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Why Linux Is Not Yet Ready For the Desktop
An anonymous reader writes "Every now and then a new- or old-media journalist tries to explain to everyone why Linux is not yet ready for the desktop. However all those men who graduated from their engineering universities years ago have only superficial knowledge about operating systems and their inner works. An unknown author from Russia has decided to draw up a list of technical reasons and limitations hampering Linux domination on the desktop." Some of the gripes listed here really resonate with me, having just moved to an early version of Ubuntu 9.10 on my main testing-stuff laptop; it's frustrating especially that while many seemingly more esoteric things work perfectly, sound now works only in part, and even that partial success took some fiddling.
Without the big labels like Valve developing their titles on Linux, you aren't going to see Linux widely used in desktop soon.
New Economic Perspectives
The first alpha of 9.10 was released a couple days ago with new kernel, new gcc, lots of new libraries... you should not be surprised things don't work well yet. Jaunty seems pretty stable to me. Minor issues with my intel video card, but works fine for all my daily work.
They are indoctrinated to a world of malware, reboots and crashes. They are convinced that's just the way PC's are, so they stick with the devil they know rather than attempt to learn anything new. They refuse to open their minds to anything else. These people will cling onto Windows well after Microsoft go bankrupt and no longer provide updates. These people will sit securely in their own bubble and assume they are safe and secure. If it wasn't for the fact that EVERY user gets the fallout from Microsoft botnets regardless of their OS, I'd say leave them be.
There is also the fact that web-based is the new way of making money from software. No piracy since its mostly server-side, lace it with ads and nobody complains about adware.
But people do complain about not being able to access web applications from notebook computers while away from Internet access, such as on the road or in a restaurant that does not offer free Wi-Fi.
between GNOME and KDE, and the mainstream distributions (Novel ubuntu) promote GNOME/Mono.
So when somebody writes a new app, there are instantly forks of the same thing in: GTK, QT, Mono, PyGTK, Java, and one in C for FVWM.
So people just write libraries and the major distroes cherry pick the crappest frontends.
It's simple. If you make $40bn per year you can invest $100M to eleminate the competition and that can be used to promote crapware FOSS...
If you're not using it now, you probably never will. As a long time (and current) Linux user, I have come across all these issues first-hand, as has every other Linux user, developer and advocate out there. That they are still problems even though they've been known for years - sometimes decades shows that they will never be addressed, or fixed.
Linux is a hobby systyem. The code is donated mostly by amateurs (or people working for rewards other than money - for example the recognition of their peers) and is therefore not within the normal disciplines of IT developemt. If you tell a Linux developer their code is crap - or the application they have written is junk, they'll just walk. As they will if you ask them to do things they don't want to: such as write a manual, fix bugs, add (or remove) features.
Basically guys, this is as good as it gets. Live with it or go elsewhere.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The TFA is a worthless troll, even more so than usual in these "Linux is not ready for the desktop" Slashdot articles.
It has the usual list of ignorant complaints (oh no, there is a choice of distributions, boo hoo! oh no, there is a choice of GUI toolkits, boo hoo!), but some points stand out in their sheer stupidity.
"Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard keyloggers and against running malicious software (Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity). sudo is very easy to circumvent (social engineering). sudo still requires CLI (see clause 4.)"
Really?
Who admits these articles to the front page anyway?
we discovered a new way to think.
and I run it ubuntu 9.4 exclusively on my home machine. It is an excellent OS with some bugs and does occasionally does something completely random. It has its faults but that isn't the reason why it isn't ready for the normal user. The reason is that the average computer user is an idiot. I"m talking about those people who freak out when there isn't a gui and mainly uses their machine to write word documents, email and play games. These users want something that works and when it doesn't someone to call up and complain to/swear at.
Add in M$ market dominance and you have two blockades that are not going to be cracked anytime soon. However this is a good thing! As long as the idiots run windows, there will be orders of magnitude less viruses for Linux.
Zero games? Tell that to World of Warcraft, which seems to work fine for me on Ubuntu, straight out of the box, through wine.
The article states that Wine does not run every popular video game designed for Windows. You just got lucky in your choice of games; families with children clamoring for a specific incompatible title don't have that luxury.
