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Torvalds On Desktop Linux's Slow Uptake
javipas notes a Wired piece summarizing a two-part interview with Linus Torvalds that's up at linux-foundation.org (part 1, part 2). In the second part the creator of the Linux kernel gives his view on the limited success of Linux on the desktop. "I have never, ever cared about really anything but the Linux desktop... The desktop is also the thing where people get really upset if something changes, so it's really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows... better is worse if it's different."
Meh, people don't like chance, so change will happen slowly. That's all.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I suppose it's time for a drive-by argument.
While many here on Slashdot seem rather cynical when it comes to adoption of Linux on the desktop, I am not nearly so jaded. Not only am I an example of a non-programmer-type who switched from Windows to Linux, but in the past 12 months, I have seen countless other examples, culminating in a large number of people switching during the early days of the Vista fiasco. They were convinced that if they had to re-learn how to use an operating system, they might as well just switch to Linux.
On a number of non-computer oriented websites I visit, including ones where the majority of the members are over 30 years old, the adoption of Linux has been phenomenal... skyrocketing to >10% within one year.
I think the times for "year of linux on the desktop" jokes is past. There is no reason for the sarcasm. With almost every OEM selling Linux PCs, and AMD/ATI adopting a more pro-Linux approach, I think that there is no reason for sarcasm. This IS the year of Linux on the desktop. We're living it.
Ubuntu is making some inroads, with a more user-friendly GUI. But most people just don't see the value.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I put an XO in front of 5-15 year old kids and the younger they are the more receptive they are to the experience. Sugar is a unique desktop experience and it throws people off. Kids with PSP and DS systems are the worst. It might be why reviews by adults are so negative. My experience (and probably many of yours) is starting with a computer from the Apple II, Atari, Commodore era. Wrote high school term papers on a typewriter. In college I did amber screen work and wrote papers with a dot matrix printer. My first technical job was help desk for a huge Win95 environment. A godsend gave me the opportunity, with no experience, to move to a Solaris support gig. It was heaven to see the command line again. The rise of the Linux desktop feels comfortable to me. Put Linux systems in every school and its desktop will be popular in twenty years.
I'd suggest reading the interview (yeah right!), there's a lot of interesting insight from him. He's much more palatable then RMS. I particularly found his thoughts on getting involved interesting. I get the question of "Where should I start?" fairly often and my advice is just don't even ask that question. It's more like if you're not interested enough in one particular area that you already know what you want to try to do, don't do it. Just let it go and then when you hit something where you say, "I could do this better" and you actually feel motivated enough that you go from saying that to doing that, you will have answered that question yourself.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Linus makes cogent and valid points. However, despite the fact that this will start a holy flame war, I would go one further:
The main problem most early adopters have (that I see) IS in the difference to Windows or OS X. And that first difference is a feature: Security.
If there was a distro that was identical to XP, and booted straight to the desktop with root privileges, incorporating wine automatically, and having gimpshop, firefox, open office, urban terror, an identical winamp clone, et al configured as near as possible to the hegemonic forces of today's markets, it would gain a lot of traction very quickly.
Ditto for an OS X clone.
Many people do not want a password, do not want security, and do not want variety or choice. They want what has always worked for them, and they want it for free. I've seen more spam, viruses, trojans, rootkits, and other problems in the Windows world than anywhere else (obviously), but people keep going back there, because (sort of) IT JUST WORKS, and they are used to it. I've seen computers with virii and Mcafee that took 20 minutes to boot, but the user didn't care! Once it was up it had the stuff they were used to: Photoshop, Windows, Microsoft Office, and Outlook. There are pretty seamless replacements for all these, but they are generally not bundled by default in any distro, and are not 100% compatible across the board with the hegemonic software competitors.
*i* like the enhanced security of not logging in automagically as root, but grandma doesn't. Grandma says "fuck it" and goes and drops $500 on a dell, or maybe a mac.
Just give the people what they want (right or wrong!) and the masses will come. Now is the chance, since vista sucks balls, and sp1 doesn't fix it at all!
