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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
I always enjoy these /. stories about Linux acceptance. We are guarenteed a full vetting of why this article is wrong by the Linux-heads and why it is so right by the M$-heads.
It's even numbered for easy reference to the sprcific points
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.
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.
It took almost 3 months to get the sound working on Ubuntu (TOS-link). Even to this day I'm scared that if I lose the system I'll lose the configuration- it required editing different accounts, adding new packages, modifying them in a non-standard fashion, adding options that weren't documented...
Windows XP? Put it in and the sound comes out.
I'll say the same thing about hard drives too- while the support is built in I still had to do some 20 commands to add, mount, locate, format, automount, edit the UUID manualy, fdisk....
Nothing better to kill 2 hours of your precious life.
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.
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!!!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
...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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
...if the OSS community was as honest (and constructive) as this guy it might have a chance on the general-purpose desktop against Windows.
Karma be damned; I thought that despite the provocative headline, it was a really refreshing criticism of Linux on the desktop.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Why Linux is not (yet) Ready for the Desktop
Preface:
In this document we only discuss Linux deficiencies while everyone should keep in mind that there are areas where Linux has excelled other OSes.
A primary target of this comparison is Windows OS.
Linux major shortcomings and problems:
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.
1. No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing, many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headache.
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).
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.
2.2 Very slow GUI (except when being run with composite window managers on top of OpenGL).
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).
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.
2.4.2 Fonts antialiasing only works for certain GUI toolkits (see 2.1).
2.4.3 Default fonts (often) look ugly.
2.4.3.1 (Being resolved) By default most distros disable advanced fonts antialiasing.
2.4.3.2 By default most distros come without good or even compatible with Windows fonts.
2.5 No double buffering.
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 sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
3.2 No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb, portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.
3.3 Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software. User should never be bothered with using ./configure && make && make installer. It should be possible to install any software by downloading a package and double clicking it (yes, like in Windows, but probably prompting for user/administrator password).
3.4 Applications development is a major PITA. Different distros can use a) different libraries versions b) different compiler flags c) different compilers. This leads to a number of problems raised to the third power.
4. It should be possible to configure everything via GUI which is still not a case for too many situations and operations.
5. Problems stemming from low linux popularity and open source nature:
5.1 Few software titles, inability to run familiar Windows software. (Some applications (which don't work in Wine) have zero Linux equivalents).
5.1.1 No equivalent of some hardcore Windows software like AutoCAD/3D Studio/Adobe Premier/Corel Painter/etc. Home and work users just won't bother installing Linux until they can work for real.
5.2 No games. Full stop. Cedega and Wine offer very incomplete support.
5.3 Incomplete or unstable drivers for some hardware. Problems setting up some hardware (like sound cards or TV tuners/Web Cameras).
5.3.1 A lot of WinPrinters do n
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.
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...
Notice the ".ru" at the end of the domain of the "article". Russia, eh?
I'll tell you what's going on:
The Slashdot gang, desperate for traffic and the subsequent advertising revenue from said traffic, teamed up with the Russian mafia and they're writing these Troll articles. Now, nothing increases viewership like controversy and the biggest controversy among computers nerds is Linux vs. Microsoft and how Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
There you go.
The vast majority of desktop computer users is happy with Minesweeper, Solitaire and Tetris.
The Tetris Company has never put out a product for Linux, except possibly the browser-based Tetris Friends. And it alleges that workalikes such as Lockjaw and Gnometris violate its copyright, though this US Copyright Office document makes Tetris's claims look flimsy.
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?
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.
If regedit.exe counts as a GUI, so does your favourite text editor. Navigating to a path (in the registry or in the filesystem) and changing a cryptic string for another cryptic string is necessary on Windows to do interesting things, same as Linux. It is not generally necessary on either platform if you just want to listen to music and write emails.
Also, to add an unscientific anecdote about hardware support, I now find it easier to make hardware work on Linux. Having bought a Vista laptop, I installed Windows XP and Linux on it, and have every piece of hardware working perfectly on Linux, but many missing/unreliable drivers (and, bizarrely, no support for USB keyboards) on XP.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
1999 called, they want to know what percentage of desktop users are using Linux.
