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

I believe in people

[suso]

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.

Re:I believe in people

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

You might want to step down from the high horse. There is a big difference between someone being lazy, ignorant and downright stupid and having a different set of priorities. Most people want to be able to check their email, surf the web and play a game or two on their computer. Why should they have to put themselves through anymore trouble than they have to? They buy a computer with Windows preinstalled. They buy some readily available Windows software and install it by dropping in the CD and clicking "yes" a couple times. It's easy. Now, for no real reason, you want them to go out and make that process more difficult (whether that difficulty is real or simply perceived). Most people would consider that to be stupid.

Re:I believe in people

[Odin_Tiger]

"oh noes how do I set my VCR clock" syndrome

Your entire post misses one of the main facts that Linux zealots regularly overlook: [Typical User]: "I do not have the time, nor the inclination, to figure out how to set the clock on my VCR. I don't care. What I do care about is watching this movie. That's it. I just want to watch a goddamned movie. Why do I have to (set my clock / install and configure WINE / use the console / download dependencies / switch to root) in order to (watch my movie / play my video game / change the way a program behaves when it starts / get this stupid thing to execute at all / look at the files in directory XYZ)."
You're right, it -is- a matter of laziness, but most of the time, it is -not- on the part of the user. There are ways of solving these problems in Linux. I've seen it done. But *nix geeks don't want to solve them; they want to continue to lazily assume that everybody is a Linux expert so that they can say that the usability failures in their software are the user's fault.

Re:I believe in people

[DaveAtFraud]

A guy who used to work for me described it this way: people want a computing appliance. That is, they want their computer to work like their toaster or, at worst, their microwave oven. They really don't know nor do they care what goes on "inside." They just want to play a game, toast a bagle or nuke some left-overs.

Every interest has a small subset of people who find the internals fascinating. I usually pick on the example of cars. Most people really don't care about how all of the internals work. They just want to put the key in the ignition, turn it on, and drive. Is it within most people's ability to do a significant amount of their own maintenance? Yes. Do they? No. They have other things to do with their time. The Linux community needs to understand this. Unfortunately, all too many Linux folks would rather engage in a protracted flae-war over some nuanced difference between KDE and Gnome, Red Hat and SuSE and Gentoo and Ubuntu and, .. ad infinitum, Debian and any commercial distribution, etc.

Oh yeah, I've been using Linux since Red Hat 5.0 in 1998. Its great. I just installed Fedora Core 6 on three different systems (including one laptop) and the installs all went flawlessly. I only had to resort to the command line for some "under the hood" changes that a typical user wouldn't do. Its getting there. It would help if there wasn't so much noise about how terrible such a default installation is from all the bit twiddlers.

Cheers,
Dave

Re:I believe in people

[Wavicle]

2. Fully support NTFS so I can dual boot and not only be able to work with my linux files from linux and my windows files from windows. At least have full read-write support on NTFS so I can really be able to use it in linux.

Just to be clear here... The problem with NTFS hasn't been a religious or ideaological hurdle. Nearly all Linux advocates agree that full NTFS support would be a boon to getting more people to use Linux. Microsoft knows this. Microsoft has not made the NTFS spec freely available because it could easily undermine their dominance on the desktop.

People volunteering their time have had to painstakingly reverse-engineer the NTFS file format. This is hard. How much confidence must you have in an NTFS driver before using it? A buggy driver could wipe out not only your Linux files, but all of your windows files as well.

Progress is being made. These folks seem to have a fairly well tested set of tools for NTFS access in Linux. But I would guesstimate that Linux is at least 1 year away from solid NTFS support.

Re:I believe in people

[fyngyrz]

Simply look at the IQ gaussian. No matter if it disturbs your politically correct sense or not, or if you have a quibble with what the "center" means, it still lays out the performance curve of human beings faced with task completion. The more complex the task, the further out to the right you go, and the fewer people you find able to get the job done. And this tells you, straight to your face, that you're not going to get everyone even in the center and upper half into your "tent" until, or unless, you deal with:

1. Linux isn't linux. Desktops vary, UI's vary, what works varies, features vary
2. Linux isn't friendly to major commercial apps users want — wrong mindset / licensing
3. Linux has no standard GUI layer in the OS. Look and feel, consequently, is a mashup
4. No, everyone is not willing to compile applications. Even if it is "easy."
5. No, people will not type "apt-get" and deal with whatever happens (or doesn't.)
6. It has to work with their printer, their camera, their favorite website
7. Laptops are everywhere. No wifi? Bye bye!
8. Linux has to support popular trends, such as iTunes. Can't play DRM'd tunes? No sale.
9. Linux needs games. But games are commercial apps... see point #2
10. Linux needs documentation that works for non-technical users. Badly!
11. Oh, and Linux needs software that works for non-technical users, even more so.
12. My favorite poster child for crazy and zot-worthy UI, RH9/CUPS. I just want to add a printer!
13. Update: I upgraded CUPS. The RH9 UI no longer works. Yeah, that'll draw customers.
14. Lacks critical mass: My friends / work-mates know how this works and can help me. Right?
15. Only works with... The holy cr*p factor: I need to recompile the kernel?? What????
16. Photoshop. Photoshop. Photoshop. The GIMP... no. Seriously. Just no. Photoshop.
17. If you can't get Outlook, then you need ALL of its functionality. No way around it.
18. If you can't get Word, then you need ALL of its functionality. OO isn't there.

Taken together, I think that most of those points are a direct or secondary consequence of the mindset that pervades linux; without a sea change in that mindset, linux isn't going very far outside its technical user base. IMHO.

From the point of view of my company, we (I, more to the point, since I run the company) am interested in a linux release of our software but the user base is small, there is no core GUI (we are not going to be stuck debugging people's desktops, widget libraries, etc.) and the licensing terms (GPL and others) are basically a minefield for our IP. We've been "doing" windows since the Windows 3.1, we even did all the windows RISC versions (MIPS, PPC, Alpha) we did the Amiga, we're seriously considering releasing our Mac version. Linux? No. I keep my eye on it in the hopes that a GUI will become a standardized part of the OS (whether or not it obsoletes xwindows and pendant technologies isn't an issue.) That'd probably be enough to get a pilot release out. Mind you, I'm not talking about linux's interest in my product. I think my product can stand on its own — all the better for us if linux users are technical. Our product is many times more complex to use than, for instance, Photoshop. No, I'm talking about my interest in linux. Until or unless linux can look and feel to me like support for it won't be more effort intensive than Windows support, it's a non-starter. A consistent GUI is where that all starts. IMHO. :)

I am guessing that the thought process at, for instance, Adobe, is similar. Linux does everything it can, it seems to me, to not court commercial developers of heavy GUI applications. But desktops elsewhere (Apple, Windows) are going to more and more GUI. Look at Omni Outliner. Delicious Library. Photoshop. Word. You may not like these apps, but they literally se

even the linux experts get tired.

[yagu]

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:

• evangelize, but don't be religious (there's a difference).
• educate
• give good support...
• (mine) don't give Linux to someone for whom it isn't going to make any sense... that's a disservice to your "client" and Linux

It's all about pre-installed.

[khasim]

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.

Re:So what?

[uradu]

> 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.

Spot on.

[pcx]

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.

I Just Got a LINUX CAR!

[CheeseburgerBrown]

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.