It all falls under the category of "Keep it simple, stupid", really. I'm still waiting for a distro that during install gives you two choices:
Super Secure
Just Like Windows
That will be the distro that finally takes huge chunks out of the windows market. Ubuntu is close, but still pretty far away.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Why is this so hard for so many people to understand? The reason Linux doesn't get adopted has nothing to do with how the desktop works. I have news for you: Linux, Windows and the Mac are effectively identical when it comes to operating them.
I shout this from the rooftops everytime this comes up: PEOPLE USE APPLICATIONS, NOT OPERATING SYSTEMS.
Applications are EVERYTHING. Microsoft has long understood this. Why are people so upset at Vista? It's not because of the popups... it's because of the compatability problems. People want absolute, "it just works" compatability. People want to be able to walk into Best Buy, grab a box off the shelf (software OR hardware), and install it. No muss, no fuss. That's why the Mac has long had single digit adoption rates. People don't to figure anything out, they just want to buy a damn box and load it on.
Linux will be adopted with a) it has nearly perfect Windows compatibility, or b) the major companies start producing Linux version of their commercial software.
And yes, I understand that there are typically free versions of various commercial software. But again, people don't want to figure anything out. They want to know that if they see a box, it will work. If they buy that fancy computerized sewing machine (such as my mother-in-law), it will work.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
" it's really hard to enter the desktop market because people are used to whatever they used before, mostly Windows... better is worse if it's different. "
If Linux is trying to ape the Windows look and feel, or its rubbish ever-changing architecture or dll hell... then it is doomed to failure in the long term. With Vista, Windows has reached saturation point - even long time users are reluctant to take on Vista or for that matter, IE7 or Office 2007.
Firefox isn't slow in its uptake because it is different from IE7; people use it bcos it is better. Linux trying to mock Windows would be a 10-year backward step, and doomed to failure.
RMS was right... Torvalds is just an engineer; he isn't great at predicting the future or reading people's minds.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Here's the thing -- I've been working in the IT field for over 15 years now. I'm no systems administrator but I certainly know my way around a computer.
I want Linux to be ready for the desktop.
I want Linux to provide a decent end user experience.
But it doesn't. It doesn't even come close. I've tried different flavors over the years. Most recently, I tried (and failed!) to install Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop at home. And here is what I've found...
Between driver issues, chicken and egg problems (my network isn't working, how can I can my network working if my network isn't working), absolutely atrocious user-friendliness, what still feels to this "power user" like a very steep learning curve (I just want to get wireless to work, what is a "NDIS wrapper"? I have to do WHAT?) , nothing built in to the OS to help with this and online forums that are full of extremely helpful people who give convoluted, conflicting and overly complicated advice...
It just isn't a good end user experience. Linux seems all about feature sets and me-too-ism. cleverly titled software packages that are a little embarrassing to run or talk about. But very little thought is given to getting something up and running so a regular person can hit the ground running. If you don't happen to have a family member or friend ready to walk you through the transition, you will end up spending tens/hundreds of hours to get to a point where you can do the same things you could with your Windows machine. The closest I ever came was the Knoppix Live CD about three years ago... but even that ended up being more work than what I got out of it.
Again -- I want Linux to be ready for the desktop. I understand as an IT professional that you can get a much leaner, more secure, stable configuration for a fraction of the price. At the enterprise level that makes sense. But for a regular person looking to take the plunge... documentation, easy of use, drivers that "just work" -- SIMPLE, NON TECHIE ways to get things working once they don't work without needing to learn something new -- all of these might be things that geeks scoff at. But until they are addressed, Linux will forever be a tiny slice on that pie chart.
Come on geeks. Microsoft is ripe for the picking. Macs will grow in market share. People will continue down the MS upgrade path and you'll keep talking about how 20__ is the year of desktop Linux...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
Linux is doing just fine if you consider growth rate. These statistics - and those of several other sites I've encountered (including my own) indicate it's adoption rate is as fast as that of Apple's, in some cases moreso. However, adoption looks very poor if you look to 'market share', a figure based on sale count, and by far the most popular guage.