I think that Linux is more than ready for the desktop but as you say people don't know that it exists. Over the weekend I reformatted my semi-corporate laptop (lenovo thinkpad r61) from Vista Business to Ubuntu 9.04. And I've been totally surprised how well the whole process went. All of the hardware worked OOTB. Today I've been even more surprised when I brought the machine to work. I connected the network cable. Fired up Evolution and connected to the Exchange server. When I wanted to print something Ubuntu had found all of the available printers on the network and let me choose which one I wanted to use. Everything has been flawless the whole way. Not to mention that it's blazing fast compared to Vista. I can even run a Windows XP environment in Virutalbox without any significant slowdown (4GB RAM) so if I need to sync my iphone apps on it I can do that too. But people don't know that the possibility exists, or even if they know the headaches caused by Windows aren't big enough to warrant a change, or a couple other excuses to just stay with what they know.
xb0x
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=
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 ?
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.
Mind you, I've used linux here and there since the 1.3 kernel (slackware then), and I've tried out just about every version of Ubuntu. This is the first time it stays in use.
Some things in TFA make me wonder though, like "Enterprise: no standard way of software distribution". How hard is it to set up a local repository(-ies), from where workstations get updates?
Finally, the next time someone posts and article about Linux and the desktop, please be clear which desktop we're talking about. This article seems to talk about all of them at once.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
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.
From TFA:
12. 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.).
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that one. Linux is viruses free BECAUSE of its security model! A program you run from the web will NOT change your root settings! If you get "infected" because you got the "I want to see the dancing bunnies" syndrome, you can still log in as root and fix your infected user account. Yes, an infected user will NOT infect other users!
Try that with Windows.
"sudo still requires CLI". Yes, but we have gksu and kdesu. I've been using it for years.
It's not the model that's wrong, you dumbass (I'm talking to the article writer), but the implementation (_IF_ it is indeed wrong). Linux has this philosophy: It's better to be safe than friendly. Windows has tried to put user friendliness over security. Thanks to this we have botnets running all over the world.
Everything was fine with the article until I found this "bad security model" crap. I tagged the article "troll" just because of it.
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.
Every time I install Windows, it takes three or four hours to complete setup - install drivers, install patches, install cygwin, MS office and whatsoever, restore backup data, and I'm ready to work.
Every time I install Linux, it takes three or four days to complete setup - install Linux, install packages, change font configurations because the default rendering is so ugly, search on the net to figure out how I can get (insert some hardware here) working on my PC, search on the net to figure out why my PC doesn't shut down properly, search on the net why XXXX doesn't work anymore, search on the net for an older version of some package so that I don't need to touch some old code (that I don't intend to fix), search for this, that, etc. Have to do the same thing for every distribution, because one method that worked for one distribution doesn't work for the other one.
Even after the settings are done, I have to cope with poor localizations. Typing in other languages such as Korean or Japanese is still horrible, though I must admit the situation has improved vastly. Messages are badly translated, or some messages aren't translated at all. Now I just gave up using any language other than English on my Ubuntu desktop.
Yes, they are indoctrinated to a world of horrible things. They refuse to open their mind to anything else. So what? They find their computer as a tool, and if the tool does what they need to do, that's enough. I can't teach my wife how to configure SCIM, how to deal with the messages not translated properly, and how to deal with the website that doesn't get rendered properly on Firefox (though in this case, the website is to blame), while all she uses is some simple word processing and web surfing (total 2 hrs per week) which all works perfectly well on Windows. I'd rather deal with the malwares than teaching her all that stuff.
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.
At that point it doesn't matter if Linux is beer-free or speech-free, how it can run forever without needing a reboot, how secure it is, etc. Until it can pass the day in, day out tests I mentioned above, and do it without the user having to unlearn and then relearn how to do things, it's going nowhere on the mainstream desktop.
Here in Europe, we have these technologies called 'GPRS' and '3G' which mean you're network connected over 95% of the land area.
We have that in the United States, but in this recession, not everybody who owns a laptop has 720 USD per year to blow on a 3G plan in addition to what they're paying for Internet access at home.
I strongly recommend you try Wine Doors if you haven't already.
