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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.
The future is web based. Endless bloat, inefficient javascript and the latency of accessing remote systems. Why will people accept such a system? because a lot of people never learned to use a desktop, they learned how to use a web browser. Anything outside the web browser looks complicated to them.
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. Give it a few years and ads will no longer be served up by dedicated domains you can easily block.
If client side desktop computing is to survive the interface has to become more iPhony. Ordinary folk love the touchy feeley colourful, childish looking animated interface of the iPhone so the future is in projects like Hildon. I personally hate the iPhone's interface but thats alright, if its Linux or BSD I'll just install a minimalist window manager which there should always be plenty of.
That and "niche" applications.
The only reason there is a Windoze box in my house is that my wife is a quilter. The current version of Electric Quilt (AFAICT) will not run acceptably under WINE. There is no reasonable FOSS equivalent.
I don't know why I bother upgrading. They say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and in the case of Ubuntu that has proven to be the case every single time because something always breaks upon upgrade. This most recent upgrade to Jaunty completely disabled my ability to put my laptop to sleep because the screen now goes dark and I can't see what is happening and what is stopping it from sleeping. No matter what I do I can't get the screen to come back on, so the only recovery is a forced shutdown via the power button. Now I can only shut it down and reboot it - so much for uptime statistics!
Anyway, something always breaks. This is, however, not so different than any other operating system upgrade. Unless you have well tested hardware, that is nothing too bleeding edge new and nothing too old (e.g. my IBM T-30 laptop) then it is likely you will have some problems each time you upgrade. I know I have had my share of problems when going from Win98 to XP that a few internet searches easily resolved. I guess it also helps when you don't upgrade that often - it has been years since I have touched my Windows installation and yet every 6 months I am upgrading my Linux and bitching every time when something breaks. I should just leave the freakin' thing alone!!!
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...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.
In the last paragraph the author talks about implementations of SMB and AD (active directory?) not being available, then excludes samba. I with he would say why. Samba seems pretty good in that area.
In addition I would like to say that my wife's corolla is crap because it can't carry 1000 kilos of stuff the way my van does. Also the Boeing 747 is crap because it has a bigger radar cross section than a B2 stealth bomber.
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The driver problem is a variation of the chicken and the egg.
Linux is not a large part of the desktop market thus many manufacturers do not bother writing drivers for them. As a result every time a new piece of hardware comes out someone has to have that hardware (so they care) and then cobble a driver together for it. As a result some hardware is not supported (or poorly supported). Then people say Linux isn't desktop ready because the drivers aren't up to snuff. Repeat.
I'm not saying the complaint isn't valid but sadly there is little Linux can do about it (short of creating a new project to keep up with every piece of hardware known to man). Windows on the other hand doesn't have this problem as every manufacturer on the planet makes sure to include a driver for windows. Mac escapes this problem since it's a hardware company and says we only support Mac products. It's a very unfair setup and I'm not sure if there is a way to break the cycle.
you tried running it in virtualbox? it may still be technically running in windows, but at least you are limiting the 'damage'. if you don't give it network access you can do without antivirus stuff and probably make it run and 'boot' quicker than the real thing :)
also virtualbox' seamless mode will make it virtually... well.. seamless.. :D
I did my research and found a TV tuner that would work under Linux so that I could run MythTV. How many tuner cards work with OSX? Linux is not Windows, but it doesn't mean it's not ready for the desktop.
Apple puts together hardware that works with their OS and now Dell and other OEM's are doing the same with Linux. If you want to run either Linux or OSX on older hardware you have lying around be prepared to hack (although much less with Linux). If you want to build a system from scratch, do your homework first and buy compatible parts.
I stopped reading halfway through. Its a troll. I could say Windows isn't ready for the desktop because there are no CLI utilities or scripting languages built in.
If you want to do something in batch like resize and auto-rotate a bunch of digital camera pictures you need to search for and download a program that does exactly what you want and hopefully not get a virus.
With linux, you whip up a little script that runs jhead -autorot and convert -resize.
A lot of times you need to do something specialized each time. Having a full blown GUI for each occasion doesn't make sense and neither does having something that is so extremely configurable because it would ultimately be complicated and confusing and still wouldn't handle the 5% of the corner cases.
In my opinion, one of the biggest hurdles keeping Linux our of the domestic desktop market is the developers apparently can't put themselves in the shoes of the average user. In my personal experience they tend to hold the end user in contempt, but I realize that this is a fairly small sample of the community...
Like it or not, Windows and OSX have set standards for interface and functional transparency. It may not sit well with developers that they can't micromanage what the OS is doing, but the average user just doesn't give a shit and is unwilling if not incapable of tweaking the OS to accomplish otherwise simple tasks.
It needs to "just work." If you need to use the command line, it's broken for desktop use. If you need to manually edit a file, it's broken for desktop use. If an essential component for some software is not included and must be installed and configured separately, it's broken for desktop use. (That last one is a big, big problem for Linux!)