One of the reasons Linux isn't ready for the desktop is the attitude of developers. An example is the current Kubuntu.
Many people who did take the plungs with desktop Linux settled, reasonably, on the mature, functional KDE-3.5. But if those people upgrade to current Kubuntu Jaunty Jackelope (one wonders if 9.10 will just be called "Silly Gay Name"), they'll find their familiar desktop -- nowhere. Instead, they'll find KDE-4.2, which isn't the atrocity that 4.0 and 4.1 were, but which still ain't ready for real work.
It would be a simple thing to support both and to allow people to migrate gradually to the new KDE, as it and its applications become more usable. But that's not being done and the developers and packagers are actually kind of snotty about it.
One *can* get KDE-3.5 for the current Kubuntu and Ubuntu, but it involves unofficial and semi-official (whatever that means) repositories and substantially more work.
Users, especially those who want to use Linux for real work, might end up thinking that Linux developers in general are kind of jerks. That impression can be hard to refute.
...but insists that reproduction of any kind is prohibited without permission. So I won't quote from the article. I will just refer to it.
You might want to refer him to the concept of "fair use".
Seems like we've had this exact argument a thousand times. This list at least makes mostly good points. But it still misses the mark many times. Particularly annoying is the absolutism in so many statements, like:
This is obviously false. There are games on Linux. Many are open sourced, and some commercials games are available on Linux (e.g. World of Goo). Now I wouldn't have argued if he had said "Very few games." But instead he tried to make his point punchier by being absolute... and this weakens his whole argument by introducing lies.
And as usual the author prefaces by mentioning that this is some sort of relative comparison with Windows, yet points out problems that exist with all operating systems, like "A galore of software bugs across all applications", or "huge shutdown time" (I've timed it on dual-boot systems and for me Kubuntu was faster than Windows XP. YMMV.) and "poor documentation" (does Windows come with an awesome manual I wasn't made aware of? No. For both Win and Linux you end up searching online. Both have tons of 3rd-party documentation.)...
And then there are kind nonsensical complaints like "don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual" Does Windows let you do this easily? The heading said that this was an analysis of whether Linux is ready for the Desktop and instead the author injects one of his pet-peeves about configuring Linux as a server?
And then there are spurious assumptions used to justify complaints, like "Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity". We've had this argument many times... undoubtedly the low market-share of Linux helps keep viruses off the platform. But there is also plenty of evidence that it is robust security-wise (e.g. infection rates for servers). At a minimum it's not the settled question the author implies.
I could go on and on. No doubt this thread will tear-apart other statements from TFA. It's too bad, because many of the points made are very much correct, and deserve attention. But it seems that whenever someone tries to compile lists such as this, they end up not only making good points about what needs work, but throwing in their own anecdotal annoyances and personal viewpoints, which muddies the whole argument...
The desktop/laptop is NOT dead.
The reason is simple: people don't trust computing "over the cloud," because your device will be essentially useless if you are in an area with little to no Internet connectivity. Besides, you can get a netbook computer for under US$400 nowadays, and with improving technology those netbooks will soon store as much as 250 to 320 GB of data on the hard drive in the machine itself, way more than enough to store local data for business documents, spreadsheets, and smaller presentation files.
You're forgetting about specialist applications like audio/music editing and production, video editing, and advanced image editing. Doing this stuff with web-based software isn't feasible, so as long as people do stuff like that, there will be some form of desktop.
The parent poster is not talking about corporate use, or geeks like us, he's talking about the folks at home. You know the other NINETY percent of the market.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Standard Asound driver.
You miss the point: I did get it to work. That means it could always work, from the beginning, but Ubuntu did not include the correct hardware recognition to set up the system. It also provides no easy method for me to report back those settings for others. If it was truly a manufacturer problem then I would still not be having sound.
That means the moment I got it to work I stopped fiddling- and every time I get the little red upgrade spot I hesitate and think: Is this the reboot that kills it?
Most of the software I work(ed) with is still to get heavy duty tasks done are still very much on my computer. CAD, programming, mathematica-type programs... not that I want them all to be, just how it is with current internet pervasiveness and speed.
