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Hardy Heron Making Linux Ready for the Masses?
desmondhaynes writes "Is Linux ready for the masses? Is Linux really being targeted towards the 'casual computer user'? Computerworld thinks we're getting there, talking of Linux 'going mainstream 'with Ubuntu. 'If there is a single complaint that is laid at the feet of Linux time and time again, it's that the operating system is too complicated and arcane for casual computer users to tolerate. You can't ask newbies to install device drivers or recompile the kernel, naysayers argue. Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days, but Ubuntu, the user-friendly distribution sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical Ltd., has made a mission out of dispelling such complaints entirely.'"
I would say it's quite possible, but until Ubuntu got something like widespread availability as a pre-installed on computers for purchase, then it won't matter how ready it is because few people in the masses will have any experience.
Right now, with a few exceptions, it's the geeks advertising it to others. There's not enough of us really to make an impact (and not all of us are evangelists). Ubuntu or an equally-suitable disto NEEDS to be pre-installed on a larger number of machines than we currently have. Simple.
Also regular linux users that do not have time for tinkering.
:-)
I run a Gentoo workstation for work, where I set up things exactly the way I want them, but this is quite time consuming.
I also have a "media center" type box with ubuntu that the family uses to get and display multimedia content. This box is almost maintenance free, no virus, no problems. A Windows machine would have given me a lot more work and it would have turned me into a pirate
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
I think that in order for linux to be really ready, someone has to suck it up, and include mp3 and dvd playing out of the box.
Stop playing it safe and force Fraunhofer's hand. Make them come out as bad guys and demand you remove mp3 support.
I understand there are scary legal reasons for not having mp3/dvd support.. but as a user, I don't care what they are.
Granted, he's a retired rocket scientist, but he's nigh on 80 years old.
He's been on the previous release of Ubuntu LTS for years now and he hasn't a clue how the machine works, which is exactly how he likes it.
All I had to do was hook up his FIOS and tell him to always accept the patches when the OS asked him for permission to install them.
Being "locked out" by "doing the way it's always been done".
That's certainly "very interesting".
It's not as if Linux hasn't had to play nice with other OSen since before 1994.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It depends on which masses you refer to. Linux covers about 90% of the Windows world, and it's definitely the most importnat 90%. People can and do switch desktops to Linux. Maybe not as often as you'd like, but they do it.
The problem is that the other 10% is crap like Clippy and Activex that no one on Linux wants to have or implement, but makes a certain number of computer users more comfortable. Windows does so much hand-holding by default, and that's one of the things Linux users hate about it. But it's necessary for a number of people who can never remember the difference between business and friendly letters or for people who are to afraid to even click Settings... let alone dick around with it a bit.
It doesn't help that Linux is mostly marketed by the community as being "Almost-Windows" or "Free Windows", instead of as a product that stands on its own.
People have said as a joke that OpenOffice.org or similar programs will take over once they have their own clippy, but may a true word is said in jest.
The masses will accept nearly anything put in front of them which is intuitive enough, and familiar enough, for them to comprehend. Eventually, Linux will take over. When it takes over is up to the hardware manufacturers.
This has two components. When the OEMs gather up enough courage to escape Microsoft's shackles, and when the device makers decide that developing open drivers is worth their time, Linux will flourish. Until then, every year will continue to be the "year of the Linux desktop". How many of these are we up to, 12?
The two main culprits right now are Dell and Nvidia. Dell needs to release the sales numbers of their Linux desktop systems, and Nvidia needs to abandon their binary-only driver approach.
How the fuck do you actually brick a PC by installing an operating system? Maybe if the OS is evil and directly fucks with the flash memory on your BIOS (which Grub does not do). I would suspect that something else went wrong, and you're dealing with proximity in time (and yes, I've had that happen to, having a hard drive crash just as I was rebooting after installing a service pack in Win2k, and spending an hour thinking the installation had fucked up).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Now hold on a second. Would your friend have been able to get wireless working in Windows if the driver didn't automatically install? It frequently doesn't, you know? I can't count the number of times I've done a clean XP install, and had it fail to install sound drivers, video drivers, ethernet controller drivers, or wireless drivers. (But it does helpfully offer to look on the internet for such drivers. How it plans to do this with no connectivity is anyone's guess.)
Every time this happens -- which is often enough to be annoying -- I have to go hunt down individual drivers from individual manufacturer's websites, since half of them seem to need to be propietary to work at all (the generic Broadcom driver for a Dell laptop, for example, would not install, but the one from Dell's site did). Then I have to burn them to CD, take them to the afflicted machine, and load them that way.
Ironically I usually end up doing this from my Ubuntu laptop, where everything -- absolutely everything -- worked out of the box. Even on Broadcom chipsets, the only thing I've ever had trouble with in the past when it came to Linux, Ubuntu just threw a message box that said something like "Check this box to enable the restricted wireless driver," and presto.
My point, I guess, is that I've never understood why people criticize Linux because Your Mom wouldn't know what to do if something goes awry. While true, it isn't like Your Mom knows what to do when things go awry with Windows either, so what's the difference?
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Quite frankly, I don't want to use the same operating system as someone who refuses to edit any configuration file.
Marketing Linux to the average desktop is a bad idea. Leave Linux to the power users and the server market.
Just because I'm not afraid of editing a config file doesn't mean I want to. I like that in a modern Ubuntu distro I can get everything working with a minimal amount of fuss, and don't like the parts that don't work automagically so I have to go mucking about with config files.
You know what the best part about it is, though? The "it works automagically don't worry" part and the "oops didn't work but don't worry you can fix it with text-editor-fu" part live in perfect harmony. Linux is getting better in the usability department, without sacrificing its "power user" roots. I can't see anything to complain about.
If you want to be an elitist about it, go use Slackware, or any *BSD. You can still consider yourself superior to the poor slobs whose Linux distros don't require config file editing, for whatever that's worth.
Oh, and I may be a power user, but I'm also a gamer, and I want games that run natively on Linux. Besides a tiny subset of games, that's not happening until Linux is the average desktop.
The enemies of Democracy are
Since I'm trying to put myself in a more regular user position (partly to eventually move in-laws when their XP installation get broken), I got my own list of things that need work in order to be really competitive:
Configuration: Yes, usually autodetection and GUI config work. Sometimes doesn't. The worst part is the case of X. Some Distros like Ubuntu trash X.org autodetection in order to use their own, inferior solution (then Debian doesn't include xorgcfg). That's stupid. Enhance the GUI, but keep the working functionality! There are no excuses for misconfigured monitor these days!
Software installation: Again apt/yum/etc is great, but still imperfect. Distros make me feel like different houses with different power outlets each. Yes, all use the same voltage, but I need to get the appliances from the house builder, or mess getting original plug-less appliance and attach it a plug myself. The case is, there is no distribution including all the software all the people will ever use, and downloading and compiling tarballs (sometimes including tricky "./configure" parameters and/or iterating over several dependencies) is of course out of the question. I think the community should embrace things like ZeroInstall (or Autopackage), and either becoming the standard for packaging and installing anything besides the base system, and developers providing those packages instead of just source and waiting for some packagers picking it and integrating it into distros' repos.
Translations. AFAIK, just the development version of libapt is getting i18n support, that tells a lot about how important the end user is, and there are a lot out there that doesn't understand English. And I won't start talking about lack of quality of translations in general.
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There's a porn browser in the repo: pornview