It's probably not included in the default installation because I think you have to have a Windows license to install some of the DLLs and such (then again, who doesn't have a couple of those sitting around?)
OK, so let's deconstruct this point by point. I've left one or two points out where I have no specific comments.
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.
Bold predictions indeed. True, I think proprietary software will remain, particularly in the vertical market; however a certain segment of software will become commoditised (arguably some of it already has been) and therefore users will expect it to be free or priced lower than cost.
1. No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing, many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headache.
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).
Couldn't agree more here. ALSA has improved audio in a few areas but in all other aspects, from a user perspective it has only made things more difficult. Someone else commented recently on Slashdot regarding the BSD approach to this problem, it sounds like they have done a lot better by staying with/improving OSS. I really wish someone would stand up and take charge of improving Linux's core audio infrastructure instead of putting band-aids like PulseAudio on top.
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.
I'm not sure this is really as bad as is made out. In between major releases, Qt and Gtk both take backwards compatibility very seriously. Qt at least is a commercial product, they have a commitment to maintain compatibility.
2.2 Very slow GUI (except when being run with composite window managers on top of OpenGL).
Too general to respond to - can hardly be true for all machines.
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).
I thought that was the point of Cairo... ? Not my area of expertise though.
2.5 No double buffering.
No explanation of how this is relevant to an end user.
3.1 No unified configuration system for computer settings, devices and system services. E.g. distro A sets up networking using these utilities, outputting certain settings residing in certain file system locations, distro B sets up everything differently. This drives most users mad.
Honestly I don't think the average user is really going to care where a configuration tool stores its settings as long as it works; only a power user or developer would. Of course it would be nice if people would use the same tools. However, although it's taken quite some time to work in all situations, NetworkManager has vastly improved network configuration ease of use and has been adopted by many distributions.
3.2 No unified installer across all distros. Consider RPM, deb, portage, tar.gz, sources, etc. It adds a cost for software development.
True, but arguably as far as the packaging alone is concerned, if you target RPM and deb you're going to cover most of the distributions that actually matter to end users.
3.3 Many distros' repositories do not contain all available open source software. User should never be bothered with using ./config
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.
Solitaire doesn't count :)
Your argument for the fact that "there ARE games for Linux" is that there ARE games for linux. Are there cool games for Linux? I doubt it. Look at the most pirated games... how many of them run on Linux? Why the hell would I install Linux if I can't play my favorite games? The coolest things about PCs is that you can use them to play games!
I like your shiny bullet list. Here's mine (I hope you haven't patented it already):
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"
In Stockholm I pay $3-$9 per month for 3G, even with max data usage you wouldn't pay more than $360/year. Are you sure you're not using prices from 99?
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.
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
Ubuntu 9.10 is great for average users as long they
can run the thing from a root CLI.
to configure screen resolution (default 800x600)
first you get an error message that the default
config tool won't work because of proprietary
drivers. do you want to use the proprietary tool?
yes. proprietary tool fills screen and bottom
(with apply/save buttons) overflows and is inaccessible.
figure a way around this by opening more screens.
apply the new setting. save setting, get error
message about backup file privs.
plug in a USB drive. get message that you don't /media.
have privs to mount it. look for DiskManager tool
that was present on 8.10. not there. synaptic
pachage manager: install MountManager. hides button in
in another menu which you need to configure. find it
and click it. nothing happens. so, CLI in
root mode - library object error message in
MountManager. so, edit fstab and remove offending
lines. correct privs for mount dirs in
reboot. screen res wrong again. back to step one.
eventually, you forget why you were trying to
access the USB drive.
Kevin O'Kane http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/
"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).
I think you missed his point. His point is that sudo can be easily circumvented by social engineering.
Let's say yuo have Sudo configured like the typical Ubuntu, where the current user need only enter their password to gain root access. Let's suppose that in some future reality Linux is really popular, and starts getting "normal" users. They install some nifty password saving program that asks for their password. They give it to it, and now the app can do anything it wants.
"But we can read the source code, so that won't happen", you'll yell.. sure YOU CAN, but not the "normal" person. "It would never make it into the repository" you say, well if Linux becomes popular people won't simply be using the repository, they'll be getting software from all over the place, just like they do with Windows now.
