I wonder how we can make the transition be towards Linux for the average user. We moved my retired parents from Win7 to Ubuntu, and they're doing just fine (other than printer drivers). For most people's uses, Linux is a perfectly reasonable and functionally complete alternative to Win7 or XP.
That's surprisingly important to the average user.
He began emailing documents to himself and printing from his Windows 7 laptop.
About six months after Windows 8 was released, HP finally released a supposedly compatible driver for his printer. Upon installation of the driver, the system detected the same printer twice, and neither of the detected devices worked. Additionally, every application I tried printing from crashed as soon as the printer dialog appeared.
The situation was resolved when we discovered that HP has a Windows 8 compatible generic postscript driver that works with just about everything.
I didn't go out and buy a new printer, I reinstalled Windows.
They will be happy with anything you are enthusiastic about that is lawful and is not harmful to your health.
As long as they don't watch Netflix.
Or play games.
Or have any unsupported peripherals.
Or want to use any commercial consumer software.
The rest of your complaints are valid right now. I expect the game situation is going to change because of what Valve's doing w/ SteamOS.
On Windows, I can go to Netflix.com and it starts working. Even if it needs Silverlight, it installs it for your automatically. Users don't know what Silverlight is. They don't want to search through Arch's wiki. They certainly don't want to figure out what the hell a browser user-agent override is.
In reality, Netflix doesn't work on Linux.
To wit: Netflix is (currently) harder to use on every Linux distribution than it is on Windows and Mac. It's probably too much hassle to be worth it for non-tech folks, but it does work.
I can't imagine that conversation. "It's trivial! You just go to fds-team.de... no, that's .de, not .com. Yup, fds-team.de slash cms slash pipelight... you know what, just search for Pipelight. It's like the third or fourth result down, just look for whatever doesn't have boats or trailers in the name. You'll install it with the command there, the sudo... no, that's sudo with an S, not psuedo. Ah, there's directions there, you can follow them. Now let me tell you about the user-agent string..."
No thank you. Netflix does not work on Linux. It can merely be made to work.
I can:
"Does Netflix work on Linux?"
"Yes! It's not officially supported, but it does work. Go here https://launchpad.net/pipelight , click the 'Installation Instructions' link and follow the instructions for your distro. Don't know which one you're using? Here's how to find out..."
As I mentioned in my reply to your comment: "[Netflix on Linux is] probably too much hassle to be worth it for non-tech folks, but it does work."
> Netflix does not work on Linux. It can merely be made to work.
I guess we don't speak the same language. :) If you can make something work on Linux, then it works on Linux. Your assertion to the contrary is confusing.
Look at it this way - lets say I made, for example a fingerprint scanner for Windows, and you wanted to use it for Linux. I could say "yes! it works on Linux! You just have to write your own C driver!" You can clearly see this isn't an acceptable solution as writing a driver is needlessly complex especially if you don't have the proper documentation.
Now you might argue that writing a driver and searching Google for pipelight are in way two different leagues - but to the average user, asking them to do that might as well be the same as asking them to write their own driver.
Even the instructions you gave are confusing. Follow the instructions for your distro? Wait, you expect the average user to use the command line? What distro am I using? Linux? Should I follow AV Linux?
Because you most likely work with computers everyday on a professional level, you are vastly overstating the know-how of the average computer user. So yes, Netflix does work on Linux - if you are a wiz enough to get it up and working. The average user? No.
F: "In reality, Netflix doesn't work on Linux."
Me: "Netflix does work on Linux in the same way that a program written for a device that doesn't yet have a C compiler does work. ... [Netflix is] probably too much hassle to be worth it for non-tech folks..."
F: "My point was, Netflix does not work. It can be made to work, but by default, it does not work... Netflix does not work on Linux. It can merely be made to work."
Me: "If you can make something work on Linux, then it works on Linux. Your assertion to the contrary is confusing."
1) Do you still not see how the words he wrote are confusing? If you can make something work, then it works!
2) Where does freehunter restrict the scope of his assertion to the set of people who would never, ever, ever read HN or any other tech site? I don't see anywhere in his argument where he does that.
As far as I can tell, he never says "Netflix actually does work on Linux for people who are technically inclined." The only thing that I see him saying about Netflix on Linux is that "...it does not work on Linux [unless you install the software needed to make it work]... [but even if you did that, that's not really Netflix working on Linux, for... reasons!]" Did I misread his posts?
