Linux is Not Windows
linux.oneandoneis2.org
linux.oneandoneis2.org
This reads more like a rant at how windows people Just Don't Get It more than a genuine attempt to be helpful.
edit: Here's an example of a more helpful style, comparing linux and BSD, and he even self-deprecatingly files it under rants: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01
I ironically moved from FreeBSD to Debian about 10 years ago. Perhaps it's time for another look.
I think the main problem that new users to Linux have is the steep learning curve. The author dismisses user friendliness with the implication that the only reason Linux is difficult to learn is because it is different.
The analogy given is vi versus a standard Windows word processor. I am not disputing that vi is a much more powerful program, but I am saying that it is much harder to learn than Microsoft Word. Using Word, without knowing the keyboard shortcuts, you can use the toolbars to do what you want and in doing so you learn the shortcuts, most of which are printed next to the menu items.
Using vi, without knowing any keyboard shortcuts, you can do exactly nothing. Arguably vi is much better off without toolbars because they take up a lot of screen real estate and would be difficult to implement from a terminal window, but that does not mean there is no such thing as user friendliness. Another problem is the problem of hardware support[1], which the author does not address at all.
Having said that, I will agree with his point that since it doesn't really matter much to (with notable exceptions) most developers what features people not already using Linux would like to see, development is centred around people already using Linux and on more gentle slopes of the learning curve.
Linux cribs so much from other operating systems that it's reasonably familiar and easy to use when you first sit down, but the problems start when you need to go beyond using it as a dumb terminal: perhaps you need to set up a printer, or there's an issue with networking or power management. Now you're over the cliff. It can be a nightmare for a engineer like myself to fix problems, even though I've been using Linux since the mid-90s. An unsophisticated user would be finished.
An anecdote: I'm mainly an OSX user now, but I bought an eeePC netbook a couple of years ago for travel and tried to install the then-current version of Ubuntu. This was literally one of the most popular laptops on the market, and Ubuntu installed without a functional network device. Getting it working was not easy, involving a couple of reinstallations. Even then, power management was nonfunctional and the netbook got half the battery life as it did under Windows.
The real problem with desktop Linux isn't that it's hard to use or different; it's that the average user can expect to struggle with crippling bugs and hardware incompatibilities that are a nightmare to fix.
I hear this a lot, but nobody ever actually describes the problem they have. You mentioned priting. On my minimal Debian box, you point your web browser at http://localhost:631 and click shit and then the printer works. (If you want to improve print quality / feature support, then you probably need to google to decide which driver is best.)
On my Ubuntu 11.04 box, you type "printing" into the thing at the top left, click "add printer", click "network printer", click "find", and click "ok". That's it. Then you have that printer in every application, and from the command line via lpr.
It can't get any easier.
The only way you can run into problems is if you buy a printer that's not supported by Linux. And I think that's where most people run into trouble -- they buy something unsupported, and then spend three months googling in the hopes that maybe it's not really unsupported. One time in ten, it turns out that it is. The other nine times lead to stories like "Linux never works".
Nope, shitty hardware never works. Linux just hides that from you less than Windows.
I just learned something.
Oh, sorry, I left out the "click shit" part. Do some of that, too.
And that's the thing that Windows actually gets right. A typical user doesn't know nor care about OS-hardware compatibility. He/she buys a printer and wants it to work. It is up to OS to make this happen.
Why are you listing open sourceness and man pages as a reason that Joe Average User should use Linux? Perhaps you need to reacquaint yourself with Joe.
After that, it's all details. Windows has spyware. Linux has apt-get. But users don't care.
Except that it's not true. We had Windows Vista Home Premium (IIRC) + Works refunded once from Dell, because Ubuntu was used. The refund was 80 Euro.
In fact, they say it inflates the price of PCs barely, because the relatively small OEM Windows fee is compensated by installing tons of adware, browser bars, etc. from 3rd party vendors.
Now that is user-friendly; you must spend the best part of a day removing nagwares and spywares from a brand new computer.
You don't have to switch to linux to take advantage of free software, but it's usually easier and regardless, many of the Linux issues raised in the original article apply to the FOSS alternatives as well.
I didn't make that point explicit only because I didn't want to seem too confrontational, as j_baker's comment was clearly well-intentioned.
> Perhaps you need to reacquaint yourself with Joe.
I know lots of Windows users. They're each very different, but not stupid and frequently surprise condescending nerds with their capacity to figure things out. The most technophobic person I know, someone who uses their home computer ONLY to browse the web and check email (who probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between windows XP and gnome) once ranted to me for several months about various productivity hits caused by their office's migration from a terminal-based mainframe system to windows NT workstations. Most windows and mac users I know are particularly proficient with several applications. Whether it's Photoshop or Excel or Matlab or Finale or Final Cut Pro or Revit or ProTools or LaTeX, using the software effectively typically requires a lot more technical knowledge than "Joe Average User" requires to browse the web and check his email.
The original linked article covers this issue effectively in section #5, The myth of "user-friendly"
That said, friendliness is not incompatible with "hacker-friendly."
