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Comment by Unseelie | Hacker News Reader

As a recent convert to Ubuntu, I seriously doubt it without drastic changes.

The problem I have with the system, the problem I see making the masses balk once they've been convinced to give it a try, is that, simply, things don't work out of the box with linux.

That's not Cannonical's fault, and indeed, they've put a lot of work into their app repository to build a pile of things that do....but every single time I've tried to go off the farm, install a game from CD, install something from makefile or a tarball..I'm missing repositories. I've the wrong..something. I'm trying to build a massive skillset and understanding of the thing, and I don't have the background to do it. Very few people do. People will install it, browse the web, and then run into walls. They'll be angry, they'll blog about it. They'll leave, and they'll poison the public view.

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I disagree. Things work better out of the box for me running Ubuntu on a Thinkpad than either Windows or OS X. The Ubuntu Software Center works great and doesn't require agreeing to a 56 page license or handing over credit card details.

You're agreeing with me. The software center is great...anything outside of it?

Furthermore, there is a license applied to open software, and quite a lot of cost free software.

But the Software Center is a walled garden, requiring backwards support of the OS to the application.

I'm not sure I understand. The software center is just an example of one of the user-friendly features of Ubuntu. I could name a lot of others such as the Unity desktop, OSD, application and system indicators. Licenses applied to open software are usually one of a handful of well-known licenses such as GPL, Apache, MIT, etc. What do you mean "quite a lot of cost free software"? Cost-free as in "free as in beer"? If you want only GPL then there is the GNU operating system. I totally don't understand your 3rd point. An open-source repository is a walled garden? It's about as open as open can get.

To take your points one by one:

The software center is easty to use, yes. It is also a hugely important part of the experience, because its how you get new software...if you can find it in the software center. (often you can't..more on that in response to your last point)

Most commercial liscenses are remarkably simmilar to one another. The gist is 'don't infringe my IP', to the extent that you can plug different IPs into one by word searches.

I do mean free as beer software, as in response to the argument that avoiding credit card charges is a benefit of Ubuntu..there's plenty of widows capable free software. (and open source). Incedentally, many of the open source applications I've found have an option for a windows download. Lots of users in windows, after all.

Walled garden from the end user's side. If your access to software is through the software center, then you'll discover that there are plenty of things not supported by cannonical. Its an app store, and one with fairly limited supply. (33,686 on display, as opposed to over 80,000 in the android) If you consider that the average user is not a person who knows how to make from source, or even navigate the terminal (and I'll lay good odds not willing to learn), the software center is the -only- way anyone is likely to get decent software.

All right, only is rather extreme, but other sources of apps are so frequently rather difficult to install in this OS, where accepting a liscense agreement and pressing the install button is anything but.

The point being is that the average user won't see an open source repository, or the source at all. they'll see a list of apps they can install from what is, essentially, the ubuntu market, each app chosen and vetted by canonical.

I can download deb files from the web that install in one click. bin files work similarly

"Works for me" isn't the right response to this kind of complaint, because though it might work for you, the fact it is that it doesn't on many other people's computers--including mine. For example when upgrading to 11.04, hibernate broke on my laptop, I have crazy Compiz problems (title bars don't change titles, invisible windows blocking mouse clicks, window previews not disappearing), and other stuff going wrong.

Thank God I purposely chose an Intel wifi card in my laptop, because the poor people stuck with Broadcoms (the standard install on Dell laptops at least, and that's not an insignificant market share) were horribly buggy in every past release I've tried--and even if they did work, wifi was noticeably slower than Intel or other cards. I certainly wouldn't sit back with my Intel wifi card and tell the Broadcom users that it "works for me!"

> The problem I have with the system, the problem I see making the masses balk once they've been convinced to give it a try, is that, simply, things don't work out of the box with linux.

Indeed, I think this is the number one issue of converting users to Ubuntu, and that there are two types of not working that turn off potential users:

1) Learning a new workflow. There are tons of viable open source alternatives to proprietary software, but new users can often be overwhelmed by the idea that they're going to have to transition to a different workflow.

A year or so ago, I agreed to help my mother's secretary with her malware infested XP installation, but came to the conclusion that only a nuke from orbit would suffice. I told her that I could install Ubuntu on a separate partition, which would allow her to access her old files. However, learning OpenOffice proved too much for her, and we ended up doing a clean Windows' install.

So, users' need to be made aware of recommended alternatives to Windows' software and they very much need stellar documentation on how to complete simple tasks. It seems like many Windows' users just internalize a set of steps to complete a certain task and have a very hard time adapting when presented with a new environment.

2) Lack of out-of-the-box hardware support is still a serious issue, especially for notebooks. Many of my semi-technical friends/co-workers have expressed that they would like to try out Ubuntu and that, inevitably, they would like to install it on a notebook computer.

I typically caution them against it because of the not insignificant chance that they will end up with missing hardware support, usually wireless, which is critical to basically every notebook user. Sure, it's often possible to install proprietary drivers or firmware, but this is definitely not a task that someone new to Linux can reasonably be expected to overcome.

Something like lack of 3D acceleration is not a huge deal (maybe more of an issue with Gnome 3, not sure), but lack of wireless support, significantly reduced battery life, and broken suspend-to-RAM are serious issues that plague Ubuntu (and Linux) installs on the notebook. Canonical needs to make serious in-roads with hardware vendors before they can reasonably expect to reach 200 million users.

Again, I think it's not "Linux isn't ready for the desktop", but "Linux isn't ready for the notebook" that Canonical needs to be concerned with if they don't want to be left behind in our increasingly mobile-leaning future.

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