I've just set up Ubuntu linux, the supposed accessible desktop linux, in the hope that Wine (a linux windows emulator) is now mature enough that I can run my windows audio apps from it. It's not that I loathe Microsoft with all my heart, it's just last week I read an article about Windows security vulnerabilities, thought 'fucking hell!' and decided to try something else.
Not that I'm new to linux. For the past 9 years I've installed distro after distro (RedHat, Debian, Mandrake) in the hope that it might provide the desktop experience I've become accustomed to in Windows (let alone MacOS) and time and time again I've been disappointed. Gnome and KDE still look like rubbish, and there are still big gaps. For example, when I installed Ubuntu it recognised my windows drives, but did it bother to think that I might want to make use of them? No. Even when I used their disk tool to access the drives, did it ask me if I wanted to mount them permanently? No. I had to open a terminal and edit /etc/fstab. And they put the terminal programme under 'Accessories'. In Windows, the command line interface can be safely relegated to the Accessories menu, but in linux, it's still a very necessary tool. In fact, despite the best desktop efforts it's still the only real way of using the operating system.
My real bugbear though is the problem with WiFi support. In order for me to use WiFi under Ubuntu 5.10 (released late last year) I need to use a program called ndiswrapper, which (get this!), makes use of the windows driver for my wifi card. Talk about number 8 wire! Oh, and the version of the kernel I'm running doesn't make use of WPA encryption (which is pretty much mandatory), so I have to install yet another hack called wpasupplicant.
Now all this valiant hacking by linux volunteers to plug gaps is nice - if you know how to implement them. But as a model for configuring and using operating systems, it stinks. It relies on people being computer savvy to be able to implement them. If you're not very comp literate, and don't have the ability/inclination to upskill, chances are you're going to have a 'negative user experience' with this operating system.
Worse still, the Wifi config 'just works' under Windows. Now I know linux apologists will say "it's easy for Windows, they employ thousands of programmers and all the hardware manufacturers write drivers for them by default". True. But if you want to compete with Microsoft for the 'ma and pa' users, you have to do better than throwing hacked together code and poorly written FAQs at them.
So, the idea of accessible linux on the desktop for people like my dad still seems a long way away. To be fair Ubuntu is definitely an improvement on earlier distros. I'd say 'it's early days', but linux is now 15 years old! You'd think they'd have got it together by now. I think all this arsing around with millions of distributions, and competing desktop projects has got in the way. Not to mention geeks' inherent snobbiness about letting the hoi polloi use their system. Shame really.
Posted by stuart at August 27, 2006 10:01 AM