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Why Linux Can't 'Sell' On the Desktop
New submitter VoyagerRadio writes "Recently I found myself struggling with a question I should easily have been able to answer: Why would anyone want to use Linux as their everyday desktop (or laptop) operating system? It's a fair question, and asked often of Linux, but I'm finding it to be a question I can no longer answer with the conviction necessary to 'sell' the platform. In fact, I kind of feel like a car salesman who realizes he no longer believes in the product he's been pitching. It's not that I don't find Linux worthy; I simply don't understand how it's ever going to succeed on the desktop with voluntary marketing efforts. What do Linux users need to do to replicate the marketing efforts of Apple and Microsoft and other corporate operating system vendors? To me, it seems you don't sell Linux at all because there isn't supposed to be one dominant distribution that stands out from the rest. Without a specific product to put on the shelf to sell, what in the world do you focus your efforts on selling? An idea?"
Why not? It simply works, I can do whatever I want.
That's not my experience. First off, I'm a UNIX sysadmin. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 on a low-power Atom box at home. Recently I wanted to quickly burn some data on a DVD. But all programs I tried either produced a coaster or crashed. The problem was that the /tmp partition couldn't hold the intermediate image file that every program created. So we have like 20 GUI frontends to the cdwrite framework, but every single one produces an intermediate image, during my quick search I couldn't find a single one that burns data on the fly. I had to copy the data over the network to my iMac.
And that is the proble with Linux. While Apple and Microsoft ship their OSes with a set of working apps that cover most of the average user's needs, Linux distros come with a gazillion number of "My first app" quality software that does one particular thing better than all the other apps but fails in 90% of the rest.
What's needed is a concerted effort to develop a set of feature-complete apps that cover the basic functionality, and not waste resources into yet another mp3 player. It's nice to be able to choose between Gnome and KDE etc. but the average user prefers one set of feature-complete apps over choosing between a dozen varieties of the same functionality that all lack features.