What I'm getting at is that everyone seems to think Linux has to succeed on the desktop. Perhaps that was a good goal in the Windows XP days, but it's not as big a deal now.
I don't see why Linux needs to be a mainstream OS.
It's like being forced to think about breathing.
But, then, I don't install crap. Most people do, but most people who do also don't care so much about whether they see those popups or not. It doesn't register to them. So, yes, there is an edge case here where you can install crap and then be offended by said crap's tendency to annoy you...but personally, I rarely see it.
You change the motherboard after it fails, now Windows needs to re-validate, then if you don't do that right away, Windows Security Essentials starts counting down to when it won't work anymore?
And the Windows re-validation process fails for unknown reasons every time, so it keeps telling you "this copy isn't genuine" even though it's a 100% legit retail version (and prompts again each boot).
Which I installed to get rid of the -crap- the hardware vendor installed. And then on top of that, the -only- stuff I installed was Java, Flash, Firefox and Reader. That's -it-.
I don't even use Windows -- this is my wife's computer. Linux never bothers except for security updates.
And in the last year, Windows got infected twice, requiring re-installs when MalwareBytes and AV could not disinfect (hence, perhaps, the validation problem).
It takes more effort to keep the Windows machine going than the other 5 Linux boxes in the house (each running a different distro no less).
I've gotten revalidation prompts, but never failures; I know they can happen but it's never been an issue for me.
Seriously, I honestly don't know why so many people have trouble with it, but I have had a pain-free experience since installing Windows 7. Even Vista was pretty much problem-free, although MSE wasn't around then and I did get occasional AV nags.
1. The milestone-release system in most big distros. For Ubuntu, the biggest and supposedly most user-friendly distro, I'm expected to upgrade every 6 months. One could argue that if your system is working OK, then you can stick with one release forever--imagine still using 8.04 in 2011. But what if I want Firefox 4, or a new version of a single program? In Windows, you just go to the website and install, or sometimes the program auto-updates itself. On Ubuntu, I must update the entire system, even if I want just one program to update. That means when I update to Firefox 4, there's a chance my wifi will no longer work (happened to me in 9.04), or that hibernate won't work (happened to me in 11.04) or that my desktop environment will be shockingly different for no reason. All I wanted was Firefox--but to get it, I've got to swallow Unity and any other half-baked software the distro throws at me.
My mom ranted at me for 15 minutes because I installed FF4 on her Windows machine and now her "Home" button was on the other side of the address bar and her address bar wasn't on top anymore. Can you imagine if she had been using Ubuntu, clicked "yes" to the upgrade prompt just to get it out of the way, and had been presented with Unity? She would have had a stroke.
Yes, you can install PPA's and through various console voodoo upgrade only certain parts of the system, but not every program has a PPA and installing them is beyond a mere mortal's grasp.
And, even if you decide to skip a 6-month upgrade, at some point you won't have a choice--security updates will stop coming. Good luck upgrading an Ubuntu system with 2 years of upgrades in a row--you're going to have to flatten and reinstall, again something beyond mere mortals.
2. Quality control--and this is tied in with #1. Again going with Ubuntu (but I think this applies to most other distros as well): every time I upgrade, I'm presented with a literal swamp of fresh bugs and regressions for things that used to work. I've been using the same laptop since 8.04, and with each upgrade something that used to work breaks, something that was broken before gets fixed, and I get new bugs to deal with. Sometimes hibernate doesn't work; sometimes wifi; sometimes the boot splash is corrupt; sometimes this, sometimes that. I know quality control is a hard thing to do considering it's all volunteer-powered and we're fighting against propriety lock-in; but there's just no excuse if you're trying to put Linux on the desktop.
If Linux is to beat Windows, it has to be easy to update specific software without updating every damn thing and without regressions. Windows has, more or less, managed to do this. So far Linux hasn't, for whatever reason. Until they do, it'll be relegated to being an enthusiast's OS (and there's nothing wrong with that either).
a) Never heard of G/L
b) Don't know how to install it; don't care; 'Windows/Mac is good enough for me'
c) Have had compatibility problems with it when they tried
Of course, the idea of general population depends on who you interact with the most, but let's assume general means people who go to Best Buy/Costco/Walmart for computers. These people would probably be willing to try G/L if it came by default. Yet the moment some weird error came up that involved anything more than a simple Google search, back to the store the computer goes. This is not only a loss of money for sellers and manufacturers, but also ends up being really bad PR.
G/L distros like gNewsense or Trisquel (both of which run Linux-libre) would run and sell really well at Best Buy if the video cards, wifi adapters, etc. they would come with worked out of the box. Yet God forbid you use some other [wifi adapter, insert other unsupported device] that doesn't have the right firmware! (Of course, this also applies to regular G/L albeit much less so.) Most 'average Joes' don't care about things like FLOSS unless it works and doesn't require a lot of work to setup and use constantly.
That's not to mention running Windows programs that don't have a FLOSS alternative.