Recently, however, the wide success of the EeePC (and apparent solid sales of Dell's M1330 w/Ubuntu) shows that Linux can work very well in the hands of the uninterested or uninitiated if it comes preinstalled. At a conference I recently attended I met an art curator using an EeePC. She said she doesn't like computers but prefers the EeePC because "it's easier than my MacBook and has better internet". For the casual and highly mobile computer user I think Linux is very much claiming market share.
At the other end, the workstation market, Linux is also making very strong ground (3D animation, film compositing/editing, engineering).
I would wager that many people think it's just an inferior OS that can't run what they want. In my experience working tech support at my university, a lot of people don't think that macs can run what they need. They have this concept that all of the good programs run on windows and people just don't use other OSs to do the stuff that they do on windows. Yes, I know I'm talking about macs instead of linux but if people have such doubt in macs, it doesn't take much to see how these same people would view linux (which most haven't even heard of). Mind you this is at a university so I was dealing with a young crowd which is commonly thought of to be more tech savy. To me it seems like these kinds of misconceptions are the biggest problem for linux
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
One thing I don't understand is that there seems to be a consensus that Apple got it right, UI-wise. Unix underpinnings, but an elegant interface (from what I hear, anyway....I haven't used a Mac since ~1994). The knock against linux seems to be that the frameworks are there, it's just sort of a kludgey interface a lot of the time. "Too much command line needed". In my experience, things like Ubuntu have made it a lot better, but it still seems like a bastardized version of Windows. Sure somethings are prettier sometimes, but a lot of times other parts aren't remotely close. So my question is....
Why not rip off the other guys? Rather than chase Windows, chase freakin' OS X. If Apple can make a glamorous OS based on Unix, why can't anyone make a glamorous OS based on Linux? Is it because Apple has those magical UI fairies? FOSS vs commercial shouldn't matter - people are ultimately the ones that make the stuff. Are you telling me there are no more best and brightest out there working in the FOSS world, that they're all snatched up and locked down for commercial project?
I love a lot of the aspects of the Linux desktop, but it just seems like the vast majority of FOSS projects' tagline should be "almost as good as the commercial counterpart, but it's free!". IMHO there are only a few major projects that have actually *improved* on their commercial counterparts and made a *better* product. And those projects are the ones that succeed. For Linux On The Desktop to actually work, it needs to stop trying to be the "free alternative to Windows or Mac" and actually be a *better* alternative, for more reasons than just not having to pay for the software.
I know there are going to be tons of posts saying the tried Linux on the desktop, etc etc. But I would just like to add my voice as one who has been using Fedora on my desktop for the past few years, quite happily, and not for lack of legal copies of WindowsXP, but because it I prefer the experience. It may not be ready for "the desktop" (which seems subjective) but it is, and has been ready for my desktop.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I think we are already seeing where the success of desktop linux will come from, and its affordability. Those cheap Wallmart PCs, the EEEPC, the XO, all point the way to where success will come for linux. Right now, from a hardware perspective, there isn't much driving the need for beefier hardware from a consumer perspective besides memory-hungry OSs. The average user wants to surf the web, watch video, and do some word processing. That's about it, and they don't need eight cores and sixteen gigs of RAM to do it. I'm old enough to remember the days when the Commodore 64 DESTROYED the (then hardly ubiquitous) IBM in sales by creating a $250 computer that you could take home and just plug in and go. The fact that you can build a very usable, snappy system with linux on a quarter of the hardware that you need to just make Vista run is going to be very attractive to a certain segment of the consumer world that are not already linux users. And, this, in turn is going to provide a user base that can propell the system forward. System manufacturers seem to be figuring this out, with more and more of these systems, like the new Shuttle KPC, targeting this market.
The slow uptake has little to do with the quality of Linux/Unix/Apple as compared to Windows. It has everything to do with industry specific applications only being available in Windows. When the average consumer can walk into Best Buy or Wal-mart, easily find the Linux software, purchase it, and get it to work on their specific distro, then Linux will come to the desktop. Until that time, it WILL remain in second place. For businesses the old legacy apps will need to be ported over, and billion spent retraining employees and IT workers. This is why it is slow on the uptake, and I am an Ubuntu user BTW.