I like using Google Apps because I don't have to worry about keeping files updated across multiple computers. I think Google is safer than carrying a tangle of USB sticks about. If the file is that important or secret, I stick it onto a computer that has absolutely no net access, no modem, and no ethernet connected to it, no wireless, etc.
There are more reasons to like net apps than just being clueless. Besides the aforementioned syncing problem with files, services like mint.com provide, say, an iPhone user a convenient look at their finances impossible with a regular desktop/notebook unless you're really regimented.
That's a decent insight. However, I have no problem with people making money on software that way, as long as software patents don't block competition. What's more problematic with me is being at the whim of the software service provide at any moment to hold your data hostage and your account in their hands. I had enough experiences with ebay's arbitrariness to make me wary. That's why I do keep a backup of the google documents (and important emails too, as webmail is the essentially the same thing with the same pitfalls as any web hosted app, although more comfortable to many because it's been around a bit longer)
While the interface is important, I think many like the convenience and lack of carrying files around like I said earlier, and that will be hard to replicate for any desktop app.
You are effectively saying I *should* use Linux
*because* hardware manufacturers have a problem.
Er. That doesn't make sense.
I don't care WHERE the problem is. I am a USER and
I want my computer to WORK. As a user I ought not
to even KNOW the difference between software and
hardware, let alone the feud between the
manufacturing organization and the Free
programmer. Let alone justify my use of the
software with some kind of support-of-the-little-guy argument.
I am thankful to developers, but those same
developers also tried to convince me
that Linux was more useful
than it really was and provided a half-baked
solution. They were not really honest
and you don't sound like you are going to be
honest with the user either.
I'd rather pay poolah and give no thanks
and get something that works.
And don't come with that "Free" is not "free"
kwap. In PRACTICE free and Free have turned
out to be the same thing.
1999 called, they want to know what percentage of desktop users are using Linux.
Very little. Not just because TINC, but because those who wold speak up for Linux know better than to equate Linux with Ubuntu.
Then with what distribution of Linux-for-the-desktop should the promoters of Linux-for-the-desktop equate Linux-for-the-desktop? If not Ubuntu, then what?
Is that why Linux Desktop is such a blazing success right now ?
Please stop talking about bad support of devices in linux, but talk about stupid hardware manufacturers.
Regardless of who's to blame, the fact remains that it's "a problem with Linux on the desktop".
I'm pretty much OS-agnostic. I ran a dual-boot Windows XP/Ubuntu 8.04 system for over a year and found both had their strengths and weaknesses. If I had to choose one OS, it would HAVE to be Windows (and in fact, I just scrubbed Ubuntu from my hard disk at the weekend, leaving Windows XP SP3 as the sole OS). All my musical hardware and software will only work under Windows or OS X and I ain't buying a Mac when I've got a perfectly stable and usable Windows PC already.
Bad device support is the single biggest factor working against Linux adoption on home machines. Not everyone with a PC can perform all their computer tasks using an office suite, browser and e-mail client. Lexmark printer ? Cellphone with only a Windows sync client on the supplied disk ? Ditto for a digital camera. TV tuner card ? Webcam ?
Squirrel!
Linux is a hobby system
So wait, what does this mean, exactly? It's a hobby system that's cute to fiddle with then turn it off when I want to do "real" work? Like working with a database system that holds hundreds of millions of rows, used every day? That's in an Oracle database, running on a Linux machine.
Is my Tivo a "hobby" system? Does TomTom only make "hobby" devices ("you didn't get where you're going? Oh well, you know it's just a hobby system, right?"). I guess I shouldn't expect much from the routers, phones, and other devices that have put Linux at the core of their stack. I mean, it's just a hobby, right?
So what is a "professional" system to you? Windows? Sure, it's used a lot of professional capacities, sure there's a lot of software available for it, but are you saying it's somehow more "professional" than Linux? Why is that? Because it's written by Microsoft? Is Microsoft somehow more professional than Oracle or IBM?
Your post is breathtaking in its ignorance, and I know I'm doing myself no favors by feeding the trolls, but *come* *on*...at least a descent job of flame baiting would latch on to some obvious, specific weakness and exploit it, rightly or wrongly. This is post is just raving.
But why are Linux enthusiasts hoping for a future of Linux on the Desktop (TM)?