For all the faults Microsoft has with their software, at least they did the research and learned how Joe Shmoe uses a computer and designed to the lowest common denominator. That's how they ended up on top.
=Smidge=
While I also play WoW under Wine and agree it works reasonably well, I have to ask a simple question.
One reason WoW works reasonably under Wine is that it will use OpenGL and is not tied to DirectX. Many of the WoW developers are actually using Macs so the application could not be dependent on DirectX. And yet, there is no native Linux client produced for it, only native for Mac OS X and Windows.
As popular as the game is, and knowing it can run on a *nix variant, Blizzard still won't produce a native Linux client. So why do you suppose that is?
For most people, sound in Linux works, but it doesn't work well for anyone. By "work well", I mean MIDI and sound stream control. Windows, MacOS X and even (and especially) BeOS have the sound sewn down and are viable platforms for music creation. Linux definitely isn't and ALSA has inherent flaws that guarantee it never will.
But, since most Linux users aren't interested in making music, this is not an issue and is why Linux's sound model won't ever improve. It will make Linux a non-starter for a number of users, though.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Having just installed a dualboot box for my wife, I can tell you that it already does work better than a new windows installation. Ubuntu booted up with graphics drivers, sound working, hp scanner/printer/fax working out of the box. Windows booted up with no ethernet, low graphics mode, no sound, no printer/scanner/fax.
This is a very common thing these days. Linux driver support is miles ahead of Windows as far as 'out of the box' goes.
No SATA drive was the most confounding situation I have ever been stuck in, attempting to help someone upgrade from Vista to XP. No floppy drive, and wouldn't let me swap out the CD, and installer didn't support USB for drivers. Ended up making a slip streamed disc which was eventually done right... but I wouldn't consider that something a "normal" user would do.
Thankfully I added NIC driver at same time which otherwise wasn't there.
Maybe this is a harsh bias, but I don't consider any problem that can occur between installation and fully working setup to be normal for any user. I was a big windows fan and I found Linux to be "hard". Every turn there was more documentation I needed to read. I thought the documentation was really good... when it existed (I have noticed a lot more "incomplete" documentation than ever any "bad" documentation. Bad documentation gets fixed really quick, because bad documentation is either bad because of content or structure, and in either case many small contributions can improve documentation quickly.)
When I last used Windows regularly (up until shortly after SP2 was released), I found it took roughly 2 days for an ideal setup with every little thing done properly. One time I managed to cut this down with a slip stream and having all the software on the DVD, but the next time I needed it, most of the software was out of date. The part I liked the least was that breaking one little thing, and your best / only option is to start over. In my personal experience, things rarely work one day and then not work the next in Linux without a clear or easily discoverable reason due to a known issue. If something is broken, it is easy to track down 1) whether or not the issue is fixable / has a work around, and 2) the level of skill / experience necessary to fix such issue. This QUICKLY tells you whether or not fussing with it is going to yield adequate results. Any 'consistent' installation issue (I tweak a new Ubuntu install quite a bit) I just throw into a script I keep online, and each "tweak" being its own function, the script is very portable, like comment out "setup fkey macros".
In practice, for me, I prefer cli over gui; nobody ever implements all cli / api functions into a gui, least of all Windows, and even when they do, tasks can not easily be automated, if at all. I guess I have had more of the feeling that anything I learn about Linux teaches me how to learn better and faster about Linux. When you learn a gui all you have learned is the gui. No matter how easy it is to use, it doesn't teach you about how the system works.
Ok, too high an expectation for regular users. Most the problems I see / hear are switching to Linux from Windows problems, not Linux problems. Certain "advantages" of Windows are directly related to Microsoft's monopolistic control over the environment (ANY other hardware, getting the right parts that will work with the system is normal and expected). With due diligence, educating yourself about Linux lets to do more. Maintenance and auditing is fast and easy at any level, once you learn it ("normal users" don't maintain their machines AT ALL even though they know they should, and I would bet most would ask "what's an audit?"). If you break it, just undo it; you don't necessarily need to "time-machine" backwards or restore from backup, or reload a saved state; just change it back. Worst case scenario, like killed grub or hosed your kernel to an unbootable state, just lock and load with a liveCD and fix it. Tinkering in good faith is never going to require you to reinstall from scratch. If you tinker recklessly and aggressively, there is a good chance you can be unaware of what you changed and how, and the amount of time to reinstall than track down the issue will be shorter.
I know I am a fan boy, but it is only after 1) Taking the time to educate myself about Linux, and 2) Decades of "WTF, ARE YOU KIDDING?!?" with issues with Windows that only seemed to INCREASE over time. Am I expecting too much? Evidently. MY problems, and headaches for that matter, were fixed switching to Linux. Ubuntu has given me enough not to need anything else, installed as host anyway (Gentoo VM is just too much fun).
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