux boxes since the days of the 75+ floppy disk installs. Back then it was fun, how cool to get a FREE version of Unix on my PC!
I have probably installed hundreds of Linuxes. In the beginning it was cool, it was fun, and the end result was always worth the effort. Today, while a fully functional Linux box is almost always worth the effort, the blood, sweat, and tears of an install-troubleshoot doesn't come as easily. I've found other Linux "experts" who agree... it's time Linux works out of the box.
That said, I might disagree a bit with the thesis Linux doesn't work out of the box... I've found especially with distros like Ubuntu Linux has come far to "just working". As I've posted before, on a raw machine I've actually had better installation success with a cold install of Linux over XP.
But the main point is valid, and I think it extends to the Linux experts. Not only is troubleshooting geek-cool only to geeks, it doesn't bring warm fuzzies to people for whom you introduce to Linux. There's nothing more scary to the general users than seeing gibberish bootup messages complaining about missing or incompatible drivers and hardware when what they want to see is a shiny new GUI with applications they can use right away.
Linux experts can and still do slough through the pain of perfect Linux installs but the rest of the world isn't impressed. Give them something they can use that works well with everything else. Ultimately it looks like Linux is getting there and may even have a chance of becoming a major desktop... I'm not as pessimistic as the article seems to be.
In the meantime, good points from the article to win favor for Linux and its future:
Until Linux is pre-installed, it won't matter to the majority of home users.
That's because the majority of home users do NOT upgrade their OS. They use whatever was installed by the OEM. They use the drivers provided by the OEM. They won't even install and update anti-virus software.
Fedora had no problems detecting the hardware. So, after some googling we discovered that there were separate Windows drivers for the SATA drives that came with the motherboard. We had to create a floppy (!!!!) with the drivers that had to be inserted at a specific step during the windows install. Luckily my son insisted on getting a floppy drive, otherwise we would not be able to install windows.
Fedora Core 4 installed with no problems..
...richie - It is a good day to code.
> Even compiling and installing a driver or two isn't rocket science.
Holy cow, are you even hearing yourself saying this? Most of the people I know that are not in the computer biz have a hard time just wrapping their mind around the concept of a directory hierarchy and the difference between a file and a folder. And then tell these people to cd into folder x and type "make", and then insmod the compiled module? Or explaining to them why some drivers are in the kernel, while others are installable modules, right after explaining what a kernel is and what it's good for? This attitude is exactly what the original article is addressing.
The misconception is that the layperson actually goes through the process of installing an operating system, ever. Most people don't realize that a computer and the operating system are two different things. They buy it, and everything works. The key to Linux becoming mainstream is extremely simple yet very difficult. Get hardware vendors to ship computers with Linux preloaded and get these computers into the retail stores like Best Buy, CompUSA, etc. The other part to all this is making migration of a new OS easy on the layperson. This is the direction certain distros have been taking, Ubuntu being one of them. The last big thing... wireless drivers, wireless drivers, wireless drivers. People want laptops, people want to go wireless. Give the people what they want.
Similes are like metaphors
I left Windows because I was tired of always having to fix something or other every other weekend. Either my girlfriend's computer would have a problem or mine would. I didn't want to fix computers all weekend - I wanted to have a life! So I ditched Windows and tried out this new thing called Linux that was supposed to be super-stable, no crashes, etc.
That worked OK, but all of a sudden buying new hardware became a monumental task. Will it work with Linux, or is it Windows-only? What hoops do I have to jump through? And when something *did* occasionally go wrong, it didn't usually mean spending a weekend fixing it. Usually, it meant spending a week fixing it.
That's why, when Mac OS X became stable (version 10.1), I took the plunge and bought a Mac. I haven't spent time worrying about or tinkering with my computer or my wife's computer since. Everything just works. I have my life back.
And I much prefer it this way.
I've just recently installed Linux on my home system and really tried to figure out. And I've gotta say, the whole thing sucks. I've tried Fedora and Ubuntu. Fedora installed much easier than Ubuntu, although that's partially because Ubuntu was installed to replace Fedora. Fedora, however, had an option to automatically remove all Linux partitions and install there, while Ubuntu's only analog (and default even if there's plenty of unpartitioned space) is to delete the entire drive! Not something I'd want to do when I'm dual booting.
/dev/hdb1 when neccessary. I don't know what the -l in fdisk -l means. Hell, if it weren't for using it in DOS I wouldn't even know what fdisk was. I don't understand the commands that I used to grab the software from the internet.