My experience (and probably many of yours) is starting with a computer from the Apple II, Atari, Commodore era. Wrote high school term papers on a typewriter. In college I did amber screen work and wrote papers with a dot matrix printer... The rise of the Linux desktop feels comfortable to me.
This middle-aged woman at the office listens to the "E-Z Rock" radio station. That's because it feels comfortable to her. She grew up with stuff like that.
Me? I turn that shit off the moment I get the chance.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I don't know a lot about computers but am quite interested in them (that's why i read slashdot). Two years ago i tried an ubuntu-only system and it was disaster, crashes all the time, controls i didn't understand and very little info to be found on the net for absolute beginners. A few weeks ago i got a computer-savvy friend to install a dual boot system for me, i now have XP pro and Ubuntu, i have logged on to windows twice since then. The ubuntu system does everything i want it to do, it's faster, all software is free, it's more userfriendly, there's no viruses and security problems etc... next time i have to wipe my HD it will be an ubuntu only system,for me windows is something of the past, i don't need it anymore. The ubuntu forum is great for beginners and has a lot of easy info, whenever i've had a problem i found answers there. Also it feels great to work with a system that is developed for the users, not for profit.
That or the phantom console.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Mod me down. But the single best thing that the Linux community can do is to develop a free IDE for wxPython development (the only sane environment so far for cross-platform development). Imagine the number of applications you would have when you have a single IDE which can provide you with installers for n-number of operating systems without any additional effort other than learning python. Also since the next generation .NET applications (WPF and the like) cannot run without a huge runtime (since .NET does not have a linker), this is the best time for such a killer IDE. Can the open source community wake up atleast now?
1. Will it play my games? As in _all_ of them?
2. Will it work with my iPod?
3. Does it run Office?
Want to grab customers? Then Wine must play Win95 games better than Vista as well as _all_ of the latest releases, automagically.
Linux must also interact with an iPod and be capable of running Office _at the time of installation_. No extra stuff to download -- it needs to 'just work'.
Forget "free as in free beer" -- if that were going to attract Joe User, it would have happened already. Instead, Mac has the buzz, despite its higher price.
Free downloads of Kubuntu forever, but my father-in-law had better have the chance to buy the above at Wal-Mart or Linux will never capture the desktop market.
You're not wrong. For me (and for a good number of other
For those who want a computer that isn't Windows, but "works", you're right in talking about a Mac, 'cause for now that's your alternate (and a damned good one, too). Linux as a desktop OS still not for the faint of heart, even Ubuntu (which I use daily). As a Windows "power user", you are in the worst position to switch: you have a lot invested in customization, apps, and comfort level, and you need to see a truly superlative offering to make switching worth it to you. As you've correctly found out, Linux isn't it, for you. Heck, most Windows power users would probably load XP if someone dropped a brand new iMac on their desk, and never boot back to OS X again!
You decry that Microsoft is ripe for the picking, if only geeks would make things that "just work". Well, I'm not a developer, and even I know this: making things that "just work" is very, very HARD WORK! The developers of Linux desktop environments, applications, and the like do an amazing job, given that many are pure volunteers, and those that are paid don't have the same resources behind them. Making GUI interfaces slick and bug free, and testing them against myriad combinations of hardware platforms and software combinations, is just not fun! Microsoft (and Apple) pay good money to many, many people to perform the unsexy, boring, yet necessary work of trying to do this, stuff that geeks have no interest in doing if they could do "their own thing" instead.
I'm afraid that I don't see what you desire happening. Linux will always be the "geek" OS. People who use it will have to be ready for an experience which is somewhat more "down and dirty" than Windows. If that's not good enough for you, sorry man! You have to weigh which is more painful to you: Microsoft's forced upgrades, security risks, and ever-increasing hostility to its customers; or learning to deal with a less "friendly" OS and applications. Because until you feel greater pain from the former, it really makes no sense to switch to the latter.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Go to the wayback machine. The VERY first cached slashdot page (from 1998) there has this interesting article conviniently titled Linux Affecting MS Sales? " ( http://web.archive.org/web/19980113193017/slashdot.org/slashdot.cgi?mode=article&artnum=419 [archive.org] ): From the article: "Could 98 really be the year Linux breaks into the main stream corporate world in a big way?". Really, it's not funny anymore.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
What really soured me was when I worked for a company porting their Irix Applications to Linux. We ported the software and said specifically "Will only work with Red Hat 5" (this was a few years ago). That application made up less than 5% of sales and almost 40% of tech support inquiries because "OMG, it won't work on my custom hacked slackware/debian install why not!". Tell them, "Sorry, we only support RH" and then we'd get blogged on how bad we were on not being "Open".
