Why the World Is Not Ready For Linux 861
eldavojohn writes "While many users reading Slashdot embrace Linux, ZDNet is running an article on why the rest of the world isn't ready. One note for Linux developers: 'Stop assuming that everyone using Linux (or who wants to use Linux) is a Linux expert.' While a lot of these topics have been brought up as both stories and comments on Slashdot, this article pretty much sums up why Vista could be absolutely terrible, and people would still believe there is no other option." From the article: "The one area of Linux ownership and use where it becomes apparent that there's an assumption that everyone who uses Linux is an expert is hardware support. Your average user doesn't have the time, the energy or the inclination to deal with uncertainty. Also, they usually only have the one PC to play with. Hardware just has to work. There's a very good reason why Microsoft spends a lot of time on hardware compatibility — it's what people want."
even the linux experts get tired. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been installing, troubleshooting, setting up Linux boxes since the days of the 75+ floppy disk installs. Back then it was fun, how cool to get a FREE version of Unix on my PC!
I have probably installed hundreds of Linuxes. In the beginning it was cool, it was fun, and the end result was always worth the effort. Today, while a fully functional Linux box is almost always worth the effort, the blood, sweat, and tears of an install-troubleshoot doesn't come as easily. I've found other Linux "experts" who agree... it's time Linux works out of the box.
That said, I might disagree a bit with the thesis Linux doesn't work out of the box... I've found especially with distros like Ubuntu Linux has come far to "just working". As I've posted before, on a raw machine I've actually had better installation success with a cold install of Linux over XP.
But the main point is valid, and I think it extends to the Linux experts. Not only is troubleshooting geek-cool only to geeks, it doesn't bring warm fuzzies to people for whom you introduce to Linux. There's nothing more scary to the general users than seeing gibberish bootup messages complaining about missing or incompatible drivers and hardware when what they want to see is a shiny new GUI with applications they can use right away.
Linux experts can and still do slough through the pain of perfect Linux installs but the rest of the world isn't impressed. Give them something they can use that works well with everything else. Ultimately it looks like Linux is getting there and may even have a chance of becoming a major desktop... I'm not as pessimistic as the article seems to be.
In the meantime, good points from the article to win favor for Linux and its future:
It's all about pre-installed. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because the majority of home users do NOT upgrade their OS. They use whatever was installed by the OEM. They use the drivers provided by the OEM. They won't even install and update anti-virus software.
Absolutely Right (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not that I'm ignorant, certainly. I use Firefox, OpenOffice, Gaim, and other open-source software regularly. I've learned some Java, SQL, HTML, C++, and consider myself "computer savvy." But because I am not familiar with the language of the Linux OS (like the CHAR(3) names for the folders on the \ or the keywords for taking advantage of the terminal), I am extremely limited in what I can do. I tried to install FF2.0 the other day, but after I extracted the tar.gz, I didn't know what to do. I tried a HOWTO I found on Ubuntu's community site, tried apt-get, but neither didn't work for some reason. So I'm stuck with FF1.5 for now. It's probably a simple fix, but that all the more profoundly demonstrates how difficult it can be to use even one of the most user-friendly distros available.
Don't get me wrong; I love the idea behind OSS and want to learn to use Linux better--I wouldn't be trying it out if I didn't. But I simply cannot use it for anything more than simple tasks like web surfing and office utilities because there is a high knowledge barrier that will just take time to overcome. If Linux can adapt like Nintendo and find a way to make Linux more accessible and bring those who can only handle Windows well into the Linux world, then we've got something. Until then, I'm afraid the author is right.
Windows/OSX = Arithmetic, Linux = Algebra. (Score:2, Interesting)
"But where is Photoshop?" : my Ubuntu story... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is with the software, as soon as the user needs anything more than browse,read email and write letters they hit the wall with Linux.