I mean, I am the one of the mystic, claimed-by-some-to-be-nonexistent "Linux-exclusive" users you've heard of, and I like it with a passion. However I don't understand why people like me are busy trying to push Linux to the Joe Q. Users. Is it because that a Linux future must be better than something else? But how do we know for sure? Even if we were, then why should we be pushing it for some global acceptance?
And yes, I know the technical advantages of Linux that could be beneficial to average users. I know the ideals for which Linux claims to stand and I think they are fine, but on the other hand something being fine doesn't necessarily imply that we should be pushing it everywhere. You may want to share your joyful experience with your new shiny $DISTRO desktop but everyone has his/her own definition of joyfulness.
In other words, I value a future of Everyone Happy with His/Her Own Fucking Favorate Operating System far greater than one of "Linux on the Desktop". It's all about choice, huh? We are supposed to be the more technical-savvy group so we should have understood our own needs (which means I need what I need but I don't necessarily need what $BIG_GREED_CORPORATION tells me to need), AND that ours are not necessarily shared by others, right?
Thanks for listening to my rant. I apology for the time I made you wasted in reading this post.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
On the desktop,in the last couple of years especially, Ubuntu has driven it a long way forwards, and I enjoy trying each new release. But several fundamental things still don't work well enough and the help when things go wrong is still fairly awful.
Printing - still too hard to get up and running.
Wifi connectivity - my laptop 'just works' for any required length of time with a solid Wifi connection in Windows at home, but in several distros of Linux it has to re-establish a connection every couple of minutes.
Battery life on laptops still sucks relative to both XP and Windows 7.
Suspend/resume, and Hibernation/resume. In Windows I just fold the laptop and *know* it will close down cleanly, and come back when I open it. USB, sound, video - all will still be working when it comes back. Not so in Linux.
Yes, I as a computer user and engineer of over 20 years experience can get Ubuntu to work for me. But it's just too hard to be worthwhile. And it's a shame, but I certainly can't recommend the technophobe people I support (family, friends) switch to Linux as things are.
Just a few reasons why Windows isn't really ready for the desktop either:
1.1 Insanely difficult to set up volume levels, audio recording ... and in some situations even audio output.
1.2 Highly confusing, not self-explanatory mixer settings.
1.3 By default the volume levels are not set properly (no audio output/no sound recording).
2. Kernel Level GUI making security a nightmare.
4. It should be possible to configure everything via simple GUI which is still not a case for too many situations and operations require registry edits or hacks with 3rd party software.
5. Problems stemming from high windows popularity and closed source nature:
5.1 Too many duplicate software titles, crapware which duplicates the features of existing software getting bundled with PCs. Massive lack of reuseable code. Many programmers reinvent the wheel badly due to lack of suitable libraries/backends.
5.2 Incomplete or unstable drivers for some hardware. Problems setting up some hardware.
5.2.1 A lot of web cameras still do not work without badly written proprietary drivers, often unavailable for Vista or even XP. Many devices with the same chipset ship with their own drivers and more annoyingly there own poorly written proprietary software.
5.2.2 There's no standard webcam/TV card viewing software.
5.4 It's impossible to watch Divx movies without downloading extra Codecs which Windows won't find for you.
5.5 Questionable patents and legality status. Bad record of abuse of monopolies and unfair practice against competitors.
6. Poor or almost missing regression testing in Window kernel (and, alas, in other closed Source software too) leading to a situation when new versions of windows may become totally unusable for some hardware configurations (software suspend doesn't work, crashes, unable to boot, networking problems, video tearing, etc.)
7. A galore of software bugs across all applications. Just look into some of the CERT advisories which have been issued for Windows.
8. Poor interoperability between applications and their components. E.g. many kernel features get a decent userspace support years after introduction.
9. General slowness: just compare bootup/login times between a Windows PC installed 2 years ago and a Linux one.
9.1 Huge shutdown/suspend/hibernate/restore time.
10. Poor documentation.
11. Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard keyloggers and against running malicious software. UAC is very very easy to circumvent (social engineering). Such a vast amount of the OS running in kernel space makes it far easier to exploit.