Well, OSX came along, we ported to mac and dropped Linux support all together. Personally, at OS 10.2 is when I switched to OSX and never looked back. Most of those "switchers" I knew back then were Linux users who jumped to Mac OSX.
When my time became worth something to me personally, the fact that I could have MS Office, Photoshop, a complete Unix-based development environment all on one machine. Including use of tools like Quickbooks, when I started out as a consultant, and all the ProTools.
When my clients give me the choice, I deploy on BSD. When I don't get the choice I still stratch my head at how simple things like the MySQL start command are located in different locations depending on the distro. It's this lack of standardization that was annoying back then and while better, is still annoying now.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I work for a program in San Antonio called iMAK. (interactive Media Applications at Krueger.) We are technology magnet within the Northeast Independent School District. I was hired on as a technology teacher last year, and after the first semester I started imaging the Dell 620's in my room to run Ubuntu/--Now Gutsy. It has been challenging creating an independent Linux lab within such a large school district, but it's VERY successfuly. The kids, parents, and the other technology teacher I drag in from around the district really like what I've done. Here is a link with pictures: http://www.neisd.net/imak/classroom.html My podcast! http://www.neisd.net/imak/Beck/podcasts/Beck/rss.xml Thanks, Josh Beck NEISD School District San Antonio, Texas
This is the argument Linus makes in the article. I agree with it to some extent, but I also think the way he presents it is a little misleading. He makes it sound like Windows and Linux are just different, so there's absolutely nothing the Linux community can do to encourage adoption of Linux on the desktop -- it's all a matter of users' ingrained prejudices. But Windows and Linux aren't just different by design, they're also different in terms of their bugs. If you use Windows as your desktop, you encounter bugs. If you use Linux as your desktop, you encounter bugs. For instance, I've just spent half an hour this morning dealing with an issue in CUPS where every time I boot my Linux box, it starts spewing page after page of raw postscript. (Deleting the job from the queue didn't help. It just reappared the next time I booted the machine.) Well, this is a bug that I know about now, and I have workarounds for it. (Delete the printer and then reinstall it in CUPS's web interface.) Bugs in the Windows desktop aren't a strong motivation for Windows users to switch to Linux, because they're used to those bugs, never really think about them much. But if they were to try Linux, they'd say, "Oh my god, this OS is a total piece of crap. Look at the printer spewing page after page of garbage, and it starts again every time I reboot. This is pathetic. I'm sticking with Windows." They notice the Linux bugs more because they're unfamiliar and mysterious, and also when you switch OSes, you get hit with lots of these new and unfamiliar bugs all at once.
So it's not just a matter of user preference, and it's not something that's outside the control of developers in Linux's OSS ecosystem. The quality of the Linux desktop sucks -- sometimes I think it sucks almost as much as the quality of the Windows desktop -- and it needs to be improved. If that happens, it will increase adoption of Linux on the desktop.
Find free books.
I've had just the opposite experience. With Windows, I always have to use driver CDs (Windows XP was nicer in this regard, but drivers still needed to be installed). This is weird. Things are just supposed to work. On the other hand, my Linux distro (just happens to be Ubuntu) doesn't need all that crap, I don't even need to set up anything. I can just pop in a CD, boot from there, and I have a fully usable computer. Things like this make me go Wow! On the other hand, I do recognise that other people may have it different, my friend's computer gets locked up if you use stuff like Fire in Compiz (onboard graphics). Ah well.
... a German friend of mine said. Why is it called Excel? it should be called "Get By".