I have a photographer friend who uses Photoshop extensively. When fixing her Windows machine that kept freezing, I decided to make a it a double boot with Ubuntu as the second OS. I added all her bookmarks from Firefox, I made sure she could access her documents, her expensive high end Epson printer had a nice functional Gutenprint driver, and of course, I added GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop.
When I demoed the system to her, up until we got to the GIMP part, my friend was impressed with Ubuntu. She liked the clean Gnome menus, she liked how her printer could print, she liked that she didn't have to use an antivirus and she liked Ubuntu because it means "humanity towards others" -- so far all was well.
Then the bomb was dropped: she had asked a simple question -- "Where is Photoshop?" I quietly told her that there is nice replacement for it called GIMP. And headed over to the Graphics>GIMP menu to show her GIMP -- what I think is an excellent image manipulation program. But she told me to stop the whole thing and to give back her Photoshop. She didn't care that windows' security had more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese, she didn't care that her Windows machine would freeze once in a while, she didn't care about the "free" part and she definitely didn't give a damn anymore about "Humanity towards others" when she could not have her Photoshop. Just the fact that she would have to tell other professionals that she uses a program called "GIMP" was enough for her to not wanting to try it. In other words just the names and the "image" of some of the OS applications sound "goofy", childish or "geeky" and no matter how much we don't like it but appearances and first impression are important (the marketing folk know that too well).
Now, I know that GIMP is probably just as good and that with more or less effort one can achieve the same result with GIMP as one can with Photoshop. I have been using it for many years with success, BUT I am also a geek who likes to write device drivers and re-compile kernels. I love Linux and would never go back to Windows. I figured out a way to do everything I needed in Linux. But most people are not geeks like me. They want their computer to do a specific job. In other words the computer to them is a "tool" much like a monkey wrench -- just a means to an end, to me the computer is a "the end".
People falsely assume that Microsoft conquered the world because of its great operating system. It was not the operating system, it was Office (especially Excel and Word) and other applications, most written by a 3rd party, that made Windows into what it is. Most people who use Windows would probably agree that it sucks: bad security, blue screens and restarts -- everyone hates those things. But as long as Office along with Photoshop, Dreamweaver and other software that people spend hundreds and thousands of dollars is there -- they will be glued to Windows.
I realize that it is a "chicken and egg" problem: if Linux would be more popular the software companies would invest in porting their application to Linux (think Maya, Matlab and Mathematica...) but part of the reason that Linux is not that popular is because most of the applications will not work in Linux.
P.S. No, I didn't try running Photoshop with WINE because I heard it is not stable, and Linux also didn't have an easy way to calibrate and match the input/output color profiles and was missing some other software that my friend was using. I just used Photoshop as a prime example.
Re:I believe in people (Score:3, Interesting)
Are they lazy and ignorant? OK, I guess it's hard to argue that they're not ignorant.
Are people who don't want to rebuild the transmission on their car just lazy and ignorant? They could do it. Most people could do it, if they took the time to learn how. I believe that most people can do anything that they really want to do. But that doesn't mean they're lazy and ignorant if they don't want to do something that I happen to think is fun.
Re:I believe in people (Score:2, Interesting)
However, having to remotely fix issues with Flash, Javascript, JRE's, and printing are a bugger. That's where I think the effort of Linux hackadors should be. Work on the base. Make it just work... the rest will come.
Re:I believe in people (Score:5, Interesting)
Simply look at the IQ gaussian. No matter if it disturbs your politically correct sense or not, or if you have a quibble with what the "center" means, it still lays out the performance curve of human beings faced with task completion. The more complex the task, the further out to the right you go, and the fewer people you find able to get the job done. And this tells you, straight to your face, that you're not going to get everyone even in the center and upper half into your "tent" until, or unless, you deal with:
Taken together, I think that most of those points are a direct or secondary consequence of the mindset that pervades linux; without a sea change in that mindset, linux isn't going very far outside its technical user base. IMHO.