From there, things just got worse. I spent a long time researching how to mount an NTFS partition in Fedora, finally found some good links for Ubuntu (hence the change). I managed to mount the NTFS partition and listen to the music stored thereon, but I really only had a vague idea of what I was doing. Some of the stuff was reasonably obvious. For example, the fstab file is obviously supposed to be default mountings when you boot up. However, the syntax used inside of it is all gibberish to me, as was most of the commands I used during the process of installing everything I needed for this project. I basically just copy-pasted everything, filling in specific information like
And every single tutorial is exactly the same. They either assume you know something, or they tell you what to do without explaining why you're doing it. It'd be nice if there were some tutorials that actually took the time to tell you, for example, "fdisk -l" invokes the fdisk program with the -l switch. Fdisk is used for viewing and editing partitions and the -l switch makes it (I assume) list the current partitions.
I installed Linux so that I could learn how to use it, but all I've learned is how many arcane commands with even more arcane syntaxes (syntaces) it has.
Keep in mind, also, that I'm the exception. I'm a Windows user with no practical interest in Linux, who's only doing it for the learning experience. I'm actually willing to go out and look stuff up, to some extent. As I said, though, Linux is just a curiosity to me. I'm not going to spend all day figuring out how to exit the "help" given by the man command (seriously, how do you exit it? Aside from closing the terminal, I mean? I know I can prest shift+zz because someone told me that, but how the hell would anyone ever guess that?).
Linux, even the best distributions, have a long, long, long way to go before they're anywhere near as usable as Windows.
It's not that I'm ignorant, certainly. I use Firefox, OpenOffice, Gaim, and other open-source software regularly. I've learned some Java, SQL, HTML, C++, and consider myself "computer savvy." But because I am not familiar with the language of the Linux OS (like the CHAR(3) names for the folders on the \ or the keywords for taking advantage of the terminal), I am extremely limited in what I can do. I tried to install FF2.0 the other day, but after I extracted the tar.gz, I didn't know what to do. I tried a HOWTO I found on Ubuntu's community site, tried apt-get, but neither didn't work for some reason. So I'm stuck with FF1.5 for now. It's probably a simple fix, but that all the more profoundly demonstrates how difficult it can be to use even one of the most user-friendly distros available.
Don't get me wrong; I love the idea behind OSS and want to learn to use Linux better--I wouldn't be trying it out if I didn't. But I simply cannot use it for anything more than simple tasks like web surfing and office utilities because there is a high knowledge barrier that will just take time to overcome. If Linux can adapt like Nintendo and find a way to make Linux more accessible and bring those who can only handle Windows well into the Linux world, then we've got something. Until then, I'm afraid the author is right.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
What Linux needs to do in order to be a viable player in the market is to catch one type of consumer, the PC Illiterate type. These are people who either us MAC OS or Windows XP. All of these people use computers as tools for their job, not as a hobby. You have artists who would use a MAC over Windows, you have accountants who would use Windows because of Excel, etc. Etc. Those who work in the computer field will most likely use any of the platforms out there that their job requires them to do. Anyway, the people who do not work in the computer field just want something that makes their job easier. MS and MAC have set out to do that since the 1980s. MACs always excelled in simplicity and ease of use. In no way does a typical mac user have to learn the inner workins of the OS to fix a problem such as registry edit, etc. The overall learning curve of the MAC OS is little compared to Windows, however, MAC OS is heavily limited to its hardware (well it has been up until now, but even still, you need to be a geek to boot Windows on a mac) and thus not everyone is using it. Reason windows is out there is becuase it tries to do everything. It has evolved a lot to the point where the hardware now has to to support the OS, not the OS support the hardware. Linux is still just that, an OS that has support certain hardware first. That is why you have to be computer literate to be able to get full functionality out of Linux.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
Have you tried doing the things you're asking of Linux in Windows?
Have you tried to gain access to the data on a Linux partition from within Windows? It's actually pretty difficult.
When people install GNU/Linux on a Windows box they expect it to automatically set up a dual boot option and configure itself so the two continue to work perfectly and in harmony. Have you tried installing Windows on a machine which already has Linux on it? It just zaps things so you have a job getting access to your GNU/Linux install.
Windows now comes with an ever decreasing number of commandline utilities, but with GNU/Linux the opposite is true. When it comes to configuration, how easy is it to edit the all-important Windows registry when you can't boot into Windows itself? Bloody hard is the answer, unless you're prepared to pay for suitable third party tools.
Most Windows tutorials don't explain what's going on under the hood either. They explain how to use the GUI, and that's your lot, so you should probably only be comparing them to KDE or GNOME tutorials. It's all very superficial stuff.
Commandline work is always going to be the domain of those who know what they're actually doing, and not the casual user. Perhaps all we need to do is hide all the options and programs that require a decent level of technical expertise in the same way that Windows does.