My point is this: G/L won't become immensely popular without the major compatibility issues being fixed and it becoming a default install on a whole major line of computers. Compatibility won't be fixed until the vendors of the devices or programs see a significant profit intake from releasing the firmware/whatever and do so. Default installation won't happen until some major hardware company comes along and sells G/L only.
TL;DR: G/L needs major support to become commercially popular.
If this had kept up, and more suppliers had joined the bandwagon, it would have been exactly the major support you are talking about. Why did things move backwards?
For #2, a thousand times amen. My project for today is re-partitioning my hard drives to make room for a Windows installation. Wifi-sharing doesn't work anymore (because someone decided that bridging wifi to ethernet adapters was a misfeature?), but still happily advertised in Network Manager.
Suspend and Hibernate don't work (even worse, they lock up the system), and the summer weather is too hot to keep the desktop running 24/7.
Apparently, desktop Linux only works if you want to version-lock on 2-to-5-year-old hardware and features that were designed for that hardware, that took 2-5 years to port to Linux and debug, all the while creeping through the minefield to avoid reressions in stability, functionality, and user experience.
If you can't use modern software, and you can't use the capabilities of modern or bargain hardware, than what's the point? It adds up to a hidden tax because you endure an ongoing lag against progress and wasting money on hardware you can't fully exploit. You may as well buy proprietary OS and software with all the money you can save by buying new-generation Windows-certified hardware, and money can earn by not spending 10 hours a week trying to fix you machine.
Fighting for freedom is noble, but it's a martyr's calling. It's hard to be so in love with technology, while at the same time never getting to enjoy using it. It's sadomasochism.
This goes for the desktop. On the server, where we have hardware drivers with 10-year lifecyles, and top-to-bottom programmability and network-transparency, Linux is a dream.
I am planning to switch to Windows to get wifi and multimedia to work, and run Linux on a virtual machine inside it, treating the VM like a local low-latency headless Linode/EC2-style instance.
1. MS and Apple are both fantastic marketers (although Apple has been doing better than MS as of late) and throw massive amounts of cash at promoting their OS's. Nobody is doing this for Linux.
2. The average customer is more inclined to trust something they saw plastic people hawking on TV than something that's free. People generally don't trust free stuff. If you're walking down the street and some random stranger offers you a sandwich, do you eat it? Most people wouldn't.
3. Inertia. Almost all computers come pre-loaded with an OS other than Linux. Most users will never install an OS on their computers themselves.
Most of the stereotypes about Linux are totally false these days. The above problems need solutions that probably aren't coming anytime soon. I find it interesting that a loose amalgamation of volunteer open-source programmers can build such a professional-grade OS and then completely fail to market it. What Linux needs is for open-source marketing to catch up to open-source software.
i installed windows back and in a day i had all my extra keys, the second plug, photoshop, cubase and my wacom working.
i'm on a mac now, and they make the software for the hardware and the hardware for the software and i'm on the rich side of the market so adobe and wacom make software for my os of choice.
Though likely, when Linux wins the desktop, no one will notice the difference.
While you might have problems if you build a custom machine or use extremely recent hardware (which doesn't have good drivers), the general implication of browser-as-OS is that people wouldn't be installing this new system on old computers, but instead would buy new computers with it already baked in. Manufacturers, if they wanted to succeed, would be forced to make sure that all the drivers and the system in general worked well.
http://batsov.com/Linux/Windows/Rant/2011/06/11/linux-deskto...
Which covers most/all of those things. Reasonably new and innovative hardware (like GPU switching in laptops) just doesn't work, period. There are plenty more examples. The browser makes Linux worse since the only thing you need from your underlying platform is really good driver and power management support.
The only issue on the driver list I've ever encountered is wireless failing after suspending. Oddly, that issue only showed up after my latest kernel upgrade (and is a reason that I'm not using my netbook much until I figure out a fix). I suppose that I've just been very lucky with the hardware I've installed Linux on.
(I've also removed the FUD comment from my earlier post).
I've always felt that Linux's biggest challenge was a lack of a voice. Linus does a great job of being that voice for the kernel and the closest we come for user land is Canonical. An illustrative example of how that voice might feel to users, if you have a choice between Gnome (MacOS X inspired UI) or KDE (Windows inspired UI) then the set of utilities (calculator, IM client, explorer, etc) might (in a well voiced world) have one implementation and they would change their behavior depending on window system preference. Some do of course, but many don't and it confuses new users when they use the KDE version of a tool on Gnome or vice versa. The concept is that you need one person or group which is speaking toward how things will be done, so that consistency can be achieved across a large number of things. The concept seems somewhat antithetical to some members of the Linux and FOSS communities.
Another area where a good leader / communicator would help out would be in things like audio and printing and wireless networks. These things are, to the perspective of someone coming to or trying Linux, horribly horribly broken. They "just work" on Windows or MacOS.
Graphics and windows have gotten better in recent years but anything that drops into the 'modify your .Xdefaults file' or 'Xorg configuration' just mortifies someone who just wants to use the machine they don't want to become a 'nerd' just to do something useful.