12. A very bad backwards and forward compatibility.
12.1 Old applications often fail to work in new Windows versions. Compatibility modes not always reliable and quite daunting for novice users.
Gee Whiz! I didn't realize my desktop isn't working. Month after month and year after year it felt like it worked just fine.
Just wanted to say, whilst making note that I am strongly against cloud computing, that the first spreadsheet programs were probably very inflexible too. Things like macro's and massively complex formulae probably weren't available early on. I don't actually remember that, I net have a use for spreadsheets until about 4 years ago, but it is something to think about.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
But how many end users actually ever need to use regedit compared with CLI on Linux?
I've never seen a bigger piece of flamebait than this article. Stopped reading it half-way through cuz it's just LOADED with misinformation.
Viruses don't matter anymore. It's all about trojans now. A stupid person using Ubuntu is just as easy to infect with a trojan as a stupid person using Windows is.
The question is which anecdote echoes most readers' experience.
Crap. The people who "can't use Linux", cannot use Windows either. I eat better because of it. They break their pre-installed version (usually within a few months). Then they pay someone like myself to re-install Windows, and all the drivers and software they need.
If you give them a linux system pre-installed and configured (a thing you can buy from Dell and others now), they are able to use it with the same level of functionality. They can surf teh interwebs, play music, and watch videos.
Slashdot has been running "Is Linux Ready For The Desktop?" stories pretty much forever. We could go back several years and find threads saying pretty muh the same things.
The question is wrong. It isn't so much "Is Linux Ready for the Big Dance?" as it is "Is Anyone Gonna Ask Linux to the Big Dance?" For instance, while it may or may not be the fault of Linux that most hardware vendors do not provide linux drivers, the fact is that they don't. If someone can't use their hardware with Linux, pointing the finger of blame isn't going to make that hardware work.
Linux lacks many (most?) of the commercial products used by other platforms. Why? Because the perception exists that Linux users won't buy commerical products. Whether that perception is accurate is irrelevant.
My own take: The more tightly an OS is associated with a specific hardware platform, the eaier it is for that vendor to control the quality and reliability of the users' experience. Due to the nature of its development culture, Linux stands farther away from hardware platforms than do Windows and, obviously, OS X. The Unix-y ability to Linux to run on many hardware flavors is a double-edged sword.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I suspect what you are really saying is that it is hard to get the cut price "designed for Windows" printers to work. Well, surprise! You can't blame a non-Windows OS for not supporting a printer when part of the firmware is embedded in a Windows driver and it is crippled by design. Buy a mainstream office printer from a mainstream manufacturer and you should have no problems.
I don't disagree with your other comments, btw, and I run Windows on my netbook to allow several legacy programs without Wine to run. But GDI printers are an abortion.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Guys, everyone responding to the parent, his gripe is not that cut/paste doesn't work.
His gripe is that when you click on the URL bar in Firefox-Linux, it doesn't automatically highlight the entire text so he can paste over the whole thing right away.
Personally, I think this is a stupid argument and a windows failure. I don't want to have to multi click to put my cursor at a specific point. This is a bad UI decision on MS's part and is a Windows behavior, not FF). And it's easily fixed by double clicking in Firefox-Linux.
the average user just doesn't give a shit and is unwilling if not incapable of tweaking the OS to accomplish otherwise simple tasks.
Absolutely. You've hit the nail right on the head. 95% of users out there are not going to RTFM, will not open the command prompt, and will not edit a config file. Not because they're stupid, or lazy - but because it's not their job. And the sooner developers realize this, the better.
It's not a question of "how can we make the stupid users figure out that 1% of the application experience so we don't have to code a step-by-step GUI configuration util for it?", it's a question of "how do we understand that the secretary/doctor/lawyer/manager *expects* the machine to work just like every other machine in his/her universe?".
The problem is not that the average office user / home user is stupid. The problem is that they're used to their coffee-maker, microwave, fax machine, and calculator being 100% operational out-of-the-box, and the computer should not be any different.
There is a significant difference in the mentality of Joe Q. User and Jim Q. Developer when it comes to the question of what's acceptable in a computer application, and until we IT professionals suspend our hubris for a minute and try to work out a solution that "just plain works", we'll keep running into the same brick wall and wondering why it's still there.