The problem is with the software, as soon as the user needs anything more than browse,read email and write letters they hit the wall with Linux.
I have a photographer friend who uses Photoshop extensively. When fixing her Windows machine that kept freezing, I decided to make a it a double boot with Ubuntu as the second OS. I added all her bookmarks from Firefox, I made sure she could access her documents, her expensive high end Epson printer had a nice functional Gutenprint driver, and of course, I added GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop.
When I demoed the system to her, up until we got to the GIMP part, my friend was impressed with Ubuntu. She liked the clean Gnome menus, she liked how her printer could print, she liked that she didn't have to use an antivirus and she liked Ubuntu because it means "humanity towards others" -- so far all was well.
Then the bomb was dropped: she had asked a simple question -- "Where is Photoshop?" I quietly told her that there is nice replacement for it called GIMP. And headed over to the Graphics>GIMP menu to show her GIMP -- what I think is an excellent image manipulation program. But she told me to stop the whole thing and to give back her Photoshop. She didn't care that windows' security had more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese, she didn't care that her Windows machine would freeze once in a while, she didn't care about the "free" part and she definitely didn't give a damn anymore about "Humanity towards others" when she could not have her Photoshop. Just the fact that she would have to tell other professionals that she uses a program called "GIMP" was enough for her to not wanting to try it. In other words just the names and the "image" of some of the OS applications sound "goofy", childish or "geeky" and no matter how much we don't like it but appearances and first impression are important (the marketing folk know that too well).
Now, I know that GIMP is probably just as good and that with more or less effort one can achieve the same result with GIMP as one can with Photoshop. I have been using it for many years with success, BUT I am also a geek who likes to write device drivers and re-compile kernels. I love Linux and would never go back to Windows. I figured out a way to do everything I needed in Linux. But most people are not geeks like me. They want their computer to do a specific job. In other words the computer to them is a "tool" much like a monkey wrench -- just a means to an end, to me the computer is a "the end".
People falsely assume that Microsoft conquered the world because of its great operating system. It was not the operating system, it was Office (especially Excel and Word) and other applications, most written by a 3rd party, that made Windows into what it is. Most people who use Windows would probably agree that it sucks: bad security, blue screens and restarts -- everyone hates those things. But as long as Office along with Photoshop, Dreamweaver and other software that people spend hundreds and thousands of dollars is there -- they will be glued to Windows.
I realize that it is a "chicken and egg" problem: if Linux would be more popular the software companies would invest in porting their application to Linux (think Maya, Matlab and Mathematica...) but part of the reason that Linux is not that popular is because most of the applications will not work in Linux.
P.S. No, I didn't try running Photoshop with WINE because I heard it is not stable, and Linux also didn't have an easy way to calibrate and match the input/output color profiles and was missing some other software that my friend was using. I just used Photoshop as a prime example.
I recently stopped playing World of Warcraft and no longer had a reason to stay on the windows platform. I use open office, media player classic, and Firefox and that's pretty much it. So I thought I'd try Ubuntu out since I'd heard so many good things about it.
I burned the disk, backed up my data and took the plunge.
The problem was immediate. I have a lcd monitor, a top of the line NEC monitor that is smart enough to whine, moan and complain when the resolution isn't 1280x1024. Ubuntu however gave my top resolution options as 1024x768. I thought Ubuntu probably needed the NVidia drivers so I headed over and discovered that installing NVidia's Linux drivers made the US tax code read like a harry potter novel by comparison.
Needless to say, this ended my experiment with Linux. (And yes I know there's a command line to reconfigure the graphics shell but any time you need to send anyone to the command line to get an install working you've pretty much admitted failure.)
But wait! It doesn't end there! A few days later on Digg there was a thread about Linux being ready for the desktop! I relayed my casual user experience almost exactly the way I have here. Two hours later my user experience had been burried down to negative numbers as had all the other "negative testimonials". Yep, the Linux fan bois had run roughshod over anyone who actually had the nerve to explain why they still thought Linux wasn't ready for the desktop and there were legions of them.
So the problem is two fold really. Linux still doesn't nail the "out of box installs" anywhere near as well as Windows does and there is a sizable portion of the community that would kill the messengers rather than address the problem.
The best thing about my new car is that it's free, which really jibed well with my bank account status.
The first bad news came when I tried to actually get in the car and drive; I received an error message on the dashboard that said, "No tires detected."
I got out and checked, and there were tires on the car, so I got back in and punched the steering wheel a few times. After a few hours of poring over the manual I discovered that I had to tell the car about what kind of tires I had, so, after some digging, I found the button to initiate tire declarations (for some reason it was called INI RUBBER-BASED ROAD INTERFACE LIB EZ). I pushed it and a little sign lit up saying, "If your Linux car is a 2006 model or better you may need to install a rubber-based road interface synchronizer before attempting to declare tire status to the vehicle."
