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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.
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.
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.
Lucky? I hardly think so. WoW is hardly an obscure game - it is the most popular MMORPG in the world. The idea that wine can run, out of the box, such a high profile game is perfectly incompatible with 'no games, period.'
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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.
1999 called, they want to know what percentage of desktop users are using Linux.
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.
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.
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.
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?
... 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).