Of course, this is IMHO, YMMV, and so on.
P.S. Someone mentioned a dearth of audio software for Linux. Here's a small list: http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/sound_and_music/59815/#habracut
Google Transation: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhabrahabr.ru%2Fblogs%2Fsound_and_music%2F59815%2F%23habracut&sl=ru&tl=en&history_state0=
Many of his points are just embarrassing. I don't get it, what pride can you take in showing that you tried a hobbyist operating system that flies in the hands of a master and then demonstrating all the areas you failed to comprehend/jury rig ?
Its not supposed to work straight out the box, because you are supposed to find the way to use with in symbiosis - if you are a paid up windows user, please don't complain when you bring home a free DIY airplane and you glue the decals on the windscreen.
Yes, but corporate use drives home use. That's the reason I own a Windows PC today instead of a Mac or a Linux box. I'm a UNIX Systems Administrator who mostly works on Linux boxes and I actually have to use Windows to do all the parts of my job that do not involve me directly typing commands on the command line.
Office (Outlook, Visio, Word, Excel) is #1, but there are a lot of other tools that are either Windows only, or they are so much easier to use on Windows that they might as well drop their Linux versions.
Yeah, I could get OpenOffice, but then, I can run that on my Windows box too. I might as well just use MS Office, as my workplace pays for that.
On the Desktop, everything that Linux distros have, Windows also has. And many things that Linux desktops don't have, Windows boxes do.
I'm entirely capable of creating a Linux desktop that I could get by with, but why would I? Windows has business and games which are the top two reasons for me to have a computer at home.
For non-administrator types, creating a usable home Linux desktop is much less compelling as they probably need to use Excel or Word and have never used or even heard of OpenOffice. Needless to say, they will be annoyed and frustrated when their Linux distro pulls out one of its patented "only half-works" issues on something that should be taken for granted like sound or graphics.
Home desktop use is maybe 90% of the market, but what do you think put the PC in the home in the first place?
I have a copy of Vista, it took three tries to install it, and it took me about an hour to get it looking like XP again and to turn off UAC. It sucks up RAM like no tomorrow. But it doesn't matter. I wanted DirectX 10 and my box has 6GB of RAM, upgradeable to 12, so I really don't care. I could have a Linux box that is built on a better platform that will make far better use of my system resources, but how would it be anything more than a toy?
0. Premise: proprietary software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You may argue eternally, but complicated software like games, 3D applications, databases, CADs(Computer-aided Design), etc. which cost millions of dollars and years of man-hours to develop will never be open sourced. Software patents are about to stay forever.
And how this has to do with Linux?
1. No reliable sound system,
Alsa?
no reliable unified software audio mixing,
PulseAudio?
many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headache.
Probably refering to the old proprietary flash plugin? The new one doesn't have that problem, and if you care about hackers not entering your computer, you shouldn't use the old one anyway. By the way, we also have gnash now.
1.1 Insanely difficult to set up volume levels, audio recording ... and in some situations even audio output.
1.2 Highly confusing, not self-explanatory mixer settings.
1.3 By default many distros do not set volume levels properly (no audio output/no sound recording).
Still ignoring the efforts PulseAudio. Now some people are upset because the volume mixer is TOO simple (btw I agree with them).
2. X system: 2.1 No good stable standardized API for developing GUI applications (like Win32 API). Both GTK and Qt are very unstable and often break backwards compatibility.
Pure BS. Qt is extremely stable, much better than MFC and sure A LOT much better than USER.EXE. In fact, even many commercial applications for Windows are starting to use it.
2.2 Very slow GUI (except when being run with composite window managers on top of OpenGL).
Perhaps repainting can be a bit slower, but try watching TV on Windows using any commercially available software of your choice, then do the same on Linux, and after that let's talk about slowness again. Btw any graphics card produced after 2005 is able to do compositing.
2.3 Many GUI operations are not accelerated. No analogue of GDI or GDI+. Text antialiasing and other GUI operations are software rendered by GUI libraries (GTK->Cairo/QT->Xft).
No analogue of GDI? You mean we cannot draw lines and circles in Linux? Sounds new to me. No acceleration? See EXA and XRender. Xft renders fonts via XRender. No GDI+? See Arthur, Cairo.