The 'edges' of Linux, especially in places where there are on-going personality of philosophical wars (like the Canonical/Gnome/KDE wars or the Wireless vendors vs the world wars) are really yucky places to have a problem.
And there is the point that was made in the article that when you do have a problem you can't really find an answer sometimes. I wish there was the 'redhat for desktop' equivalent one could point those people at. Canonical is closer but having a staff that manages issues rather than a wiki/forums page would make it worth paying for in some circles.
No thanks, I still haven't figured out how to get the 3 days of my life back trying to share some files over my home network last year when I installed ubuntu on my old (but perfectly serviceable) computer in my latest attempt at using Linux.
What didn't work out of the box?
- Mouse (stock Dell USB mouse), never did fix that, tried 3 different mice, dug up an old PS/2 mouse and made do with that, probably some obscure usb issue, but the usb hard drives and keyboard I had connected worked from the beginning
- NIC drivers (dunnah, some regular old built in 10/100 part on the mobo), took an entire day of my life to resolve, and it kept dropping connection requiring a reboot every 4-5 hours
- Video drivers (nvidia something or other), never did work right
- file sharing (I eventually got it to kinda work after hand editing a bunch of files and installing some older version of samba, really, what's the gui there for anyways?)
- Stopped seeing one of the hard drives on the second day, a reinstall of ubuntu (and all the other crap I had to do) fixed that
- X died for no apparent reason, reinstall again
- it refused to sync properly with my perfectly cromulent monitor so I was doing all this at 640x480, which works brilliantly when half of the gui controls are off the screen, I was prepared not to care if I could just get the NIC working and remote in
- after getting everything working (kinda, with gum and duct tape), ubuntu did some sort of update that blitzed the whole thing and I just gave up, I hadn't even really gotten to what I wanted to do with it.
As much as I really tried to get it to work, and I try one of these about once every year or so since 1996 with whatever is the hot distro of the moment, and I had no illusions that it would be as straight forward as Windows or OS X, I did expect things like actually being able to use the computer enough to fire up a browser and search for solutions to minor configuration issues. Every issue I had was literally a major configuration issue. I spent those 3 days with my MBP sitting next to me so I could look up help in various forums.
By comparison, I wiped the drive, installed Windows XP, most of it was spent waiting for the files to copy, I had a thumb drive with 4 drivers on it. After install I clicked setup.exe for each driver, rebooted a handful of times. Clicked each drive I wanted to share and set it to "share" and that system is still up and running...I think I've rebooted it 3 times since then. Total time spent? 90 minutes.
So if "it" is wasting a bunch of my time for absolutely nothing in return? I can't think of any other area in my life where I would allow that kind of user experience.
Imagine this was a car, and I had to rebuild the engine or the shifter nob or pedals or windshield or whatever just to drive it off the lot, and then I'd find out it wasn't compatible with every road I wanted to go on, unless I patched it with a different windshield, but when I did that the a/c stopped working. And the brake pedal would stop activating the brake system every 6 hours unless I turned the car off and restarted the engine. Bringing in my car for an oil change might make the doors or wheels stop working.
I have pretty low expectations of technology. I don't expect things to "just work", but I do expect to have a couple pretty clear lines to resolve any issues, even if I have to get my hands dirty and change the spark plugs myself.
So if this is "it", no thanks.
Strangely I never had any mouse problem under linux for ages, but the only windows computer -alas- under my management lost the ability to use any USB devices a long time ago. USB still works when the machine's running Linux, so the hardware is fine; the USB hardware is still listed in the "hardware manager", but for some reason, USB keys, mice, etc simply aren't anywhere to be seen.
Generally speaking, I almost never have any problem under Linux that I can't solve in a couple of minutes -- except a major hard drive crash maybe. Windows remain, OTOH, a complete mystery most of the time. So it definitely is a familiarity problem. Sometimes, I may fall down to the mantra that "windows is total, utter shite". But I'm reasonable enough to understand that it's just me who just got completely unfamiliar and uneasy with it.
> Every issue I had was literally a major configuration issue.
That's quite surprising, since I hardly met any machine since 2003 where one of the common live-CDs wouldn't boot to a workable state out of the box.
Bizarrely, I was able to live-CD boot to my newer machine fine. I even ran Ubuntu as my main OS for about 3 months until there was something I needed to do that wouldn't run under Wine. It worked "ok".
- I needed to reboot it 3 or 4 times a day because the sound would just stop working for no reason I was ever able to resolve.
- I could never get it to use the native resolution of my monitors. I suspect it was driver issues with my perfectly normal nvidia card.
- Video playback, flash, etc. all ran unacceptably slow.
To be honest, I'm willing to accept that not everything will "just work" perfectly out of the box. But if it takes me longer than a 2 or 3 hours to resolve a minor issue, I'm done.
One thing that still befuddles me to this day is the plethora of perfectly earnest looking GUI configuration odds and ends in Ubuntu which seem to have virtually no effect. Anything that I was able to resolve had to be done by opening up an xterm and editing some config file someplace (which usually wasn't in the place pointed to by most of the online help I could find).