And the flaw in your thinking about the security model is that it ignores vulnerabilities in the software. Yes, browsing a web site *CAN* infect the entire system if there's a vulnerability in the browser which can be used to exploit a privilege escalation vulnerability in the system. Even on Linux. And there are plenty of them. In fact, Linux install so much software in a default install that it's more or less guaranteed that there will always be some vulnerabilities.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
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
My experience on this laptop (a Toshiba Equium M70-272):
;)
WinXP SP2 vs Ubuntu 7.04
Screen: default driver @ 800x600x16 vs default driver @ native resolution
Keyboard: default driver vs general driver
Sound: not recognised vs general driver
Wifi: not recognised vs Intel general driver
Printer: not recognised vs printer-specific CUPS support
Winmodem: not recognised vs default (non working) winmodem restricted driver
So... what is your point again?
For some reason, driver hunting for Windows is acceptable, but don't dare tell the guy trying Linux that Ubuntu might not pick up the play button on the side of the keyboard automagically!
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
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...
I agree with almost every point in this article. I have been a dedicated Linux user since RH 4.2
My observations about why Linux is not ready for the desktop:
1) Lack of compatibility between versions.
I can't say enough about how frustrating this is. Every time I upgrade versions, something breaks. Usually audio. In fact, most multimedia functionality breaks every time I upgrade. I generally find that the /dev/cdrom symlink is broken at the very least, but I've frequently found that all of my CD writer scripts have to be modified.
Recently, Ubuntu arbitrarily renamed the "libglib1.2" package, breaking every application that links against the GTK+ library. Why? No answer.
It's as if Linux is actively hostile to the concept of backwards compatibility.
2) Lack of support for hot-plugging. (point 13 in the article)
I plug in a thumb drive or usb hard drive and maybe the OS will notice it and mount it for me, and maybe it won't. Usually it doesn't. Usually, I have to become super-user and perform actions to identify the drive and mount it that would be beyond the knowledge of the average end user. And even if the user does know how to do it, why should they have to? A 10-second task just got turned into a 5-minute task.
USB scanners are the same way. They used to work, now you have to become super-user to use them. Some script that detected scanner plugin events and change the permissions just stopped working.
Multi-card readers: Same thing. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Windows, Solaris, and MacOS all solved the hot-plugging problem years ago, why can't Linux?
3. Hardware support regression
Mentioned in the article, but worth repeating. I really hate upgrading my OS and discovering that some of my existing hardware is no longer supported. Recent discovery: you can have USB1 or USB2 enabled, but not both at the same time. If you want USB1, remove the ehci_hcd module. If you want USB2, install it. See Bugzilla, Launchpad.net. It seems unlikely this bug will ever be fixed.
I plug in a thumb drive or usb hard drive and maybe the OS will notice it and mount it for me, and maybe it won't. Usually it doesn't. Usually, I have to become super-user and perform actions to identify the drive and mount it that would be beyond the knowledge of the average end user. And even if the user does know how to do it, why should they have to? A 10-second task just got turned into a 5-minute task.
Is it that the device isn't showing up, or that the device isn't mounting? That is, does it show up in the output from 'lsusb' or not?
I've never had a working USB mass storage device fail to detect and mount on any of my Linux systems; for me, it's been a solved problem.
USB scanners are the same way. They used to work, now you have to become super-user to use them. Some script that detected scanner plugin events and change the permissions just stopped working.
Weird. The only scanner juggling I've had to do was installing a particular firmware file for my Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus, because (a) it's not freely redistributable, and (b) there are several different scanners with the same USB ID, and I had to specify which one I had.
Multi-card readers: Same thing. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
As these are just USB mass storage devices, I think it's the same permissions issue you're seeing.
I'd recommend that you open a question at Launchpad Answers and see if you can get some help on this. Something is amiss on your system, and fixing it is probably preferable to working around it like this. (I'm assuming that you're using Ubuntu.)
It seems unlikely this bug [EHCI problems] will ever be fixed.
Well, it certainly won't be fixed unless someone reopens the kernel.org bug report. (The original report was identified as caused by broken hardware; that's why it was closed.)
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
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