2.4 Font rendering is implemented via high level GUI libraries, thus: 2.4.1 fontconfig fonts antialiasing settings cannot be applied on-the-fly.
Thus: each application can use the font rendering engine to do whatever it wants with fonts, other than drawing strings on the screen.
2.4.2 Fonts antialiasing only works for certain GUI toolkits (see 2.1).
False. Xft is part of X11 and can be used by every application. Even old-timers like xterm uses it. There's absolutely no reason to use server-side fonts anymore. What applications are you talking about, xbill?
2.4.3 Default fonts (often) look ugly.
De gustibus non disputandum est.
2.4.3.1 (Being resolved) By default most distros disable advanced fonts antialiasing.
That's because Microsoft owns a patent over sub-pixel rendering. Send your complaints to them.
2.4.3.2 By default most distros come without good or even compatible with Windows fonts.
Install msttcorefonts.
2.5 No double buffering.
We have composite these days. Before that, we had the X Double Buffering extension.
3. Problems stemming from the vast number of Linux distributives: 3.1 No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A
"Drop to the terminal", you've already lost most users.
I appreciate the power of the terminal, and many of the folks on this site also do, but users simply don't care about the "power" of it, they care about simplicity, straightforwardness, and software.
Linux isn't yet simple, especially when people are used to doing things in Windows or even Mac (a bit), those two platforms work surprisingly alike for installing software (double click!), for finding software (go to some website, download it), etc. When a user is used to going to Mozilla.org and downloading the latest Firefox, and then tries doing that in Linux only to find that they have to drop to the terminal and do a install, they already are ready to wipe and format and put Windows back on so they can play their games and surf the web.
Windows has taken years to get a cohesive (and still not quite there yet) and unified GUI. Mac took a long time too, and it's pretty darned good. Linux is a compilation of GUI, and while it's pretty good LOOKING, it's not unified across every window, every application, etc. Plus, breaking the habit of people downloading apps from the web and going to repositories is counter intuitive for a lot of people.
If you want to make a dent where Windows is king, you have to adopt some of the peculiarities of the OS in order to adopt. You give them training wheels and the rest they learn on their own. If you fail to provide that, then they just give up and say it sucks -- like the returns OEMs show from getting *nix laptops. Even with distros that work out of the box from OEMs, people are returning them. Sure the distro can be done better, but the odds of that happening are slim, so my thought is that Linux itself needs to change at its core to help the users bridge the gap.
But I've been hearing "Linux on the desktop" for so many years now I just laugh about it now. Given the treatment of non-Linux users by Linux users (berating, combative, defensive, angry, etc), there's good reason why it never catches on, and it's because the userbase for Linux are a bunch of assholes.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
... was the point of the article going over your head. The key phrase (from your own post) "hobbyist operating system". The point of TFA was that Linux isn't ready for the masses, not that it isn't ready for geeks. Sure, it "flies in the hands of a master". The point is that very few people are masters, and very few have the time or inclination to become masters.
Right. Which is why it's not ready for the desktop (at least for ordinary mortals).
At the time, I estimated that we were around the 50% mark toward that goal (lots of missing device drivers, buggy OpenOffice, no high-quality equivalent tools for photo editing, page layout, video editing, and much more). In short, anyone using a Linux desktop would need to have another machine to accomplish these other tasks.
In recent weeks, I have installed SLED 11, openSuse 11.1, Fedora 10, and Ubuntu 9.04 on several netbooks, notebooks, and boxes. My goal (once again) was to make one of these systems my everyday workhorse machine, one that I could recommend to friends and family for all of their computing tasks. While the situation is much improved from three years ago, we are still quite a way from reaching that elusive 100% goal. For myself and my family, I would guess that we are in the 80's, but gamers would give a much lower score.
Installation and setup is vastly improved. The desktop layouts, particularly GNOME, are reasonably familiar to users of other platforms. Individual applications, notably OpenOffice and Firefox, have come a long way. The usability of system update mechanisms ranges from the smooth (Ubuntu) to the challenging (SuSE). (Development tools are outstanding, but that isn't the issue here.)