I'm honestly interested in what problems people have under Windows or OS X that drives them to Linux. I hear a lot about insurmountable issues with these OSs, hardware that won't work or whatever. But I've almost never had an issue I couldn't resolve by downloading the correct driver for the device, clicking setup.exe and rebooting. The few times I couldn't it was because the hardware was bad.
(though there was one time I was trying to get bluetooth to work on a laptop I had, I did the above, but it borked the machine and I got a bluescreen. 30 minutes of googling gave me the magic incantations to fix it and get me back up and running...turns out the laptop was one of the submodels that didn't actually have bluetooth hardware...meh)
Now finding the drivers can sometimes be hard, especially if the hardware is oddball or very old.
The price of flexibility is a lack of conformity. This is fine in the server environment where you have a bunch of machines you control and learning your distro's every intricacy is worthwhile when it's amortised over all the machines you own.
However, for a home user trying to do a specific thing to their one computer, being able to Google their solution and follow the instructions is very important. Fedora and Debian might be G/L but if you only have instructions for one you'll have to know how to translate it to the other, and that's beyond most people's ken. In contrast, Windows is Windows.
The only common affliction is hardware, but Linux still draws the short straw here. But it could be worse, at least you're not making yourself a Hackintosh.
Which explains why most enterprises, once they settle on a distro, will stretch that version of the distro out for years -- all their technical staff will learn it, their greybeards will know how to wrangle weirdness out of it, they'll build an internal knowledge base how to resolve the particular 10 issues they have with it...etc. Once it's configured according to the 100 step config guide it'll run like an appliance and nobody will think anything about it unless some hardware fails.
For the end user, the endless twiddling just to get something running on their system kills any dubious efficiency improvements once it's up and running. No wonder folks are simply grabbing the useful tools and replacing the broken desktop OS with OS X.
This is now one of the more frequent activities I do on my machine. Next step is to make a desktop shortcut or applet "Fix my Sound" or a command-line script, to avoid going through the incantation to find and kill the right proces. Then install Windows.
With the GUIs, problem is that Gnome and KDE and Canonical have gone through so many changes to their config systems (supposedly freedesktop.org D-Bus or something is supposed to fix that, but there is always at least one team starting up a vendetta against another team, and breaking compatibility), and even if there is new stuff that works, there are tons of packages in the Canonical repository that happily edit config that your environment isn't actually using (gtk vs gconf vs dconf vs kde vs gnome, etc)
Taking the car analogy further, suppose I tried to turn on my radio, only to find out the volume knob (which I can quite clearly see and manipulate) doesn't work, 2 or 3 days of Googling into it lets me know that there's a new knob, over on the other side of the steering wheel to control volume, that's undocumented, doesn't work properly, and dumps all the petrol from the gas tank if it goes above 7.
The actual way to resolve the volume knob operation is to swap out the radio the car came with with another one, except doing so will cause an engine conflict requiring a new transmission and a green left rear tire. Until of course the radio stops working, which requires you to rearrange the spark plugs in a random order. But hey, the new radio you put in has satellite radio that works so long as the windshield wipers aren't on intermittent wipe...so you can check that feature box I suppose.
Reading the manual for illumination it says: "to lengthen the distance of wave propagation attenuation from the magnetic speaker drivers, rotate the amplitude control clockwise (unless south of the equator where clocks work double negatively backwards <G>)"
Searching the Internet for help always ends up with conversations like
"you shouldn't have bought that radio, every body knows that"
"which one, the stock one, or the new one? I didn't have a choice with the stock one"
"RTFM"
"I did and it's entirely not helpful"
"did you try removing your shoes?"
"no"
"do that, it'll fix it. I have the same car you have, but from 1962, and that's how I solve my tire problem everytime"
"I don't have a tire problem, I have a radio problem"
"that's what you think...."
blah blah blah blah
and in the end we're talking about different cars anyways
When switching from windows Me to Vista, my stepmother had to change her scanner and printer that were perfectly working because there aren't any driver. They both still work with the latest Linux (and Mac OS X).
This is quite typical of the problems under windows : forced upgrades, nagwares, malwares...
Also it has to be said over and over again: setting up Windows from a generic install disk can be just as much of a nightmare as Linux. The reason Windows works so well for most people has nothing to do with Windows; it has to do with using essentially a special distribution of Windows put together by the company that assembled the hardware. They've located, tested, and installed the right drivers on the system, and they've put together a recovery/reinstall disk that has all those drivers. Try installing Windows without having the right drivers pre-selected for you and you can easily end up in the same hell as a Linux install gone bad, except with less help available online because it's not a common thing to attempt.
By the way, your handy thumb drive with four drivers on it -- why did you need that? And why did you have it? Why weren't you that well prepared for the Linux install? It doesn't seem like a fair comparison if you're comparing a Windows install where you knew exactly what drivers you needed and already had them on hand to a Linux install where you hadn't even Googled the right driver for your video card.