From the point of view of my company, we (I, more to the point, since I run the company) am interested in a linux release of our software but the user base is small, there is no core GUI (we are not going to be stuck debugging people's desktops, widget libraries, etc.) and the licensing terms (GPL and others) are basically a minefield for our IP. We've been "doing" windows since the Windows 3.1, we even did all the windows RISC versions (MIPS, PPC, Alpha) we did the Amiga, we're seriously considering releasing our Mac version. Linux? No. I keep my eye on it in the hopes that a GUI will become a standardized part of the OS (whether or not it obsoletes xwindows and pendant technologies isn't an issue.) That'd probably be enough to get a pilot release out. Mind you, I'm not talking about linux's interest in my product. I think my product can stand on its own — all the better for us if linux users are technical. Our product is many times more complex to use than, for instance, Photoshop. No, I'm talking about my interest in linux. Until or unless linux can look and feel to me like support for it won't be more effort intensive than Windows support, it's a non-starter. A consistent GUI is where that all starts. IMHO. :)
I am guessing that the thought process at, for instance, Adobe, is similar. Linux does everything it can, it seems to me, to not court commercial developers of heavy GUI applications. But desktops elsewhere (Apple, Windows) are going to more and more GUI. Look at Omni Outliner. Delicious Library. Photoshop. Word. You may not like these apps, but they literally se
Re:I believe in people (Score:3, Interesting)
Different kinds of people (Score:3, Interesting)
"people" want it to be... Which people? Not everyone, not me. Personally I hope to see Linux evolve into a system that's really good for people like me - people who want an environment especially well-suited to tinkering. I think it has the potential and the flexibility - but one of the problems is that even people who want to tinker also want their computer to assist them in various ways. I think the need for a -print0 option is an inherent flaw in the way "find" works, for instance - and I'd like a certain degree of consistency across the various tools that's hard to accomplish without an organized leadership. There's lots of great ideas - for instance, I think the Emacs command interface is brilliant (hotkey sequences combined with a decent help system and the ability to specify commands by name if you've forgotten the hotkey sequence) but things like that are sort of little citadels surrounded by wilderness. If you step outside Emacs, you lose the benefit of the Emacs command interface - and other apps have great stuff to offer, too, but none of it really meshes from one app to another.
But the appliance thing? It's been tried, and computers just aren't ready to be appliances yet. Or rather, people still need the "general purpose" computer, in part because everything they do on the computer is still evolving. Web standards change, hardware standards change, new software comes out all the time, and so on. People keep thinking of new things to do with computers. Things haven't settled enough for computers to be commodity "appliances" - or at least, if you treat the computer like that you're missing out on the full potential of the thing. (The botnet problem, for instance, could be solved by thoroughly debugging the e-mail, web, etc. apps, burning them to ROM, and allowing nothing else on the system to execute - but that doesn't work now, 'cause there'd be some new version of Flash, some new video codec, a new CSS or HTML spec, etc. and users would want that stuff to work.)
Now, that doesn't mean that a system that attempts to fill the needs of people who want a certain set of functionality, with no headaches, is a bad thing. I just don't believe that a system like that should be expected to serve everyone. I think it's good that projects like KDE are trying to serve that niche, but at the same time I think that treating that kind of thing as if it's the whole point of Linux is a little shortsighted. I think there's a popular notion that's evolved out this desire to turn Linux into an "appliance-wannabe" system like Windows or Mac OS, the notion that it's inherently poor design to create an application based on the needs and expectations of hackers or power users as opposed to the vast majority of users... Or, conversely, that, with few exceptions, the ideal for a UI design is always the design that works reasonably well for the largest number of people. There is some merit to this idea - different people handle ideas in different ways, and so it's good to use a style that fits these different ways of thinking - but I believe that it's worthwhile to create systems that are specifically well-suited to power users. Some people just want to operate at a "higher" level of sorts, have more extensive control over more minute details, and so on. The key is to not be lazy about it: make the app complicated but aim to make it fit well with its neighbors' styles and in addition to providing all the power user functionality, be sure to include ways to manage that complexity intelligently. And also, it help