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Miguel de Icaza On Usability and Openness
doperative points out comments from Miguel de Icaza on the struggle for usability in many software products:
"De Icaza uses OpenSUSE as his main desktop (with the GNOME interface, of course), says he likes Linux better than Windows, and says the Linux kernel is also 'superior' to the MacOS kernel. 'Having the source code for the system is fabulous. Being able to extend the system is fabulous,' he says. But he notes that proprietary systems have advantages — such as video and audio systems that rarely break. 'I spent so many years battling with Linux and something new is broken every time,' he says. 'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'"
Sound and video is broken on open systems because of the RIAA/MPAA and Microsoft with their protected pathways, encryption, patented interconnects and tilt bits.
- if you want a desktop system that stays out of your way, Just Works, and requires little maintenance beyond letting an auto updater do its thing... Windows or OSX are your only real options
Theres truth to all of what youve said, but youre simplifying things waaay too much. There are times Windows will just refuse to work with a system (ie, shipped with vista, provides no XP drivers, nothing works in XP, and Vista SP2 hasnt shipped yet), and Linux will land you with a beautifully configured and funcitonal system out of the box; there are times, conversely, where nothing you do seems to get Pulse to work with flash, or theres no driver for your wifi card, but Win7 just nails it from the get go.
Ive stopped using Ubuntu for the most part for a few reasons, but the main one was that I used to do a lot of WoW and used ventrilo for it, and one of the upgrades finally stopped working quite right with wine, and I was just tired of having to make each and every proprietary, windows-only thing I did work right on Linux. It was doable, and fun and instructive for a while, but after a while the excitement fades and you tire of pushing so hard against the reality that you really do need Windows-only apps (Evolution's OWA integration SUCKS compared to real MAPI support from Outlook!).
But I can fully envision someone who really does need only the web and a few other things and for them Linux Just Works in a way Windows cant-- fully integrated updates, general freedom from the spectre of malware (the reason is irrelevant)
They'll say, "It's nvidia's fault for not doing X" or "it's your fault because you didn't do Y" or "it's the upstream maintainer's fault because he didn't do Z". Which is, unfortunately, completely missing the point: when you are using a system to get a task done, fault does not matter.
There is a lot of truth to this, but people forget about these incidents on Windows because theyre considered part of what you have to do-- XP didnt come with passable nVidia drivers worth gaming with, nor did Vista; you had to hunt them down and install them. But when you have to do the same on Linux-- which is basically an identical experience with a single binary that you run and does all the work for you-- all of a sudden its "too much of a burden on the user".
Its also worth mentioning that comparing a preinstalled OS with preinstalled drivers to one that you install from disk post-factory is apples-to-oranges-- If / when Linux is preinstalled from an image onto HP or Acer laptops, they wont have driver issues-- they wont ship until they are fixed. See for example the instant-boot varieties like Acer's and HPs preboot web-browsing-only Linux distros-- the wireless works flawlessly on those, because the manufacturer took care of it.
In usability and out-of-box-experience, Windows and Linux (generally) are getting closer and closer; I rather suspect that as that continues, the complaints about Gnome and Ubuntu's changes will be rather more vocal.