I was that well prepared for the Linux install. I had CDs burned with multiple builds of the drivers, thumb drives with multiple builds of the drivers, hell, I had an entire other computer available with working access to the internet, I spent 3 days trying to get things working which are so not even a problem on other systems. Is there some super human level of support I should have had available? Should I have built a time machine and brought forward the Oracle of Delphi and Alan Turing?
That's the point. If you read this thread, and the rest of the topic, the common factor is that Linux fails to work out of the box on regular old systems on perfectly normal hardware.
The windows I installed was regular old, bought in the store windows. The hardware was off-the-shelf in a system I built myself. Nothing exotic (even if the system was 2 years old at the time). I installed it, it "just worked". When windows doesn't it's clear, or resolvable in 5 or 10 minutes of googling, with reliable and repeatable paths to resolution, and the system is usually able to run in a reduced function level of operation well enough that I was able to patch it up with fairly minimal fuss. Yeah sure, there's some deep voodoo that Windows bluebeards know, like how to path a registry by hand or some nonsense.
I was able to get the same distro to kinda work on another machine. But I eventually uninstalled it because, while it "worked" it was "not quite right".
Since the mid 90s, I give this a go every year, to see if their is a popular distro that's up to claims of "just works".
I've never gotten a distro to "just work" and gave up after days in disgust. Video drivers don't work, common peripherals, like keyboards, don't work reliably, audio has never worked right, I've brought half working machines to LUG meetings hoping some greybeard could coax something out of it to no avail. I've worked in hardware shops with virtually unlimited access to any sort of hardware you could imagine and after weeks of banging on the machine been unable to get something as basic as syncing to a monitor to work correctly. Stupid things like identical video cards eliciting different responses from the system.
What has improved? The install and available software. I remember 6 or 7 years ago, getting past the install was seen as a major requirement for acceptance on the desktop in the community. And coinciding with that having decent productivity software.
I think the community has stepped up and more or less gotten those resolved. But useless or nonexistent GUIs, random config files floating around from distro to distro with help docs that are out of date and have no bearing on what's actually in the files let along where, or what the configuration options actually mean, broken default packages, updates that break simple regression testing, etc. All fail to impress.
I've used Linux systems at times to save failing Windows disks, or rest system passwords on NT machines, and other utilitarian sorts of things. In embedded systems I own, where Linux is running as a ground up build for that specific hardware, it runs brilliantly. I have more Linux systems in my house than I do Windows for example. But unless problems can be reliably resolved in 1-2 hours, it's a no go.
I'll never understand why people have an issue with a singular piece of hardware on a Mac or a Windows machine and use that as an excuse to move to Linux, and then tolerate an absurd and constant barrage of completely solved problems (on other systems) every day.
Is it better than it used to be? Sure! Is it competitive? Not really.
Over and over again I see commercial OS vendors implicitly credited for writing drivers that were actually supplied by the hardware manufacturers themselves.
The vast majority of the general population find that their Windows and OS X machines 'Just Work' because they come preconfigured with all of the manufacturer's drivers already installed.
Linux can't 'Just Work' in the Desktop space because:
1. It doesn't have majority market share (like Microsoft), so not all hardware manufacturers will make it a priority for their hardware to have good Linux drivers.
2. It doesn't control the hardware platform (like Apple), so it is likely that a significant proportion of users will have machines that have unsupported / badly supported hardware.
Linux has to solve this problem, excuses be damned (and it has become quite good at solving this problem – most hardware just works).
It's great, but it's not the point. The point is to make Linux the best OS that the community is capable of making. Not for other people: For itself. The oh-so-common threats of "Linux will never take over the desktop unless it does such-and-such" are simply irrelevant: The Linux community isn't trying to take over the desktop. They really don't care if it gets good enough to make it onto your desktop, so long as it stays good enough to remain on theirs. The highly-vocal MS-haters, pro-Linux zealots, and money-making FOSS purveyors might be loud, but they're still minorities.
I believe this still reflects the opinion of the Linux community, but there is a growing public consensus that is entirely opposite: the goal of Linux is to gain market share comparable or superior to the major commercial desktop operating systems, and since the current Linux community itself is a rounding error by comparison, the goals of Linux have nothing to do with the needs of its current users and everything to do with serving the people who so far want nothing to do with it. It seems to me Linux is in the early stages of acting out the cliché sitcom plot where the main character is sidetracked onto a quixotic mission to remake themselves as a popular kid, culminating in a humiliating realization that they aren't any closer to being popular than when they started, they've picked up vices without learning any virtues, they've alienated their friends, and worst of all, in the process of rejecting their identity they've rejected and abandoned their own good qualities.
Linux should learn from what the cool kids do well, of course. It should learn to be friendly, approachable, well-groomed, and confident. I'm glad it's doing that. With GNOME, KDE, and Canonical, we have three big projects devoted to making the Linux desktop smooth, polished, and friendly. Linux and all its users are benefiting tremendously from that, just like I (a rather frumpy geek) benefit from periodic attention to upgrading and expanding my wardrobe.
However, Linux needs to think just as much about its strengths, and we don't hear enough about that. Linux is a powerful system for sophisticated users. It's got a great command line. It's mostly open-source and has a great community. Linux has two major integrated desktop environments, and inside the integrated environment of your choice, or even from a niche window manager put together by a handful of people, you can run apps from another integrated environment. On one desktop I run KDE, and on my laptop I usually run Awesome. When I want to run a KDE app under Awesome, I just apt-get install it and run it. Isn't that amazing? Not to mention that Linux (like other open sources Unixes) runs on a range of hardware platforms that puts Windows and OSX to shame. When's the last time a Windows user needed to run an OS on a virtual ARM processor on an FPGA, looked in the FPGA manual, and discovered, "Oh good, it supports Windows, so I'll just install that and have a nice familiar environment?"
Now, many people who have read this far will wish this was a different kind of forum where they could just quote the last paragraph followed by the picture of Ogre screaming "NERDS!!!!" and be done with it. However, it's ridiculous to dismiss Linux's strength, and in fact everybody's image of Linux is affected by those strengths. Anybody who cares enough about Linux to click to this page cares about its geeky awesomeness. If you truly dismiss those strengths from your mind and see Linux only as a desktop operating system for unsophisticated users, then Linux is just a pathetic third-place OS that only a mother or an open source zealot could love. That would be a tragic crisis of confidence. That's like when the kid who's great at music or math or poetry hits rock bottom and tells him or herself, "None of the things I'm good at matter. Nobody cares about them. Nobody sees me as a kid with this great ability. They judge me the same way they judge each other. They just see me as an ugly kid with mediocre social skills." Of course, that's when the learning starts, and by the end of the sitcom or the Saturday morning special, the kid learns that it's okay to be a little frumpy but her talent is something to treasure, and for her, two hours of doing her hair and applying makeup in the morning (which she hates) is not going to pay off as well as a couple of hours playing the cello or writing code or whatever it is that she really loves and is good at.
Linux needs to skip the Saturday morning special trap of defining itself solely by its ability to cater to the mainstream. The Linux community needs to look at itself as users and say, "Damn, Linux rocks my socks off. How can we make it more awesome for us?" Not, "Well, I'm a weirdo, and real users are nothing like me, so it doesn't really matter that I like Linux. I guess from a normal user's perspective I can't think of anything that Linux is especially good at. How can the Linux community make Linux suck less for other people?" Not that the answers to those two questions are entirely disjoint. There's a lot of overlap between them. It's just that the first is an important perspective that is in danger of being lost as we concentrate more and more on the second.
I hear people talk about problems or applications that haven't been standard linux fair for years now, but they haven't tried it and by-golly they're unbelievably attached to those memories they have of how hard it is to use.
Aw, already with no explanation? That's fine. Let's play a game. Let's count the number of posts that make it seem completely obvious that Linux is "so wildly unusable". Then let's count the number of posts that actually describe any task that is vastly different or categorically harder to do in Linux. Let's see which count is greater.
My phone works as a modem out of the box in Ubuntu. I can do internet connection sharing to my Xbox in less than 5 clicks (it required registry editing and manual editting of UNIX files in use in OS X), and I've yet to get my phone working as a modem in OS X, period.
If you tally up a list of possible problems someone might encounter in their entire computing use Linux will definitely solve far more intuitively than Windows, however, when tally up a list of possible problems someone might have and multiply it by the frequency in which they have them the polishes on Windows and OS X to solve those problems are far better.
Lets take for example what happens when I plug my projector into my laptop using Windows vs. Ubuntu, on Ubuntu nothing happens, on Windows it starts showing stuff on my projector (once in a while it doesn't and have I have to press Windows+P and move to the projector option, or unplug it and plug it back in again).
By any standardized method of testing Linux will excel, when you put people in front of it it's obvious that it's inferior. Hell, my friend happens to have a Sony Xperia, I ask him why the GUI is so sluggish and get some answer about Sony charging his provider for updates, and them not having updates, and not wanting to root his phone, apparently the issue is fixed in some version of Android that he can't update to. When I hear this I think, that sounds like too much of a pain in the ass, I'll stick with my iPhone, when normal people hear this they think, Sony Xperias / Android are broken.
I'm just going to address this point right here. Almost all normal people I know would really appreciate being able to get internet in any variety of locales where they'd otherwise have to wrangle with stupid WiFi login screens and money portals or where even crappy commercial WiFi is unavailable (park?). The thing is that most people just don't even consider that it is or should be possible.
If the "normal person" is incidentally using Ubuntu and Cyanogenmod, all we have to do is plug the phone in via USB, turn on tethering on the phone, click "HTC Android Phone" on "the two computers on the screen" (nm-applet), and that's that.
This is extremely handy in a lot of cases. Today, for instance, I tethered my phone and used it to browse for a few hours because Comcast was choking to death on my new modem and I had to wait for a "backend engineer" to process the ticket the customer service people created. Do you think that having a redundant net connection with just your phone and a USB cord is valuable, even to "normal people"? I sure do.
As to the rest of your post, you can generalize anything you want into a niche. I could say, "You know, 'normal people' only use their computers for Facebook, they definitely aren't trying to plug them into projectors". The reality is that plugging in a projector should work on Ubuntu and often does. As you noted, Windows is not perfect in this regard either; Ubuntu works excellently for a large number of people. Is that OK with you?
Saying that Ubuntu can never take off because you have to manually specify projector output is quite far-fetched. Should I say that Windows will never take off because you usually have to install software to use your peripherals when on Linux they are almost always supported immediately upon plug in?
Here's the real answer: desktop Linux will come around when it gets a company like Apple behind it, just as embedded Linux came around as TiVO, Google, Boxee, etc., put their weight behind it.
Microsoft sells relatively few copies of Windows directly to consumers; almost all consumers receive Windows pre-installed on the computer that they purchased at major retailer X. The manufacturers integrate the OS and the hardware, ship it out, and sell the whole thing as a single product called a "PC". When Linux gets someone that does this on a major, Dell-like scale, we'll see Linux on the desktop. It's well past good enough; really, these things don't take all that much. The biggest obstacles are social: "Why doesn't this greeting card creation program I just bought for $60 work on my 'UBUNTOX'?"
I thought you meant using your cell phone to place an outgoing call to a dialup internet service.
Note: I don't have an AT&T iPhone where I understand this doesn't work and yes, if you don't like iTunes it's probably going to be a PITA to get this to work.
This hasn't been my experience. Mine is similar, except you don't even have to click anything: the usb network device is detected, and network-manager immediately attempts to get an IP address. Then you're online.
There is no way it could possibly be easier.
On Linux, I can't even use X + Awesome + <terminal emulator> without huge amounts of tearing and nearly 1 second delays while the WM redraws my terminal emulators while switching virtual desktops. A more experienced friend of mine suggested that this could be due to using nvidia binary graphics drivers, so I tried out the open source ones, but the tearing and delays got worse, and occasionally an entire window would be mangled for no apparent reason. He also suggested that it could be due to XRandR, but I noticed no change when I stopped using it (other than that my displays were no longer vertical), so now I'm using the binary drivers and XRandR again.
After upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.04, I was unable to use my onboard NIC at all. I thought that it had been bricked, so I put another in, but eventually someone I knew experienced the same problem and was able to fix it by temporarily removing the battery from his motherboard. Apparently the drivers that ship with 11.04 like to put your network card into an unusable state until you physically mess with the machine. You could just be careful not use them and download the working drivers, but you might need a NIC for that...
On OSX, Spaces has a bug that causes windows to randomly rearrange themselves on the Z-axis when switching spaces. It also has a bug that causes your keyboard to stop working completely. The first time I encountered the second bug I had to reboot my computer because I couldn't kill Spaces without using my keyboard, but I have since put Activity Monitor in my dock just in case I need to do that. Fullscreen games on OSX (Starcraft II or Heroes of Newerth, for example) run a reasonably high chance of never giving up exclusive mode, even after dying, so your machine will become mostly inoperable after playing the game a lot of the time. There's also no reasonable way to run these games in fullscreen non-exclusive mode (the most useful configuration on other OSes), so you can't quickly switch between the game and Skype/screencasting software/IRC.
...And I hardly think I need to tell anyone here what sucks about Windows.
Ubuntu's 11.04 compiz is unstable, don't let me deceive you. BUT, it is far superior to plain old metacity with nvidia. Ugh, that shit tears and is awful.
Take the time to try a composited window manager. While you're at it, install vlc, and make sure you manually tell it to "Use Hardware Acceleration". It's amazing how small things can really show you the ability of Linux.
Similarly, I use VDPAU output for mplayer and full-screen it, taking the window manager and compositing manager out of the equation entirely.
Not everyone wants OS-X-style eye candy.
I think I pretty well acknowledged that even. I didn't know that you don't move windows in Awesome, especially since the comment was about tearing, and I merely mentioned that using a compositor helps with tearing...
Alternatively, you could right click on the Finder icon in the dock, choose 'New Finder Window' from the menu. From there you can go to the Applications / Utilities folder, and launch Activity Monitor from there.
And you still can't watch video without tearing on multiple displays setup :(
(You have to disable one of the displays in driver settings)
You can't have photoshop or any decent image editing software on linux (gimp is, well, a cripple).
Arguably, font rendering is still awful, and so are default fonts in all the distros.
You still have to watch out for what you upgrade and in which order. E.g. if you update X with non-repository video drivers (e.g. binary AMD drivers), your system might not even load after reboot.
Speaking of AMD drivers, they are plain horrible.
Arguably, GNOME / KDE / XFCE are all worse than Windows Explorer or OS X default window manager.
Whenever it comes to something being easy to use or well-designed visually, linux desktop experience is so much inferior compared to windows and os x.
Really? I've always thought of good window managers as one of the big selling points of the Linux experience. Moving and resizing windows just seems so much more cumbersome to me when I'm using either. Perhaps you meant to talk about the file manager?
In comparison to what? Cleartype on windows is absolute shit, and OSX just looks blurry. In Linux I can tweak the aliasing and hinting options to be the way I like them.