However, I had to install restricted drivers to make wireless work, had to install commercially licensed Flash to be able to view many websites, and still found myself without programs for video editing, page layout, and photo editing that compared well with their commercial counterparts (e.g., Scribus vs. MS Publisher or Pages). Watching commercial DVDs occasionally required the use of terminal commands to download and install software, not to mention the associated legal issues. Webcams and microphones were unreliable at best, making it impossible to do video chat or broadcasting (e.g. uStream) with web-based applications.
So I renew the challenge to make it possible for average computer users to do 100% of their work using open source software. That means moving development efforts up from the operating system and infrastructure level to concentrate on creating high quality, easily used applications. That also rules out using WINE or VirtualBox to run proprietary apps.
Let's create personas and scenarios for different types of users, identify their needs, and build the needed applications and drivers. Let's also continue to push device makers to supply Linux drivers. Let's find a workable solution for Flash and SWF-based web content. (Gnash isn't quite there.) In that way, we can make some progress toward that magic 100% number that would allow people to do all of their computing on a Linux desktop.
Time makes more converts than reason
You got it. The only thing wrong with Linux today is that it's still developed in R&D mode. The distros, desktop environments, etc. are still changing too fast. This is a byproduct of the open source development model, and it's the reason Linux got as complete as it is without billions of investment.
But for general desktop usage, R&D mode won't hack it. And at this point there's not much good reason for Linux to stay in R&D other than inertia. Sure there are a few things that haven't shaken out a good desktop standard yet. As has been mentioned before, the presence of multiple sound and video API's is an ongoing problem. So much so that KDE4 built Phonon to wrap the 'native' API's in a standard one apps can code to (and lots of apps lost functionality in the process of converting to that least common denominator API).
Hopefully, the painful transition from KDE3 to KDE4 was the last 'total rewrite' in that project. And if that accounts for the pain, then it'll prove well worth it. GNOME seems about ready to undertake a similar wholesale update.
What would be wonderful would be for the next development cycle to be concentrated on really nailing down such things and targeting all the major toolkits toward the same underlying plumbing. And then keeping it the same for a good, long time (at least from the app's point of view). Then maybe the 3rd party apps would start to appear. As it stands, WINE is probably the most stable API available under Linux, and (no disrespect toward WINE) that's not a good thing.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
We are finally beginning to see Windows improving because there are things that Linux does better. I would think every Windows fan would be cheering Linux on. Most of these criticisms are valid in that they are not so much about Linux having a Windows look and feel but where Linux falls short of good user interface principles as a system. What we could do here is prioritize the issues that he has taken the time to identify. We can consider when to submit bug reports. Ask developers questions. Decide which weaknesses are strengths. Talk to hardware vendors. Take a look at the code. Submit patches. Test new code. I dual boot Windows rarely.
I find the security model points disturbing though. Windows is a rather awkward system to trust with anything valuable. I only run it on my hardware after disconnecting the internet.
These criticisms are golden nuggets. For the most part they can be fixed. They are just a few bumps in the road of the journey to world domination.
I read until I hit the part about Linux having a bad setup for security, laughed, and stopped reading. That was enough to let me know that this guy is clearly an idiot. Doesn't he realize that the reason so many people run into security problems in Xp is because they run as admin? No viruses for Linux ONLY because of its low popularity? Umm, it is the number one web server, and it still maintains a good security reputation. It is the number one embedded OS, and it still maintains a good security reputation. It is run by companies like Google and Yahoo, and still maintains a good security rep. Trust me, I should know. Linux is much more secure than Windows. Windows Vista is the only version of Windows that is reasonably secure, until you turn off the annoying warnings.
Open Source: Eroding the Digital Divide
For many of us who are curious, but not programmers, Linux really is basically a hobby system. It's the appeal of figuring out how things work, that brings a lot of us over from M$.
I didn't expect my laptop's Ubuntu 9.0.4 to work perfectly on install. In fact, it took me three days to figure out what I needed to do to get a DVD to play. I would never dream of recommending Linux to less-savvy people as a replacement OS - but I did get a sense of achievement out of getting it set up for myself. So for most of us who aren't trained IT professionals, it's like hauling home a broken-down car in order to teach yourself some mechanic skills. If that's not a hobby system, I don't know what is.