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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.'"
That's easy, and we've known it for a long time: Yes, and yes.
Convincing the masses to actually install it, now, that's the trick.
It's getting better all the time.
/etc/networking/interfaces file to make it work).
But, unfortunately, it's far from perfect. Ubuntu is and has been good enough for my completely non-computer-literate roommate to use when the system is up and running. But there's no way he could have gotten the wireless working on his own (even in the 8.04 beta, I still had to download and install drivers, then muck around with
Still, the progress is outstanding.
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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."
This year's the Year... I can feel it!
(Not like all those other years -- those were totally different.)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Normal people don't install operating systems, they buy a machine in a box at the computer shop. While I agree that Ubuntu is the distribution that is closest to being ready for mainstream desktops, it has to get pre-installed on those machines in order to really break into the mainstream market. So far, it hasn't. Dell went with Ubuntu, but they aren't exactly pushing their Linux offerings. Asus chose Xandros for their Linux machine. HP have chosen Suse (Novell). Their machines are or will be on sale at the local computer shop. I don't think it's any coincidence that both those companies signed patent agreements with Microsoft. I imagine Microsoft's legal team can be pretty scary if 99% of your business is based on selling hardware to run their software.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
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.
As much as i hate games, and hate to admit it, until you can go down the street to your local big box store, buy a game and it 'just work', its not ready for "the masses". "the masses" want to surf porn, buy stuff from ebay and play their stilly computer games.
For actual useful work, in a company with an IT staff, Linux and BSD have been ready for a while now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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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.
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.
"Is Linux ready for the masses?"
/. every few months is some sort of indicator.
I think that the fact that this question keeps coming up on
Ubuntu gets better with each release. When I first put Dapper on my Toshiba laptop, I had to fiddle around with the boot menu to get it to work correctly, and I had to remember to do this everytime a new kernel was installed, otherwise the laptop would stuff up on its next reboot. Subsequent releases didn't require this switch though.
The BIGGEST fix they've provided (and I'm sure everyone agrees with me on this) is the failsafe mode if X screws up. Who remembers about a year ago when XServer was updated and it killed the desktop? They quickly remedied the situation but for a lot of people I imagine that it either made them reinstall or switch back to Windows. Luckily I managed to downgrade my version because I hadn't cleaned out my archives in a while.
It's taken a while, but Ubuntu's getting there.
Summation 2
What we do see, however, is that devices like EEE PC are making people aware that there is a choice and that Linux is real. Here in New Zealand we can buy laptops preinstalled with Ubuntu in regular retail shops http://www.dse.co.nz/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/48067b6603694d34273fc0a87f3b067e/Product/View/XC5822. These have been quite popular. They are still quirky: for example setting up wireless is a bit messy (not as slick as windows) and the power management sucks a bit.
I run HH on one of these laptop that came installed with GG. For the most part, I don't think that HH vs GG is much of an issue for adoption. What is important is that distros like Ubuntu are very easy to use/update and that devices like Eee PC are exposing more people to the option. Soon people will be asking for Linux preinstalled on higher spec laptops and we'll see more choice.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Unix for the masses is here, and it's called OS X. Hardy Heron is difficult to use, poorly documented junk."
So did that detect your RAID array and Wireless card when you installed it on your machine?
yes, though you have to click through a couple of dialog boxes for legal reasons. No more difficult than installing a plugin on your browser for Flash or Silverlight.
You may enjoy three hours of tedium trying to get Xorg to display properly on a new monitor, or god forbid, two monitors. Most people don't.
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.
Yes?
Now is this the fault of the developers or of the hardware manufacturers? It's the Hardware guys, IMHO, because there is a huge lack of decent drivers for the important hardware. I'm looking at you, ATI. Not to mention, all the 'no name' (or 'cheap') hardware out there (That comes bundled in low-end machines) rarely has Linux drivers. Its either the manufacture does not have enough resources to pump out a Linux driver or they see the Linux community as too small and insignificant to even bother.
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
No. Leave *SOME* Linux distributions to power users and the server market. But Windows users have the right to an alternative.
The point isn't that a user refuses to edit any configuration file. The point is that the user SHOULDN'T HAVE to edit any configuration file in the first place! Not to mention recompiling packages, building your own rpm's, solve dependency problems, have to complain about drivers not working out of the box...
Since I moved to Linux half a year ago, I've had to do a lot of stuff that the ordinary user shouldn't have to. I would love to just click here and there, and WHILE STILL having options, not have to worry about messing around with the configuration.
Tell me, why the heck are you afraid of ordinary users? Musicians, artists, graphic designers, hardcore gamers... they want something that just works. What do you have against that, and what are you afraid of? If you don't want dumbed-down distributions, don't use them and keep your own distro! Linux uses the GPL license for a reason.
I don't mind using the same operating system than an elitist zealot uses - just not the same computer.
Does Windows have a GUI for configuring all the buttons of a multi-button mouse, or a GUI for configuring touchpads? AFAIK you'd need 3rd party software to do those things.
which is totally what she said
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
>Hardy Heron Making Linux Ready for the Masses?
Yes, but no more so than Mandriva 2008.1. I installed it this past weekend and it is about as slick as I have seen any Linux installation thus far. Everything just "works", and works well. It is gorgeous, fast, easy to use, seamlessly knit together, simple to update, loaded with helpful admin tools, and full of packages.
It is nice to know there are many decent choices for a high quality Linux desktop experience!
So basically you're saying since Ubuntu added BulletProofX in 7.10, it's ready?
No, no, no. Did OS X work perfectly on this random Dell that you tried to install Hardy on?
Seriously. When you first started using OS X, you bought a new machine that was specifically built to run that OS. Comparing that experience to trying to install Ubuntu on random hardware is absurd. If you want to compare your OS X experience to anything, compare it to a Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
YES!!! Hypothetical: you're new to Linux. Someone tells you to open up a "terminal". OK.... You don't know what a terminal is but it resembles that command line thingy you've seen once or twice (and reminds you of the hackers at the movies). Now you see "sudo". wtf?? apt-get... wtf again. This kind of banter of "just type in garbel garbel garbel" just helps keep our operating system exclusive to us. While I don't think this year is "the year" (has it ever been?), Ubuntu has definitely made things way easier.
So, going back to your question. The average user is not going to understand that sudo mean "execute a command as another user", in this case the super user. Hell, they probably don't even understand what the root user is. They aren't going to understand that "apt-get install" will install packages for them. They also aren't going to understand what the ubuntu-restricted-extras package is. We can tell them to copy and paste this, but this reminds me of the "if you give a man a fish" cliche.
So what can they do instead? Well, this is where good package management software starts to show where linux has been advancing in the "average user" realm. I'm on a Gutsy laptop right now typing this. In hopes of not disproving my point, I opened add/remove. I typed in "mp3" in the search box. The first result was the restricted-extras package, which according to it's subtitle is "codecs to play mp3, sid, mpeg1..." :) However, I think this wouldn't have shown up with the default repositories enabled. But, according to Ubuntu Brainstorm the needed repositories will be enabled by default in Hardy. The terminal is a powerful and efficient tool. Yes, if I know the name of the package I want I use apt-get. But I do this because at this point I know what "sudo" and "apt-get" means. Telling new users to do it this way takes them out of their comfort zone. It's not necessary and doesn't teach them anything. For more anger about resorting to the terminal, I refer you to an excellent (NSFW) Mark Pilgrim rant.
In no way do I want to disparage the efforts of all people working on various Linux distributions - especially not Ubuntu, who have probably put in more than anyone in recent times - but it seems to me that the mob that has done the most to bring Linux to the masses is Asus with their eeePC laptop.
1) They've put it on a desirable, useful, practical, cheap ultra-portable laptop that people want for its size and neat-ness (and low cost)
2) They've made it simple to use and focused on the core applications and best parts of Linux
3) They've made it open source (well, maybe not by choice) and accessible for developers
4) They've solid millions of them, in a single stroke bringing Linux-to-the-desktop to more users than (I would guess?) ever before.
5) Probably most importantly, they've scared the living SHIT out of Microsoft who are now scurrying around trying to get a lightweight version of XP together to match it, which is almost 100% the opposite of what they're trying to do everywhere else (ie, make people buy Vista).
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.
Got Pike?
There's a porn browser in the repo: pornview
Oh great, when that happens I'll truly never get any work done. Hopefully that day is soon followed by an Ubuntu variant that disables any access to games in the repos.
;)
You seem to fear the day where your last remaining productivity vanishes.
I, however, look forward to it.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm no expert, but....
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Windows users have the right to an alternative.
Yep. I was totally sick of Windows and all its hassles, and I couldn't resist the opportunity to use a desktop OS with the strength and configurability of UNIX with a slick modern GUI.
So I got a Mac.
As a power user, I would love for Linux to be mainstream. The more mainstream it gets, the more likely my video drivers are to work, and the more likely I am to have some decent games to play.
As a server administrator, I would love it if all of our developers ran Linux on their desktops. It's still possible to run into surprises deploying from Windows on their workstations (read: laptops) to Linux on the server.
Here's the cool part: It's not up to you.
The thing is, Linux -- or, more generally, all open source software -- is for everything and everyone. If there's anyone who can't use it, or anything it can't yet do, that's just another problem to be fixed by anyone who has the time.
And no one can stop it. You can't make it into your 31337 high-school h4x0r club anymore. It's much bigger than that, now.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I'm typing this on an ASUS EEE PC and loving it. All my linux-centric frustrations seems to be unable to happen on this tiny machine. Guess it doesn't support it. :)
Want my suggestion? Go for more generic names in the apps. In Windows, it's "add/remove programs". In Linux, the closest thing I can think of is the oddly-named "synaptic". If you tell grandma to run "synaptic" to install something, it just creates more confusion.
Stop prefixing things with "K" just because it's for KDE or whatever. Stop with the ultra-shortened names for full-blown applications, with 3-4 decimal points for versions.
Don't tread into copyright infringement with exact names for things, but moreso something a bit more streamlined. "GIMP" is guilty of over-acronymizing(with a recursive acronym in the acronym), and just sounds goofy. Perhaps a tiny bit of marketing at least on the app names will help things a bit.
Oh man, not these tired old arguments again. I have mod points and I was going mod this down, but I'm in a charitable mood and feel like feeding some trolls today.
Want to use your favourite software (photoshop, dreamweaver, GTA 4 etc: nope, that's for windows and/or mac only.
The Linux software ecosystem is rife with applications that perform the same task as their popular proprietary counterparts. Some of them aren't quite up to par (Gimp), some are roughly equivalent (OpenOffice), and some are leagues better (Firefox). There are more and more proprietary applications being ported to Linux all the time.
If your argument is that there are specific software packages that can't run on Linux, well, the same is true for both Windows and Mac. There are many Mac applications that you simply can't buy for Windows and we all well know that the reverse is true.
Neither Mac or Windows come with a system where you can browse from a catalog of over 10,000 applications and install any one of them instantly, for free, with the click of a mouse button.
Want to buy new hardware... well you can if you scour the internet for days finding out if it's compatible; you can't just pop down pcworld one saturday afternoon and pick something up and know it'll work.
This hardware myth really needs to be put to rest. Linux supports a wider variety of hardware than any other operating system on the planet. True, there can be a delay between the time that a new device is released and the time that a common Linux distribution supports it. It's also true that some hardware vendors refuse to release their hardware specifications or even cooperate in any way with open source developers but these are very much the exception these days rather than the rule. If you think Windows supports hardware any better than Linux then you have either not used Vista yet or have somehow managed to be the only person on the planet who has never fought with Windows over printer, video, or wifi driver issues at some point.
Want to install some software... sure... if you broadband no problem...
Ubuntu and many of its derivatives will ship you a copy of their OS on CD at no charge. No media fees, no shipping and handling. Free. Most of the software that you can install afterward is not at all too large to pull down via a dialup modem. Windows and OS X cost hundreds of dollars each. I would say that I put my money where my mouth is, except that I don't have to spend any of it on Linux at all.
oh, but it might install the software anywhere on your system... good luck learning to grep it.
Not sure what you mean here. On KDE- and GNOME-based distributions, a shortcut to every installed application gets put into the applications menu. Which, by the way, is sorted by the software's function so everything is easy to find. Contrast with Windows where each application goes into its own folder or a folder named after the company that distributed it. Install enough applications and the Start menu becomes large and unusable. Contrast also with Mac, where you have to dig down into a special (and also unsorted) Applications folder to find newly-installed apps.
Fat chance if your friend has just given you a cdrom with software on it!
Why, you don't have any friends?
Okay, unprofessional personal attack aside, Linux-using friends are more likely to give you a URL than a CD-ROM. If someone's giving you a CD-ROM with Windows or Mac software on it, there's a good chance it's warez anyway unless they're in the habit of giving away their legitimate software.
want to play games.... err... well... no.. not really, but hey we've got solitaire!!!