My car is missing the timing belt. It doesn't work. It can be made to work by putting a new belt in it, but I wouldn't tell someone that my car works. The best I would describe it as is a "yes, but it will take some work".
For all intents and purposes, it might as well not work.
I can do one better: "My car is missing its timing belt and needs another. Otherwise, it's in good working order."
> The original discussion was around people with limited technical ability [thus it should have been obvious what I meant.]
So, a suggestion: rather than saying "In reality, Netflix doesn't work on Linux." or "My point was, Netflix does not work.", say something like "Netflix on Linux is too hard for the man on the street to manage.".
Yanno, I said exactly that in my first reply to you, but I guess that you missed the point that I was making. Maybe you were in too much of a hurry to carefully read the words that I carefully selected to most precisely get my point across. shrug
Netflix works just fine on Linux, right? Or am I mistaken?
> Or play games.
Most people actually do NOT play the big Windows games you are referring to. They play browser-based games. Work just fine.
> Or have any unsupported peripherals.
Linux' hardware support is actually far superior to that of Windows. Trotting out the 'unsupported hardware'-argument made sense ten years ago. It does not make sense today.
On top of that, it's a bit of a silly point to make. If they don't have a monitor, they can't use it either.
> Or want to use any commercial consumer software.
Your only valid point.
There are some hacks to make it work, but Netflix won't support you if you go that route. Basically, you need a specially patched version of Wine which runs Firefox for Windows with the Silverlight plugin. There are PPAs and the like for Ubuntu users, but it's still a bit ugly and hackish.
Desktop Netflix is built with microsoft silverlight for which there is no official linux distribution. It can be made to work with a WINE hack, but even something like that may be too much for the acerage users.
But it's not just shiny newish hardware: my motherboard uses some audio chipset that was immediately recognized and used by Ubuntu, but it has various wacky issues: plug in headphones on the front panel and there's audio (after 10-15 seconds) through them, but when you unplug them, it doesn't switch back to the speakers plugged in the back. I can eventually unmute my speakers by playing around in alsamixer, but I'm not sure how, even though I've done it two or three times.
Also, Skype doesn't play well with pulseaudio (again, long-time known issue), so to ensure Skype working, you have to stop pulseaudio and start Skype, but then nothing else that uses audio works until you start pulseaudio again.
Lots of issues, still.
Also, GP was talking about his retired parents, who probaby don't play games that much, or have their favorite on Windows, so it's pretty much the same issue as above, though now steam is available on linux, and there are plenty of little games available on app markets.
I don't know netflix as a user (not US cit.), so can't comment much on that. I understand that before the streaming services, people used to get rented dvds by mail. It's a little bit a step back to return to that solution (if it still exists), but it's not that unbearable, imho.
Of course, if said parents are computer savy, then these issues might not weight that much (VMs).
Fair point, for now. But Chromebooks can access Netflix, so there's no reason why this can't be extended to Chrome on Linux in the near future.
> Or play games.
Steam for Linux and Steam OS (which is a Linux distro) will change this. Already pretty much every upcoming indie game is being developed for Linux in addition to other platforms, and there's already a substantial library of games.
> Or have any unsupported peripherals.
Very few of those exist nowadays.
> Or want to use any commercial consumer software.
And what 'commercial' consumer software are you talking about? Most software nowadays can be accessed through the browser, quite a bit is spreading to Linux, or there's an acceptable free substitute. Don't tell me a free office suite with Linux isn't compelling to the average consumer, especially now that sending documents as PDF is more socially acceptable than sending Word files...
I mean, I use Ubuntu exclusively, all native apps, while attending University, developing pet projects, and doing normal 'computer' things like using Skype, playing games, etc... I recently bough a Fujifilm X-A1 camera (great device BTW), and GIMP even works great for importing and developing RAW files...
I don't see what more the 'average' consumer needs - and don't say MS Office or Photoshop, because the vast majority of people don't 'need' them...
I don't have that many unsupported peripherials. Ubuntu currently handles my wireless HP printer better than my other laptop with Windows 7.
There are alternatives to commercial consumer software. The goal of a typical user is not to use < program >, it's to accomplish < task >. Usually < task > is "browsing the web, using email, playing music and videos".
She wanted one thing from the laptop - remote desktop client to connect to her main machine.
I used mint. After 30 minutes of trying to find suitable gui for rdesktop that does not require touching console just threw XP.