I went to the hardware store and bought one, but it was the wrong size so I had to go back again. The instructions were in German but I still managed to wedge it in there. I pushed the button and went on with my tire type declarations, after which the car decided to recognize my tires.
Great, I thought -- now where's the gear-shift?
After hours of searching I gave up and called up a friend who's a real car expert. He chuckled. "Dude, only idiots use gear-shifts. Linux drivers use gear modulating paddles located on the sides of the driverseat. Don't you know anything about cars? Jeez."
I made fun of him for being a virgin and then returned to my car. Indeed, the gear modulation paddles were conveniently hidden under the edges of my seat.
I decided to take the car for a spin, so I pulled out of my driveway and the car stalled. A message on the dashboard said, "Before initializing for road driving, please specify your exact model of Linux car."
It then gave me a list of four hundred vehicle types, each with just a slight difference in model number. I was eventually obliged to take apart a substantial part of the engine in order to see the little model number on the side of the block. Satisfied, I inputted this number into the dashboard once I'd put the engine back together and started off on my first Sunday drive with my brand new Linux car.
Then I found out my car wasn't compatible with my iPod so I put the fucking thing up on cinderblocks in my front yard and took the bus.
The bus sucks, true, but you know what? It's a no-brainer.
These stories are free but worth money.
Ubuntu definitely allows dual boot. It has a partitioner in the installation. With Linux, you don't usually use NTFS, you'd use ext2 or ext3 or ext4 which have this nice non-fragmenting feature. If you need Windows to be able to read it, that's an exception, not the rule, which is why write-support for NTFS requires installing an extra component. Ubuntu's nice because most stuff doesn't require the command line, and copy and paste works fine for entering commands into the terminal. If you want to learn to use the command line, there's a book called the Linux Phrasebook that has it all (with nice explanations) in there.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
"people" want it to be... Which people? Not everyone, not me. Personally I hope to see Linux evolve into a system that's really good for people like me - people who want an environment especially well-suited to tinkering. I think it has the potential and the flexibility - but one of the problems is that even people who want to tinker also want their computer to assist them in various ways. I think the need for a -print0 option is an inherent flaw in the way "find" works, for instance - and I'd like a certain degree of consistency across the various tools that's hard to accomplish without an organized leadership. There's lots of great ideas - for instance, I think the Emacs command interface is brilliant (hotkey sequences combined with a decent help system and the ability to specify commands by name if you've forgotten the hotkey sequence) but things like that are sort of little citadels surrounded by wilderness. If you step outside Emacs, you lose the benefit of the Emacs command interface - and other apps have great stuff to offer, too, but none of it really meshes from one app to another.
But the appliance thing? It's been tried, and computers just aren't ready to be appliances yet. Or rather, people still need the "general purpose" computer, in part because everything they do on the computer is still evolving. Web standards change, hardware standards change, new software comes out all the time, and so on. People keep thinking of new things to do with computers. Things haven't settled enough for computers to be commodity "appliances" - or at least, if you treat the computer like that you're missing out on the full potential of the thing. (The botnet problem, for instance, could be solved by thoroughly debugging the e-mail, web, etc. apps, burning them to ROM, and allowing nothing else on the system to execute - but that doesn't work now, 'cause there'd be some new version of Flash, some new video codec, a new CSS or HTML spec, etc. and users would want that stuff to work.)
Now, that doesn't mean that a system that attempts to fill the needs of people who want a certain set of functionality, with no headaches, is a bad thing. I just don't believe that a system like that should be expected to serve everyone. I think it's good that projects like KDE are trying to serve that niche, but at the same time I think that treating that kind of thing as if it's the whole point of Linux is a little shortsighted. I think there's a popular notion that's evolved out this desire to turn Linux into an "appliance-wannabe" system like Windows or Mac OS, the notion that it's inherently poor design to create an application based on the needs and expectations of hackers or power users as opposed to the vast majority of users... Or, conversely, that, with few exceptions, the ideal for a UI design is always the design that works reasonably well for the largest number of people. There is some merit to this idea - different people handle ideas in different ways, and so it's good to use a style that fits these different ways of thinking - but I believe that it's worthwhile to create systems that are specifically well-suited to power users. Some people just want to operate at a "higher" level of sorts, have more extensive control over more minute details, and so on. The key is to not be lazy about it: make the app complicated but aim to make it fit well with its neighbors' styles and in addition to providing all the power user functionality, be sure to include ways to manage that complexity intelligently. And also, it help
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand