Getting Past "Ready For the Desktop"

Jeremy LaCroix suggests in an editorial at Linux.com that the phrase "ready for the desktop" is ready for retirement. As anyone who's been using Linux for several years (or even a few) for everyday tasks knows, "ready for the desktop" is in the eye of the beholder.

Comments

How about being honest about it?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just say that "Linux will never be ready for the desktop" and be done with it.
It's a lot more honest than simply giving up because 'it's in the eye of the beholder'.

Wankers.

Re:How about being honest about it?

[dave87656]

You could just say that "Linux will never be ready for the desktop" and be done with it.
It's a lot more honest than simply giving up because 'it's in the eye of the beholder'.

Wankers. I use it for my desktop. We use it for 40 desktops in our company. Seems to work very well there. And, if I compare it to the support required for the ~10 Windows boxes we have, it seems Windows is not quite yet ready for the desktop.

The honest answer is: it depends on what you want to do with your desktop.

DOS

[bondsbw]

Was DOS ready for the desktop? By many definitions, people would say no, but that's exactly what started Microsoft's dominance of the OS market.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends if you think "desktop" means a computer that sits on a desk or a point and click GUI windowing system.

In either case, Linux is a kernel and has been ready for the desktop for ever. When people say "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", they actually mean distros don't pander to computer illiterates; the fallacy being the assumption that this is a bad thing.

I now have to disable the unwanted bloat of most modern "desktop" features.

Re:DOS

[Aranykai]

Better question: Was Vista ready for the desktop?

I have my parents running Ubuntu. They do everything they need to, and they like it cause "it just works", something that windows has never done for them.

Re:DOS

[Kijori]

"Ready for the desktop", though, is a phrase whose meaning changes as peoples' understanding of a desktop changes. People don't expect their desktop to behave like DOS anymore.

Re:DOS

[aurispector]

This is a key issue and I think it's been glossed over for too long. Although I agree that most desktop features are crap, linux just cant be mainstream until someone puts out a distro that DOES cater to the illiterates. We already have dozens of distros specifically designed for programmers and super users. Let's face it, most computer users are essentially computer illiterates - they're users, not programmers and they have no interest or reason to learn more than a few basic tasks.

Before anyone says "but ubuntu already does this", the problem is that currently you have no choice but to learn the CLI in order to accomplish anything but basic user tasks. This forces every office (or family) to have at least one go-to person that understands the OS thoroughly (or at least better than everyone else). Think about the huge investment in time and money that has already been spent understanding windows. Switching to a new OS means retraining costs for tech support. Hence linux needs a distro that's both idiot-proof for the basic user AND easy to learn/configure for admins without requiring CLI. This isn't the 1980's. Sure the CLI gives you extreme flexibility, etc., but most people just don't need this.

The other major issue is that switching to linux also means giving up the guaranteed compatibility with commercially available software. My guess is that this is more of an obstacle than any other reason.

Re:DOS

[JamesTRexx]

That's not just Ubuntu or any other *nix OS, anything but the basic task, including troubleshooting has to be done in the CLI on Windows too.
Blaming use of the CLI is just a moot point.

Re:DOS

[martin-boundary]

The CLI is more important than the GUI. Think about it: if you've ever dreamed of just talking to the computer like in the movies, the natural approach is to figure out improvements in CLI so that we can "chat" to the OS with high levels of abstraction.

The GUI is just a stopgap, and a dead end in the long run.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think you've touched on the real issue there. Popular Linux builds have themselves been ready for the desktop for years. What is still missing from Linux that Vista has is applications that are ready for typical end users. As long as Linux geeks continue to believe that OpenOffice is as good as Microsoft Office, the GIMP is as good as Photoshop, etc., and as long as Linux doesn't have things like games and business admin software of the same level as those available on Windows, it doesn't matter how funky your window manager effects are. Real people don't use an OS because of its window manager, they use it because it hosts applications they want.

Re:DOS

[JonathanBoyd]

Speaking to a computer is a horrendously inefficient means of doing a lot of tasks, some of them quite common, Anything involving the creation or editing of graphics, selecting of text, choosing a link to follow, etc. is almost always quicker and easier to do with a GUI than speech. Speech also gets in the way when there are other people about who don't want disturbed i.e. a lot of work places and is draining on the throat after a while. Don't assume computer evolution is going to follow the movies. Though even in Star Trek they're still using a GUI quite a bit.

Re:DOS

[clang_jangle]

I second that. If I need to get any serious work done in Windows, cmd.exe is indespensible. Just like BSD, Linux, and OS X you can use it without ever seeing a command prompt, but that will limit you severely. I guess the reason this gets overlooked so much is because most Windows users really don't know how to use Windows anymore than they know how to use Linux -- What they do know is how to use certain GUI frontends to certain apps. I know some MS users can be very defensive about this, and will even insist that what makes their choice "superior" is that no CLI knowledge is required, but that is just not true. Without knowledge of the CLI one can be just as "stranded" in Windows (or even on OS X on rare occasion) as in Linux.

Also it says a lot that reinstalling rather than fixing Windows is generally regarded as an acceptable practice. Because reinstalling Windows doesn't (usually) require a CLI :).

Re:DOS

[NotBornYesterday]

' ... as good as ... ' is one thing. 'Good enough' is something else. GIMP has more tools and abilities than I ever would use, and I use it on Linux frequently. Do I really need Photoshop? No. I'm not sure what problems you see with OpenOffice, but I use it all the time, and it does everything I need.

Plus, as more apps become web-deployed, desktop apps become less and less important.

Re:DOS

[Darkness404]

Honestly, does the average person really need photoshop? I mean many Windows users struggle using Paint, and most people who use Photoshop are at least technology literate enough to understand how to adapt to a different GUI and therefore don't fit the definition of the dumb Windows users who don't understand the difference between an icon and a program. OpenOffice is nearly as good as MS Office for most tasks, while Office will usually be as familiar to long time Office users, OpenOffice is just as good so long as you are willing to actually learn and even Office 2007's UI is so radically different that OpenOffice will feel even more familiar to Office users then 2007. As for games, many, many, Windows games either have a decent Linux counterpart or will run via WINE, and with Direct-X 10 being Vista-only if the WINE team can get Direct-X 10 implemented, Linux will become an almost better gaming system then XP. And most of the more popular games are already able to run very well in WINE such as WoW and others. The only problem would be is if some Linux person went out and bought some random game and tried to make it run, now chances are with a bit of hacking it would run, but as for the "pop in the CD and play" that won't work quite yet. But when they realize that they can get just about the same level of quality for free, they will just pop open Add/Remove Programs and find a game they think might be good. As for business admin software, again, most can be emulated via WINE and because most of it doesn't need immediate response you could always use VirtualBox and virtualize XP and use that. Granted, right now there are tons of Linux applications the problem is, most people think they have to buy software or go to some unknown freeware site to download who-knows-what, whereas with Linux it is just as simple as point, click, apply (or for you CLI folks, sudo apt-get install whatever)

Re:DOS

[metlin]

The day I can install Ubuntu (or any flavor of Linux), without having to worry about spending half a week configuring it, or the day I can send a client a presentation, spreadsheet or document without sacrificing features (and without having to explain) will be the day I think it is ready for desktop.

Today, Open Office is simply not there. For example, Calc is great for regular, day-to-day uses, but try opening a spreadsheet with data running into several megs or more of data, and try performing complex operations. It's so slow that it's terrible. And writing complex macros? No sir.

I mean, try using Powerpoint 2007 and compare it with Impress - trying to get something done is extremely non-intuitive (if it supports it at all) and there is no fine grained control. I would shudder to think about presenting something made in Impress to a client. It's a joke.

The realistic scenario is that if I send a doc from OO.org to a client, sometimes s/he has problems opening it, and sometimes when they send me documents, OO.org has problems opening them.

And then, there are other applications that aren't available for Linux. Everything from iTunes to Lego Mindstorms SDK is available only on Windows. Hell, even Google doesn't make its applications available on Linux. I mean, to me it is a question of convenience. Until such time that I can get these applications without having to jump through hoops, Linux is still not ready for the desktop.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong! It's not just basic tasks that need to use the CLI. I set up an ubuntu 8.04 on an old HP laptop for a mate just yesterday. It had a bog standard belkin wifi card that required me to spend 10 minutes in the terminal installing NSDIWrapper and another few minutes in the package manager installing all the extra codecs for media playback. For me it's a piece of cake and he'll never bother me about it again but I would have no chance just giving him a CD and expecting him to have it up and running. I don't care if windows is just as shit, if your grandma can't do it, it's not ready.

Re:DOS

[edmicman]

most Windows users really don't know how to use Windows anymore than they know how to use Linux -- What they do know is how to use certain GUI frontends to certain apps

So where's the push to get more of these GUI frontends to certain apps on Linux? There seems to be some work in that end, and Ubuntu seems like it's pushing towards making things easier to use for the layperson.

I use both OS's, and in my experience while I've used cmd in Windows a lot, it's usually for diagnosis purposes, where I can spit out a bunch of information that isn't available in a built in GUI. I rarely think I've ever had to use cmd to *configure* something. Whereas on Linux, there are some frontends to some commands, but I still end up having to manually go in, and add a line here or comment something out there in a text file just to change some setting.

I think the real point is, yes, a CLI no matter what the OS can be very powerful. It should definitely be available. But to *really* use it, you need to *know* what commands to use. Arguing to use man or search the Internet doesn't help. man can be unbearably confusing sometimes, or sometimes it just lists options but doesn't really explain what they do. Of course, man doesn't help if you don't know what the command is to do what you want to do in the first place! And searching for what the command is you want to use if you don't know what it is can be tedious, too.

But anyone can reasonably look for a System or Preferences menu, hopefully drill down to the area of what they're looking for, and toggle options or whatnot. Why is there such pushback to making things easier?

Re:DOS

[rathaven]

For my own part I do not disagree, however, and this is reality - I've met a number of sysadmins of small educational networks and probably others too who do not use the CLI in 99% of day to day use! This is not including the illiterates who do not even know what the "computer" is.

The sysadmins I mention didn't fail to understand the concepts - I quizzed them deeply and was shocked to see them not using a CLI with the depth of understanding they had. Looking further into the methods of work showed that they knew them well but they had to deal with so many issues they were stretched in their time and ability to pick up all the tools required to support multiple platforms - sometimes even the one they were working on. Most of the time that meant they stuck to Windoze and mostly used point and click interfaces. That's not to say they wouldn't use the CLI for emergencies or look up commands but their scripting skills were weak so CLI was mostly avoided. If admins like these need a script they download one or download a tool that does it for them or purchase one and, surprise, most of the time it does eleviate the requirement.

To move to other OS's means that those sysadmins are looking for a system that makes the concepts intuitive to implement - without having to learn commands that aren't intuitive. The illiterates also need this to the small extent that they need the tools at all.

Before anyone jumps on this as an argument of CLI/point and click - I use the examples only to highlight a point. The argument is one of transferable skills related to the concepts behind system administration. CLIs do allow this if the CLI is standardised across OS and people are prepared to learn, but it usually isn't. GUI interfaces are rarely standardised but they are intuitive and well designed and can help boost platforms by making day to day skills easy to pick up on a platform.

Re:DOS

[fbjon]

I don't think it's up to you to decide what people need or should have. The world doesn't bend that way, but the other way: People need/want to run an application, and if it only works on Windows, then so be it.

Re:DOS

[marsu_k]

As for GIMP, the last time I used it, it still didn't have any easy way to draw Ovals/Circles and Rectangles/Squares, something that even the most basic of image editors (MS Paint) has. Making an oval/rectangular selection and stroking it (hmm, that sounds rather perverse...) isn't that hard. But I think people should stop recommending Gimp to novices, while it is powerful the interface can be confusing at first. Krita is a wonderful alternative for simple painting / editing of digital photos.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Just once, I'd like to see a "Linux isn't ready for the desktop" argument that isn't staggeringly contradicting itself. First, you go:

"they're users, not programmers and they have no interest or reason to learn more than a few basic tasks."

and then:

"the problem is that currently you have no choice but to learn the CLI in order to accomplish anything but basic user tasks."

Well, make up your mind already! Are those basic user tasks inclusive or exclusive? How does reading your email and surfing the web involve command-line usage? The Firefox icon is there in the taskbar. Click and use. Hacking shell scripts requires the command line, but it is not a "basic user task".

Re:DOS

[clang_jangle]

So where's the push to get more of these GUI frontends to certain apps on Linux?

It's more like "where are the projects with apps to kill photoshop and outlook?". If we could have those two or something equal on Linux plus have pre-installed Linux as commonly available as Windows then in fact most people probably would either not care which OS they get or they'd prefer the one that doesn't moonlight as a spam zombie.

But it hardly matters anymore -- already smartphones are replacing the desktop for many consumers, and in that field the best apps are yet to be written.

Re:DOS

[duh P3rf3ss3r]

I'm sorry but this is just so much puffery. My grandma doesn't know how to "set up" Windows "on an old HP laptop for a mate" either. Does that mean Windows is not ready for prime time? Your efforts to suck and blow at the same time add up to a troll -- a well disguised troll, perhaps, maybe a troll in a dress -- but an AC troll nonetheless.

Re:DOS

[Abattoir]

That's not just Ubuntu or any other *nix OS, anything but the basic task, including troubleshooting has to be done in the CLI on Windows too. Uh, no. I don't need a command line interface on Windows to do any troubleshooting on a desktop system and neither does anyone else. The only command that is of any real use on Windows is ipconfig, and I can do everything I need that for through the network center. The Windows registry on the other hand, is required learning for any *power user*, but again, not required for the typical user.

Re:DOS

[hitmark]

the thing about games are that they are like fashion. you need to be playing the latest and greatest to count.

and even more so in this age of online gaming.

i refuse to play for pay online rpgs, but none of the people i know wants to play anything but world of warcraft these days...

i recall going to lan-party in the 90's and playing all kinds of games for laughs. go to one now and its all variants of counterstrike, and its deadly serious that you and your team win or lose...

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

And there are still scores of Windows users who couldn't install their own WiFi drivers, configure their own wireless network or install extra codecs themselves either.

I used to be the "go to guy" for my friends and family for a long time until I stopped accepting "please help me fix my computer" requests in order to focus on my full-time career. It's amazing how many people can't figure out how to load a CD and follow the instructions on the screen, let alone know that the movie they just downloaded via LimeWire needs the DivX or Xvid codec to be viewed.

I got rid of Windows just a few weeks ago in favour of Ubuntu. I loaded up a DivX encoded movie in Totem, and not only did it tell me I needed extra codecs, but Totem launched Synaptic, downloaded the codecs, installed them and then re-started the movie for me. When was the last time any app in Windows did that? And don't say "just use VLC" because the majority of Windows users have no clue what VLC is.

Re:DOS

[pizzach]

It's funny. When someone uses the CLI, they expect to be greeted with by a cold machine that accepts rigid syntax. But with voice, it's supposed to natually know what you want using a syntax that can have very vague meanings. I would think the first step in voice recognition is to make a terminal that accepts typed phases and interprets them in an intelligent way...

Re:DOS

[tknd]

Okay, this is one of the things that bugs me. OpenOffice and the GIMP do everything that the average user needs them to.

Average users (American users at least) don't think logically. They think in terms of capability rather than need. In other words they are not necessarily in search for the platform that meets their needs, they are in search for the platform that will provide them the best experience even if they will not need parts of what that experience has to offer.

For example just take SUVs. For a while the cost of gas wasn't as expensive, so normal consumers didn't take MPG into account when buying a vehicle. So they show up at the dealer and figure they need a car, but they don't know which one yet. At the dealer there's a luxury sedan selling for the same price as an SUV. The sedan doesn't have as much potential as the SUV in terms of capabilities, but will do what they need just fine. The SUV, however, opens up a number of possibilities for their vehicle--some of which they won't use. So in their minds, the SUV is a better buy than the sedan if gas price, pollution, size etc does not matter.

What linux needs is more marketing acumen and to understand what users are really after. In fact, linux distros may already have what some users are after but nobody bothers to market those features in that manner. Some areas where Linux excels are security (incompatible with most malware), and "custom" user interfaces. By "custom" I don't mean that the user can customize it but rather a custom interface is presented to the user. A good example of this is the Asus eee-pc. The product intentionally has a dumbed-down interface to become a marketing point for the product. When normal people asked, Asus they didn't chant "we run OPEN SOURCE LINUX!" but instead they said, "hey, we're going to have this really easy to use interface." But instead most geeks just get on their F/OSS soap box not understanding that the average user doesn't care what F/OSS means.

Which brings up another issue. Many of the advocates of F/OSS are not marketers or business men. They are software guys, hackers that like to stick to their ideals. So this brings two goals for such a project. One goal being spreading and supporting their ideals in open source software and the other goal being to increase market share. The two goals have conflicts. If you want more market share, you must accept that some people do not care about the ideals or will even work against them (proprietary software/hardware solutions). The faster open source projects can get rid of their internal conflicts, the quicker they will become more successful in accomplishing their goals.

Re:DOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're trying to have it both ways a bit there, and misidentifying because of it.

I'll agree that Ubuntu requires every "office (or family) to have at least one go-to person that understands the OS thoroughly (or at least better than everyone else)." But I disagree that Windows doesn't. As you say, "most computer users are essentially computer illiterates", and when they deal with Windows beyond "anything but basic user tasks" they require that go-to person just as much.

We can quibble about individual non-illiterate task being easier or harder, but the point is that we can quibble -- each has items that are easier or harder. Neither is "ready for the desktop" for the hypothetical illiterate. Configuring a secure Windows experience is a nightmare compared to Ubuntu, for example.

I also think that "you have no choice but to learn the CLI in order to accomplish anything but basic user tasks." is an overstatement. I'm all for getting further away from it in Ubuntu, but if you check Ubuntu Forums you'll notice a sizeable number of computer illiterates are in fact managing quite well by using copy&paste advice given to them -- they don't actually learn the CLI.

The difference is that the "go-to person" is telling them to type commands they don't understand versus click panel options they don't understand. It's not that big a difference, and means both systems still require the illiterates to have a go-to person. [These days they're as likely to get "click panel options" advice too - the CLI isn't required for everything anymore, though we're discussing it specifically at the moment.]

So I'm suggesting that the CLI is a bit of a bogeyman argument. YES, the ideal and as-yet-unachieved OS for illiterates will not require CLI use. Absolutely true. But it takes a great deal more than just replacing CLI with GUI panels to achieve the ideal. Quite a lot will need to be taken care of automagically and with extreme cleverness. Things will have to be self-configuring -- almost all the GUI panels will have to vanish as well as the CLI to be considered "ready for the desktop" in a way that meaningful to the illiterate.

Disclaimers: I mostly use Ubuntu these days, and I'm the go-to guy for friends, family, and co-workers. I started with personal computers long before the GUI, and while the CLI is not strange to me I'm not fond of it. Frankly I'm getting old and find it rather tedious to un-rust the synapses to remember what the syntax is for this one when needed, and I'm looking forward to having panels with visible options for most everything. But I don't believe for a minute that's enough to make it work for illiterates.

Getting hung up on the CLI as a sign that an OS isn't "ready for the desktop" misses what really is required, and misses what Ubuntu actually does better for the illiterate, like security.

Maybe we should dump the "ready for the desktop" phrase and its accumulated baggage and just say "mainstream". The current mainstream personal computer experience includes a go-to person as a fact of life. No illiterate is going to get along okay without one. Given that, Ubuntu is mainstream now, having achieved a comparable low-requirement of go-to help as Windows, and in my experience lower worry as the go-to guy.

All that's left to a "mainstream" definition is comparable user numbers. And that's a different problem because we have to factor in the near complete dominance of Windows. Apple, which is famous for ease of use, hasn't been able to dent that much either. A Linux distro is only going to achieve comparable mainstream numbers by being significantly better than Windows. Bless Microsoft for doing their best make it so, but to overcome monopoly momentum a distro will have to offer more, something along the lines of "Killer App" more.

We've achieved comparable ease of use. We may exceed it. But to get a market share like 50% requires something else entirely.

Re:DOS

[Homer1946]

People who can afford to live in fantasy worlds would find that Microsoft and Apple products are better suited to dreamers who don't need to do actual work. Wow. What a coincidence. I have also found that insulting people really helps to get them to listen to the details of my arguments.

Re:DOS

[man_of_mr_e]

Also it says a lot that reinstalling rather than fixing Windows is generally regarded as an acceptable practice. Because reinstalling Windows doesn't (usually) require a CLI :)

No, it's a simple cost/benefit analysis. Should you spend 3 or 4 hours dicking around trying to fix something (and maybe not succeeding) or spending 1 hour to reinstall the OS (or reimage if it's a corporate machine). I'll take #2 any day of the week, except in rare situations where reinstalling will take a lot longer (my home computer, for instance, with 500+ different tweaks and programs).

Re:DOS

[clang_jangle]

Multiple != mass. Try doing what you propose with several thousand files. :)

Re:DOS

[man_of_mr_e]

Part of the problem with Linux is that you have to "know" which one of the 20,000 programs in your package manager does what you need done.

So how, precisely, does one know about ndisgtk? What's more, don't you have to even manually configure it to use the restricted extras?

Sure, Windows has a lot of stuff that doesn't work right either, but it has just as much stuff that installs seamlessly, with complete directions a moron could follow. And, if that fails, they can call Linksys or DLINK and they'll walk them through it over the phone (granted, by some guy in india following a script that the user could have followed, but still.. that works most of the time, unless you're an expert and have a problem not covered by that.. which would be the only reason the expert would call).

Millions of people buy computers, set them up, and use them, including installing software and devices, with very little technical knowledge and without asking an "expert". You only see the people that are too stupid (or too scared) to do it themselves, so it gives you a skewed view of reality.

One of Linux's big problems is that it has insufficient end-user technical support and it has limited use-case testing scenarios, so when things go wrong they go spectacularly wrong. The kernel and most kinds of server apps are typically rock-solid, but the GUI end user apps tend to be buggy as hell, poorly designed, and exceedingly complex and cryptic. We like that, end-users don't.

Re:DOS

[martin-boundary]

Let me ask you this: when drawing something on a whiteboard, do you speak? Does the audience for whom you draw the ideas speak to you? Is it all happening in silence with no further communication? Of course not.

Drawing on a whiteboard is an aid to communication, but isn't the actual communication and usually cannot stand on its own. If you're not convinced, think about when you enter somebody's office and see their scribbles on their own whiteboard. Do you know from a glance what the conversation was about, and what was said? No, because the whiteboard scribbles are merely communication aids, incidental images which are designed to support the spoken word.

My point wasn't to propose speaking as an alternative to typing, my point was that pointing and clicking is a dead end compared with grammatical sentences. Whether you type those in like in a chat window, or whether you speak them to your computer directly is incidental - it's still text communication similar to a supercharged CLI. It's not GUI communication where you point at things, then point at other things, then point at some more and finally construct a command.

GUIs are the equivalent of babytalk - a tiny handful of possible operations which must be used to do everything - great to get people to use computers the first time, but much too limiting to be used by adults who prefer more sophisticated languages.

Re:DOS

[martin-boundary]

You're not seriously suggesting typing what you want to say to a computer so that it interprets what you've typed as if you've said it to it, are you?

That's exactly what I'm suggesting.

communicate in higher level abstractions. Don't imagine telling the computer "set the pixel at position 2005,789 to red", imagine "sharpen the image a bit", "cut out a silhouette". The target abstraction level is talking as if with another artist.

Firstly you just severely limited what people can do. secondly, I want precision in my editing, not for some AI to try and interpret what I want.

Yet when you want something done for which you do not have the expertise or that you must delegate, you trust a human to try and interpret what you want. Think of a computer program as a domain expert. That's where things are heading.

Think about it like this: if an artist wants to draw something, do they pick up a pencil, or do they tell someone else to pick up a pencil and give them instructions?

It depends entirely on the situation. There's no communication if the artist is alone in a room doing a pencil sketch. There is communication if he's working with others to produce artworks.

For example, a comic book artist might draw the main characters in certain scenes, and communicate with another artist who fills in the background and minor characters, another who does the colouring, another who does the words. Think of telling a program to fill in the background, another program to colour the panels, etc.

What you suggest might be fine for a simple consumer-oriented app designed for doing simple rough edits, but would be totally inappropriate for anything more advanced.

You're thinking too much in terms of existing GUI limitations. The difference between a consumer app and a professional app has to do with doing well defined specialized tasks, which are often described by a technical vocabulary that consumers don't know even exists. Yet if the vocabulary is there, it means that the abstraction exists, and therefore can be referred to in a command. So imagine "talking" to an application with a domain specific vocabulary, ie using words that a professional would immediately understand but a consumer has no idea what it means.

Adjusting hues is an optimization problem, which by the way if the artist does it by hand will depend on the characteristics of his monitor - a bad idea. At the very least, he'd want to see the final print in a good light, which suggests optimizing for the characteristics of the output device rather than the graphical display device. The point is that this can be expressed in a domain specific vocabulary, think of the sentences used by two artists discussing the characteristics of a work in progress.

But selecting and copying/italicising/whatever is still quicker with a mouse than with voice because explaining which bit you want to change takes time. Natural language sucks for speed outside of certain specialised situations.

But my point was that selecting is a means, not an end. You can use language to describe the end, and the computer can do the means.

Take a system like LaTeX, where the italicising/whatever is not done by you. Instead, you describe what you want at a higher level: what kind of article or book style, do you want a figure or table close to the reference point, or always at the top of a page, etc. LaTeX is far from a natural language interface, but it shows the possibilities with higher level instructions. Meanwhile, you're talking about selecting sets of characters, and making direct changes one selection at a time.

When you're at a site, you typically have more links to follow and these links are more quickly selectable wi

Re:DOS

[martin-boundary]

They were analogies demonstrating that sometimes we need to interact with things in a manner which is superior to what speech allows.

Of course I agree with you, although we ought to stay within the realm of computer interaction.

Similar instances exist in computing where the instant input and control a GUI offers is vastly preferable to cumbersome speech.

I think you're conflating instant feedback with the GUI. Feedback is important to know that the computer is doing roughly what you think it should be doing. If it looks like it's not doing that, you have a chance to stop the task. This sort of feedback already exist in GUIs and in CLIs.

One difference is that in CLI interaction, programs often have a 'verbose' switch so that you can turn on/off the feedback. This is typically used when doing several things in a script. The GUI equivalent would be this: you create a script with a lot of steps, eg opening some windows, moving them about, selecting various menu items, saving files, then closing all the windows again.

If the GUI showed you the script with feedback, you'd see all the windows opening, menus opening and closing, items selected and progress bars displaying all by themselves, until the script is finished. This kind of distraction would probably be hidden by asking the GUI to NOT show feedback.

offers is vastly preferable to cumbersome speech. In another comment, you suggested that speech was superior for graphical work because you could give a command and have it interpreted rather than clicking on pixel (x,y), but there are times when you do want to deal with the nitty gritty and there speech becomes the slow, cumbersome approach.

But that's a question of the proper abstraction level. A GUI has only one abstraction level, point to an object and click. All tasks using a GUI must be decomposed until they can be described by a sequence of point and click. Language has the ability to create new abstractions on demand.

How do you edit 50 pictures to make them black and white, for example? In a GUI, you have to point and click to open a file, point and click to change the colours, point and click to save the file, and this must be repeated 50 times. The only commands allowed are point and click, with the order being used implicitly to specify the context.

In a CLI, you write a script that edits a single picture to make it black and white. Then, you have a higher level of abstraction, namely a command that "turns a picture black and white". After that, you can use the higher abstraction as a building block for even higher abstractions. You can have a script that loops the "turn a picture black and white" command 50 times. This is much closer to the natural language equivalent of "here's how to make an image black and white, now do this for all 50 images".

That's why I'm saying GUI is baby talk. It never goes beyond point, click, point, click, point, click, etc. It has no ability for abstraction.

Re:DOS

[martin-boundary]

You have abstactions in the graphical realm too - look at the use of folders in a file manager, or the use of tracks-> groups->notes in a music application. I would make the case that a graphical approach is superior when manipulating objects directly, while text input is best for more abstract usage.

In a certain sense, these abstractions are "fixed", though. Language lets us create abstractions for things nobody thought of. The photoshop solution for manipulating 50 files is something the programmers had to think of putting in, either by themselves or after customers told them it would be great to have, it's not something _users_ decided to create independently through using the GUI. By contrast, the scripting example I gave was supposed to show how _users_ create new abstractions in the CLI when it makes sense for _them_.

I would make the case that a graphical approach is superior when manipulating objects directly, while text input is best for more abstract usage.

Another reason for using language is precision. It's hard to get things exactly right repeatedly and consistently. Humans aren't robots. If you're drawing circles on a sheet of paper by hand, you'll never get them right consistently, all the time. If you're _describing_ what it is you're doing to draw a circle, then you can look at the description and fix flaws in it.

In Photoshop, you'd be using the undo button to fix flaws in execution (eg the mouse overwriting some pixels), but in the next image you manipulate, such execution flaws can still appear. And if you have to do a third image two weeks later when you've forgotten how you built the first two images, you'll have difficulty making all the steps exactly right without using the undo button yet again.

The answer of course is to keep a journal with details of what you've done, but that's using language to supplement the deficiencies of straight manipulation, no? Might be easier to make the work follow the journal instead of vice versa :)

Re:DOS

[LaurensVH]

I don't understand why finding, downloading and installing WinRAR is harder than: apt-cache search kde archive software sudo apt-get install ark ... considering both actions can be trivially done by a GUI package manager app. Problem with Windows is that you have to "know" which one of the 20,000 programs, which aren't even managed in a package repository, does what you need done. There's a lot of good Win* software out there, and there's a helluva lot of crap you wouldn't want on your PC (don't say "yeah, windows", that's too easy ;-)) -- how do you differentiate between the two?

Re:DOS

[clang_jangle]

You're completely missing the point -- Photoshop isn't free; it can't be ported without Adobe's permission. The quality of Outlook is irrelevant; it's so popular as to be nearly ubiquitous and lots of people feel stuck with it.

Re:DOS

[mhall119]

For you and I yes... but for many people, they'd rather have the "layers of dialogs and wizards" (as long as they're well designed of course). They're used to dialogs and wizards, that doesn't necessarily mean they would prefer them. The command line and text files are less ambiguous than GUIs, and they change much less frequently. I can give exact CLI instructions for someone that they could run with a simple copy+paste operation, or I can give a couple pages of GUI instructions, screen shots, alternative instructions and screen shots if you're using XP instead of 2000, etc, and they'd still be lost on Vista.

The main problem for these people is that the very IDEA of opening one program (a text editor) to change the settings of another program is completely alien and makes no sense to them. Most user applications provide their options in dialogs, it's the OS services that you usually end up changing config files for. And Windows users are accustomed to opening a "Control Panel" or some other dialog to modify OS settings. Try telling a Windows user how to stop or start a system service using the Windows GUI.

In my more cynical moments, I'm quite happy to simply call these people idiots and say that they need to learn because it's REALLY not that hard, but realistically, they won't. Yes they will, they always do. Nobody wanted to re-learn the MS Office menus, or Vista, but they will anyway. Linux devs should focus on making them learn something better, not just something different, but the idea that we should make it so they don't have to re-learn anything is nonsense.

So, if we want them as users (which is another question entirely!), then we need to cater for their needs, no matter how stupid we think those needs are. I think it's equally important that we separate their needs from their wants. We should always try to cater to their needs, but should only cater to their wants when it makes sense.

"Ready for my mom's desktop."

[Manip]

I'd like to coin the term "Ready for my mom's desktop." Meaning after a few hours training she can use the platform without too much hassle.

That's where Linux really drops the ball still and OS X/Windows still dominate.

The UIs are extremely poorly designed on Linux and worse still they're often inconsistent with half a dozen ways to do the same operation.

And don't even get me started on the continued use of the terminal for /any/ normal user operations.

Linux isn't a consumer desktop, in fact it isn't even making very much ground in that area. That being said it is still an awesome server and geek toy.

Re:"Ready for my mom's desktop."

[damburger]

Seeing as my mum and stepmum already use Ubuntu quite happily (and aren't phoning up every 10 minutes complaining that something is broken/they've got a virus) it seems Linux is already at that stage.

Re:"Ready for my mom's desktop."

[antirelic]

I agree that Linux is, and has been ready for the desktop for quiet some time now. Not trying to be too much of a fanboy (because I'm not, I prefer the Fedora distro line) of Ubuntu, but man, Ubuntu is what people have always dreamed a computer being like. For example: If I need a peace of software, I go to that Ubuntu software management application, find the category of different applications, browse through, click, and its installed (all the downloading and installation happens behind the scenes).

The only downfall is still the fact that most commercial software (read as: games, MS Office, and Itunes) do not run on Linux natively. So the question about Linux being ready for the desktop is a misnomer. Linux is and has been desktop ready, it is just a question of when will application developers develop popular applications for Linux.

Re:"Ready for my mom's desktop."

[fitten]

I finally installed Ubuntu. The package manager is nice... but browsing through the 100s of packages there named:

aba
aba-dev
aba-dbg
aca
aca-dev
aca-dbg
aca-py-db
ada
ada-multi
ada-rro

and most of the descriptions might as well have been written in Wookie for as much as my mom would understand. Even search rarely returns a single, or even small number of results. Try searching for "word processor" (just did it on Ubuntu 8.04) returns 41 entries... some of which are:

lhs2tex
koffice
koffice-kde
kword
kword-data
libwps-0.1.1
libwps-dev
libwps-doc
libwps-tools

etc. My mom's first question would be "do I have to install all of those things?" and then when I said "no", she'd ask "which ones should I install, then? and why did it tell me all these things?" What's worse, for example, is that the documentation for some of these things is installed as seperate packages and not by default with the base package. IMO, it'd be better to assume documentation, for example, should be installed by default unless the user opts out, but that's not the way that the various dev groups work. They assume you want the minimal of everything unless you explicitly ask for it to be installed. And do the various package managers even have a way of asking you what parts you want installed before installing?

Most Windows users are used to running a single install per product and being given options as to what's installed related to that (dev libraries, documentation, etc.), not seeing each individual option listed among every other option for all other packages as well. It's just too much noise for someone who can't make out what all the acronyms are for. Sure, the package manager will indicate all the other required packages that will need to be installed in addition, but even that is noise, especially when you don't know which one to pick from the start, *especially* when the results of a search present you with so many things, and few of them being what you really searched for.

Linux developers assume that the end-user is a programmer/IT type person and that eventually, tools and such will be 'dumbed down' enough for Joe Six Pack (but not by them, that's not fun or interesting... but it's OSS so if you want that, do it yourself or eventually, someone may be interested in doing that and will do it... it's OSS after all and you have the source). Windows and OSX seem to have started at the other end of the spectrum (which is what probably annoys many geeks), assuming the user is Joe Six Pack and then working from there towards the other end of the spectrum.

Re:"Ready for my mom's desktop."

[notamisfit]

And it's a question of when the application developers will see any point in doing so. If iTunes was made available for Linux tomorrow, do you think Apple would get any praise for the move? Fuck no. They'd be condemned across the board for trying to "contaminate" Linux with their evil "non-free" software.

Re:"Ready for my mom's desktop."

[notamisfit]

I do this in just about every article like this, and I gotta do it here; if those users declare that the GUI is in fact "unready", what the fuck difference does it make? Are they throwing money into the pool? More than likely, no. Are they going to throw in a code patch, or even a bug report that goes beyond "Application X crashed and I don't know why" or "I want feature Z"? No. Best just to let 'em be on their way with a Vista or OSX box; when they're ready, they'll find us on their own.

Re:"Ready for my mom's desktop."

[diggitzz]

Are they going to throw in a code patch, or even a bug report that goes beyond "Application X crashed and I don't know why" or "I want feature Z"? No. Best just to let 'em be on their way with a Vista or OSX box; when they're ready, they'll find us on their own. People with those types of complaints are generally classed end users, and they're exactly the ones who are determining what's ready for the desktop and what's not. When it's ready for the end users, it's ready for the desktop. When the desktop is ready, the users will find it on their own.

Seriously, who else is the the desktop GUI being written for, if not the end users? Whose opinion of desktop readiness would matter more, exactly?

The Truth in "Ready For the Desktop"

[sleeping123]

Linux has always interested me. I've been a computer nerd since I was born, and first tried to install Linux when I was somewhere around ten years old. Well, we've seen a decade pass since then, and there's a lot of truth in this statement. I stuck with windows so long because of the inaccessibility of installing and putting together a distro the way you wanted. Now, more than ever, we are seeing a trend toward usability, starting from when you first boot the kernel. I personally love this phrase because every advertising campaign needs a slogan and with all the usability-centric distributions out there (case-in-point, Ubuntu), we've come a long way and we are finally ready for the average users' desktop.

Ready for the desktop?

[code601]

My definition of ready for the desktop would be the ability to install any application I choose without having to know that the terminal exists.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[adrianbaugh]

Exactly. You can find Ubuntu packages for the vast majority of applications (and likewise for SuSE, Fedora etc.) Certainly you'll be able to find at least one application to do whatever you want to do (though it may not be your obscure pet application of choice).

The fact that there's some weird little application used by about 5 people (including the maintainer...) that Ubuntu can't be bothered to package doesn't mean that Linux isn't ready for the desktop.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[SwedishPenguin]

By that definition, there is no desktop ready operating system. There will always be some applications that require the use of a terminal to install, that's not a shortcoming of the OS, that's the choice of those who publish the application.

Windows' ease of use vastly overstated

[cptnapalm]

If Windows is so easy to use for the computer illiterate, why have I spent untold hours fixing other peoples Windows machines, teaching people how to double click on icons, teaching people not to double click on anything which is not an icon, teaching people how to connect to a wireless hotspot, etc etc etc?

Who do you think the "No, I will not fix your computer." t-shirts were inspired by? Mac users? Linux users?

!ready for the desktop

[Toreo asesino]

The way I see it, it's ready for YOUR desktop when it can run all YOUR apps seamlessly and without a problem.

My girlfriend for instance, just browses the net, plays mp3's, checks her emails and occasionally writes documents, prints them, and occasionally uses Skype. Linux is ready for HER desktop.

Me on the other hand, I'm a .Net dev, play lot's of PC games, work with doc & docx files every day, and actually like iTunes (for the iPod). Linux is not ready for my desktop, nor is it likely to be any time soon.

To say "Linux is ready for THE desktop" is quite frankly very short-sighted.

Re:!ready for the desktop

[Ira Sponsible]

Yeah. Linux is definitely ready for my desktop. I've been using FOSS apps on Windows for years, now to the point of near exclusivity. Periodically over the last few years, I would try one distro or another to see if they would suit my needs and they weren't quite there yet. Always a handful of showstoppers for my particular needs. And now I have a new laptop with Windows Vista on it. My Vista experience has consistently been "What the fuck is this shit?" since day one, as compared to "Hey, this isn't that bad but it's better than it used to be" when I'd tried Linux. WinME worked better than this Vista crap. So a few months ago I tried Ubuntu 7.10 on the laptop (Live disc) and my experience was suddenly "Damn, this is just about there, if only the sound and my card reader worked..." Guess what? I've been running 8.04 from the live disc on my laptop for the last three weeks. Everything works, even the sound and card reader. Better and faster than Vista ever did. I have yet to have any need to reboot into Vista to get anything done that I can't do with what's included with this live disc. I guess it's time for me to ditch Windows altogether. Linux is ready for MY desktop, and I imagine it's ready for many desktops, even if not quite there yet for you or many other people.

The Question Should Be:

[FurtiveGlancer]

Is Linux ready for the average windows user?

Re:The Question Should Be:

[eapache]

I really want to meet this mythical 'average user' someday. Every user has different needs and different expectations.

Re:From TFA

[tech10171968]

Well, I really hope that isn't the case, given the respective market share. Sorry to inform you of this, but this really is the case; otherwise there wouldn't be a need for a "Geek Squad". In my experience a lot of the users who deride linux for its "lack of usability" are the very same folks I see constantly tripping over themselves in a Windows enviroment (it's also amusing to see how they totally miss the irony). This just tells me, for example, that one could hypothetically create a 100% "Plug and Play" OS, everything working out of the box, no need for dropping into a CLI (like DOS or a *Nix shell), and users will still have the same complaints only because "it's not like Windows". Window's marketshare has nothing to do with any sort of superiority; it's just that people feel more comfortable sticking with the devil they know.

The real question.

[jellomizer]

Is Linux ready for a majority position on the desktop. The answer is no and Ill expect it always will be. Because I don't see the desktop being the dominate platform for much longer. As smart phones are getting smarter, replacing many of the most commonly used desktop uses and as the price of powerful hardware is rapidly dropping I am seeing a world where we have more appliances then desktops. The key for Microsoft dominance in the desktop for the past decade has moved from 3rd party software variety to the fact that people need 100% office compatibility. (Even office for the Mac offers 99.999% compatability... not good enough) Open office offers 99% compatibility meaning normally 3 day a year you will need office, to view a document. Now if Microsoft looses it office share or there are complete solutions to share the files Microsoft will go down as well as the desktop. And we will move back towards appliance applications, for personal use. Granted they will be more like under powered desktops but using todays terms for $200.00 you will get a system that is roughly the power of a first generation core solo, a small k unupgradable box with Wi-Fi a keyboard with just office like applications. Games will be relegated to the console. All the appliances will have internet connections so most 3rd party apps will be web based. Yes slashdot will scoff and be overall displeased by this but this direction would seem to make the most sense. As it would be more economical, people will not feel the need to upgrade every 3 years. Closed Source Developers would like it as it can reduce piracy of their software. Desktops will not Die, just as the Mainframe didn't die but the desktops would be more for people like the stereotypical slashdot user who uses more of the PC power then the rest of the population. Nothing says these appliance apps will not run on the desktops.

When developers can make money...

[cyclocommuter]

... writing software for it (Linux Desktop) then it might be ready. Or when when smallish companies which bankroll software figure out a way on how to make money of it. I am not talking Office software here but tax preparation and other small business software for Accounting, Billing, Inventory, etc. It may also help if a small company can hire developers that can develop desktop software on it in true RAD fashion without the need for these developers to know how to do it in C ala Linus.

Also when users of these software (outlined above) are confident that nothing will break after 6 months when it is time for them to upgrade to the latest build of Ubuntu or Simply Mepis, Mandriva, or whatever desktop distro it is they are using, then it is ready for the desktop.

Sorry Guys, It's Definitely NOT Ready

[Hercules Peanut]

No, I'm not trolling, I trying to clear the misconception. Linux just isn't ready.

Recently I built a new PC. That puts me in the above average user (not above avg /.) category immediately. I've used DOS, Windows everything, Mac OS everything and even Solaris, This time I tried Mint. It installed beautifully. It was easier and quicker to install than Windows.

Unfortunately, my mainstream Nvidia card did not have drivers and the pkg installer for Mint didn't work. Now what do I do. Well, I had to get out of X. Care to tell me how to do that in Mint? Someone had too. It's a multistep process requiring strange keyboard combinations using function keys. Then I had to run the installer. Double-clicking is intuitive these days "sh" isn't.

Well now my video card works but I can't map any drives and my computer is constantly flooding the network with queries (how embarrassing). Our IT department is wanting to know what I was doing. I don't know. I manage to figure out the circuitous route to accessing shared drives on the network but when I doubleclick on the openoffice document on one of those network drives, I see the open office splash screen but it never opens the document. I learn that there is more to do than just "get to" the shared drives.

I finally gave up, formatted the drive and installed Windows. I'm not a hacker or even an overclocker anymore. I'm an administrator now and the final straw was when I realized that work was piling up on me while I fiddled with my OS. Playing with linux was cool but when it all boiled down to it, I had work to do and just wanted to get my job done.

I know, that's just one distro but how does anyone know which distro is right? I tried another whose name I cannot remember. It was worse. Sure, if I had a linux guy around I could have had him set it up for me but that's the point. You need a linux guy and until that changes, it's just not ready IMHO.

Yes, it is my humble opinion but I seem to recall that Red Hat shares it. I'm glad to see linux. I'm glad it's getting better. It's a great thing for the computer industry and will only get better as long as we don't delude ourselves into believing it is something that it is not. At least not yet.

P.S.
For all of you who have "set up a machine" for their parents and it "works just fine", I submit that requiring an expert to set up a system for an end user is the very definition of "not ready". In today's world that end user (even Mom) might need to change something, install something new, access something different and then things require an expert to "ssh in to fix things".

Re:Sorry Guys, It's Definitely NOT Ready

[Hymer]

For all of you who have "set up a machine" for their parents and it "works just fine" our parents wouldn't be able to install Windows so your statement is pure bullshit.
Many people can't even restore their system from a system restore CD. Windows is only "Ready for the Desktop" because it is preinstalled, installation of a real (retail) Windows is a real pain in the ass (this is true for every version from 3.x to XP both incl., I don't do Windows any more so I don't know if it is true for Vista too). The only system that is Desktop Ready by your definition is OS X... but it is only so 'cause it is like an OEM Windows: all necessary drivers are included.

--

Linux is desktop ready. Whether you are ready for Linux or not, depends on your dependency on software based on Microsofts products.

Re:Sorry Guys, It's Definitely NOT Ready

[jedidiah]

IOW, a wanted to use a particular 3rd party product and it didn't have support.

This is a pretty simple situation actually. There's no need to overcomplicate it.

This simple situation doesn't have a resolution of course but that's not the problem.

YOU wasted time because you didn't pay attention to the painfully obvious.

Linux didn't waste your time. You chose to do that yourself.

Yeah, perhaps it takes an "expert" to "set up" a Linux box for a typical end user.
Guess what? All of those end users don't "set up" their Windows boxes either. They
all have someone else do it.

I said this to people 10 years ago right here: If some default out of the Linux
install doesn't do what you want of it, and you don't want to put extra effort
into it, then DON'T. Come back and try Linux again later sometime (or not). We're
not trying to enforce an alternate hegemony on anyone.

UI is an interesting problem

[Josh Booth]

My girlfriend's dad just got her a Mac, and for the first day I found that I had a vicious Mac envy. But on the second day of using it, I am ready to go back to my three year Dell with Kubuntu. The explanation is simple: Mac OS X looks great and is intuitive, but doesn't fit my workflow well. This is pretty much the same reasoning Linus has against GNOME--the stuff he wants to do is not trivially possible.

In most ways, GNU+Linux is ready for the desktop: it has almost all of the required applications, they provide the requisite features, and they work. These are the requirements for 80% of the people who use a computer: they just want something that works and are willing to learn, but just once. As long as you don't change anything, they are fine. These people would adapt to a KDE, GNOME, Mac OS X, Windows, or Sugar desktop equally well, for that matter. And the main reason is that they feel they have far too many other things that are important in their lives to worry about how efficient they are on their computer, regardless of how many hours of their life they could reclaim by investing another hour learning a new interface.

But those 20% of users who are power users are the ones who are worried about whether Linux is ready for the desktop. Once you didn't /need/ to do anything from the commandline, Linux was ready. But for those power users, they typically have some efficiency axe to grind (myself included). Linus complained that GNOME didn't let him map some mouse key to some obscure function (among others). Mac weenies demand that everything looks as though it works out of the box the first time, even though it really doesn't. Windows junkies want to be able to download some spyware-laden utility to magically give them 2 fps more on Quake or make the desktop do something goofy. I just want an orthogonal interface--is that too much to ask? Needless to say, these people will never be appeased.

It seems to me that one day, we will be able to combine all of these concepts programmatically, and the result would be a really wonderful piece of software. But that has got to be at least 20 years away.

Either way, GNU+Linux is ready for the desktop for most people, but the cost of retraining 80% of the computer-using population is high. That is why I thought it was great to install Linux by default on these tiny laptops, because it is extremely appropriate to use Linux over Windows XP to take advantage of the low power and storage, and people are willing to learn a new piece of hardware. But Micro$oft is quickly killing that idea with XP on the new EEE PCs. Oh well.

What do you really need to be "ready"?

[sircastor]

Interpreting "Ready for the Desktop" to mean "ready for an average computer user" is something that probably never happen for Linux... In fact, It won't happen for Mac OS X either. Years and years ago when I used to be a crazed Defender of the Apple Faith, I would scratch my head at Windows. It did things weird (to me), and after logically thinking it out, those things were often unnecessarily complicated. But when a windows user would need to know how to do something on a Mac, the method would always be bizarre to them. Even though the Mac way made more sense logically, and it was more intuitive, they had been taught to work a different way. People don't like change. They don't like learning new ways of doing old things (in general), especially if they are our Moms, Dads Grandparents, or Anyone else who doesn't work with technology regularly. So there are only two ways that Linux will be "ready for the desktop", or ready for the regular Joe-schmoe: 1) Linux behaves like windows 2) Windows becomes so uncommon that the interface and it's idiosyncrasies become non-standard I don't see either of those things happening in the near future.

Preaching to the choir

[westlake]

I have my parents running Ubuntu.

This line - or something very much like it - is woven into every Linux "conversion" story posted on Slashdot.

Meanwhile, a billion users worldwide somehow manage to run Windows without the free technical support of a resident geek.

Re:Preaching to the choir

[Rutulian]

I have my parents running Ubuntu.

This line - or something very much like it - is woven into every Linux "conversion" story posted on Slashdot.

Meanwhile, a billion users worldwide somehow manage to run Windows without the free technical support of a resident geek.

O rly? I think you are looking through rose-tinted glasses...perhaps not considering yourself/friends "resident geeks" who can help out with computer problems. I know plenty of Windows users, and without "resident geeks" they would be completely helpless if something happened to their computer. The point is, Windows comes preinstalled on every computer and it is something people use as a result. They aren't using linux because they aren't the type to go and try to install it. Even MacOS X wouldn't be used by people if they had to install it. So if somebody installs it and sets it up for them to use, they can happily use it without problems (specific software needs aside, of course).

How can we judge?

[bsDaemon]

I'll be 24 in a month, but have been using some varient of UNIX since I was 12 or 13. For half my life, my computer has either run FreeBSD or Linux (Slackware, RedHat, and lately LinuxMint because the only computer i have with me here right now is a Dell d830 and I'm absolutely reliant on Wifi and too lazy to cut firmware by hand), often in dual-boot, though I have occasionally been forced to use windows machines of opportunity. I also had a G4 iBook for a while, but I gave it to my sister because it pissed me off.

There has been a MARKED improvement in being able to plop my ass down and just do "windows" things on Linux in the past few years, however quite frankly I find it somewhat less usable than I did when I was in jr. high.

I used to have these incredibly elaborate .Xdefaults, .tcshrc, .bashrc, .dircolors and .vimrc files, which are now pretty much useless.

I haven't been able to get ANSI fonts like Nexus to work in Eterm and display colored BASH prompts properly since Red Hat 6.0.

Everything has some GUI interface to it now that rights configuration files in some way that I never would have had I been doing it by hand and then I'm afraid to do a hand edit, because something usually ends up breaking.

Frankly, it seems like the push in the last 5 years especially has been to try and make a free ripoff of Windows that isn't Windows and then try and get "average computer users" to switch, for some reason which isn't even clear to me -- so why it would be to them, I have not clue.

In 8th grade I was captain of my school's BASIC programing team to the Great Computer Challenge at ODU university (sort of like an ACM competition, only stupid), and I also competed in an engineering competition where I tossed a mousetrap car together the night before in about an hour and ended up coming in 2nd place, ahead of about 30 other people.

I took the money I won from the engineering competition and bought a book on C. I had some exposure to FreeBSD through an ISP shell account that I messed with, so my uncle gave me a copy of RH 4.1 or something so that I could get at the free dev tools and learn C. I was then captain of my high school's C team for 3 years.

I started using UNIX because I wanted to use UNIX, NOT because I wanted a "cheap version of Windows that wasn't Windows." Frankly, I think the dev community, and evangelist community, have gotten far, far away from "The UNIX Way," and in the process haven't even really gained what we sought -- which for some reason was the "can any random old person or idiot use this system without me having to be on call 24/7?"

Why random people would need a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system when all they want to do is chat on IM and watch DVDs is beyond me.

So, in the long and the short -- we barely know what non-geeks want, and apparently forgot why we wanted *nix in the first place. How can we judge if the system is "ready for the desktop, then?" It seemed just fine before...

The question is irrelevant

[SpinyNorman]

With Dell, and even Walmart, selling Linux on the desktop, it has undoubtedly already arrived.

Linux is also the desktop OS of choice for a whole new class of low-cost computers from the OLPC to the Asus "Eee PC", MSI Wind, etc.

I think the "desktop" goalposts are also moving... The future of mass-market home computers (or at least a very major segment of them) is surely more along the lines of the simple-to-use internet appliance with a launcher menu rather than the general-purpose install-your-own-software PC. In this environment you could care less what the OS is, anymore than you care what OS your DVD player, Tivo, or the bank's ATM machine is running.

"Good enough"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The "good enough" argument is a fair point, but for these specific examples, I respectfully disagree that they are even "good enough". Sure, if you're literally only writing a trivially formatted letter or resizing an image, they can do it, but of course, so can much simpler programs. The big problems come when you want to do things a little bit more advanced, where using a real word processor, spreadsheet or image editor is actually necessary.

It's not just the functionality, though that has some pretty serious limitations. I'm not sure how on-topic the specifics are in this thread, but if you're interested in OpenOffice in particular, go ahead and Google my user name and terms like "OpenOffice" on site:slashdot.org, and my previous detailed commentary is easy to find. It goes without saying that OpenOffice Writer is quite some way ahead of all the major OSS alternatives in features, at least on paper, so I think it's fair to use it as a benchmark of where the Linux+OSS world stands relative to a traditional Windows-based system.

More seriously, the big problem with a lot of everyday OSS applications is quality control. The unfortunate reality is that OpenOffice has always been horribly bug-ridden, often in quite fundamental ways, and worse, the dev team show no great inclination to fix some of these things even though they have been consistently highly voted in the bug tracker for years. If I have a word processor with a major selling point in PDF export, but PDF export is completely borked with OpenType fonts, that's a downer. Spreadsheets that can't sort data when the cells contain simple calculations are pretty broken, too. And so it goes, and so it has been with many other everyday OSS packages I've tried. Sure, Windows products are hardly immune from bugs, but at least the main features in major applications are normally usable. So, until this sort of thing is fixed in the major OSS applications, I find it hard to believe that any amount of "many eyes making all bugs shallow", "with the source code you can always do it yourself" advocacy will convince the average punter that Linux and the applications that run on it are ready to replace the typical Windows-based set-up in practice.

Re:Which version is ready?

[pxc]

You think Linux support for 64-bit is bad? Windows' 64-bit versions is incomplete at best. It's not ANY GNU/Linux distribution's fault that Adobe doesn't distribute any 64-bit Flash binaries.

The article contains the answer

[Rob Y.]

Windows has tons of commercial apps, which forces a huge chicken and egg dilemma on OEM's that might want to support Linux. That, plus they actually make a teeny bit of profit on the Windows OS.

OS/X has the Macintosh hardware behind it, so no OEM problems. Beyond that, they have some great mythology and some pretty good software.

Linux has... linux. It's great software, perfectly usable in many cases, but no compelling reason for OEM's to provide it. So, it's limited to geeks willing to install (often over a paid-for copy of Windows) and some businesses that understand the potential savings.

There was a brief glimmer of hope in the EeePC and it's copycats (all prodded by the OLPC). Pre-installed linux made perfect sense on low-end hardware intended to be sold cheap and for limited uses. Microsoft's caught on to this bit of momentum, and is attempting to squelch it with XP. It remains to be seen whether they'll succeed, though press accounts suggest they might.

It remains for other Open Source stuff (most specifically OOo) to make inroads as a real cross-platform money saver. Once businesses stop using MSOffice/Outlook, they can seriously consider ditching Windows. And they might have the clout to get the OEM's to do it.

Interestingly, OOo, because it's own 'yet another cross-platform toolkit' is not shared by other software, it is nicely poised to be distro-agnostic on Linux. That could be a plus.

Not ready? only in the context of what you know

[gelfling]

Linux is only not ready in the context of what you already expect Windows to be able to do. Linux will never be Windows therefore the people who insist on 'ready' being exactly like Windows will never be happy.

Mac isn't Windows and it never will be. But it has its own advantages. It has its own learning curve. Same with Linux. If you never saw a Windows machine you would learn Linux differently and you would have an entirely different set of criticisms.