There is, admittedly, a noted lack of high-profile games natively available for Linux. However, there are some good ones available. Recent versions of Quake and Unreal Tournament run fine natively.
It's been quite a while since I haven't been able to get drivers for stuff, most of them were already there and required no hunting around at all. In fact I've had to hunt around the internet for drivers for xp installations for equipment where my linux installs just worked far more frequently. And then there's Vista - it won't play most avi's unless you hunt up something like vlc so it's no worse than having to find out how to install codecs on linux. If you are using ubuntu you don't even have to do that. And, well, lets face it, vista is the worst thing M$ have produced since dos4 and they want me to empty my bank account for the drm ridden pos when I can run debian for free???
You raise me a pc mag application, I'll up you the ante with thousands of apps in the repos that install with a single click, and they didn't even cost the price of a magazine. I need broadband? I do ok on an isdn connection but you have to fill your tank and drive to the shops (again, with wallet in hand) or hand out your credit card details over the net and still have to download some bloatware or wait for the postman.
It isn't linux that isn't ready for the desktop, it's windows.
"A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist" - Sir Humphrey Appleby
Linux Games..
http://savage2.s2games.com/main.php
http://www.eve-online.com/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://www.flightgear.org/
http://www.freeciv.org/
http://www.sauerbraten.org/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.cubeengine.com/
http://lincity-ng.berlios.de/
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/
http://www.wormux.org/
http://www.secretmaryo.org/
http://www.ufoai.net/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://tremulous.net/
http://www.eternal-lands.com/
http://www.enemyterritory.com/
Perhaps you could stop with the "No games for Linux" BS already as you obviously have your head up your ass.
I'd say that distributions like Ubuntu is exactly as user-friendly as OS X.
If you use supported hardware and don't want to customize the OS in non-supported ways, everything just works.
Trying to use OS X on badly supported hardware? Needs system-file tinkering and thorough knowledge of how the system works.
Trying to use Ubuntu on badly supported hardware? Needs system-file tinkering and thorough knowledge of how the system works.
The biggest difference is that Ubuntu usually isn't bundled together with 100% compatible hardware like OS X and, most of the time, Windows are.
To get a "apple to apple" comparison between operating systems you'd have to compare how easy they are to install and run on hardware that is 100% supported by the OS out of the box.
Or the other way around, compare them on hardware that isn't supported out of the box. =)
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
I disagree. First let me say, I use both systems on the desktop daily (and have both in front of me right now). I also have formal education in and have worked in the field of user interface design and usability testing for disparate systems over several years.
I agree that not having the hardware vendor polish an install for their system is a huge source of usability issues. Most users never install an OS, and if you give someone a pre-configured system with OS X or Linux, you've solved a lot of their problems already.
That being the case, however, Linux still has some significant usability issues for many many, workflows and tasks. Linux is outstandingly usable for super-power users who need/want to create highly customized and specialized workflows and are not afraid of learning new interfaces. Linux is fairly usable for a very novice user who has a very limited number of tasks and workflows (Web, e-mail, word processing, playing CDs). It still has some interface issues, but it also has a few usability wins in this regard (such as at the task of keeping this core software up to date). They obviously have not, however, done the extensive usability testing Apple does, but they've hit most of the low hanging fruit for very novice users.
Linux has a lot of usability and interface issues when it comes to in between users. People who want to add new hardware (webcam, fancy trackball, stylus, braille board, or whatever) are more likely to have usability problems and not just because of lack of drivers. People who want to install and run software for specific more advanced uses such as: video editing, audio recording/mixing, 3D and vector graphics, publishing, or most commercial software like big games and other payware, still have significant usability problems. People still have significant problems trying to perform some common, but advanced tasks: creating a restricted user account for guests, migrating an installed system to new hardware, or sending a friend some software you have installed (but which is not in the repository), or enabling more advanced user interface features.
In short I understand and agree with your point about hardware, but I disagree in general about Linux being as usable as OS X for the gamut of end user tasks. I don't think any Linux on the desktop developer invests significantly in usability testing (based upon their resulting products) and I don't think they will catch the last 20% or so of problems until they do. I don't think they've even done enough work to address some of the fairly obvious problems that you can find and correct without such testing.