Where I work, we are trialing open office, and the thing can’t even do a simple mail merge from a CSV file. What hope have I got of converting our 30 admin staff over to Open Office from Microsoft Office, let alone, cutting them over to a desktop, where they can’t even double click on an Office type file from a network share and seemlessly watch it open.

The sad excuse for a file common dialog box in all distributions of linux is more than proof that the Linux Desktop is not mature.

Of all of them the most polished for the desktop Ubuntu still cannot do some of the basic things like play an MP3 from my SAMBA server.

Even the commercial products drive me up the wall. Novell have a linux product call Access Manager, a customised disk based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. Well it doesn’t support the NIC’s in the server, and because it is customised, I can’t install the C++ compiler to compile a set from source and then load the Kernal Object. So I had to actually make a SUSE Driver Addon Disk which took me down the typical roller coaster ride of trial and error. So for a weeks work I finally got my Linux Server to reconise the network cards, something that I could have done in Windows within half an hour at the best of times.

The problem (which will always be a problem) is that the whole lot is too open, too many people conflict over how something should be implemented and conseqeuntially you have 5 different package managers, 10 diffrent windows managers, 8 different shells, and 360+ different linux distributions..

How the hell am I supposed to push this product?

For someone to understand why Microsoft is beloved God of IT, it should understand simple marketing basics. Microsoft spends enormous money on that as they have done since beginning. It is all about appearance. It means that IT is still luxury in lot of places. When IT will start to be more tool than toy (it’s already happening in lot of places), then alternatives become more attractive. Until then, Windows is used, because it’s what you use without thinking.

When Linux will hit OEM places, home entertainment appliances, it also will be used without thinking. People don’t care about what they got on computer, unless it’s working. So we should get installed by default. It all matters. Until then we should grow our power user crowd. And be more friendly to them.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see linux spread across the desktop with high penetration. For one, it would force M$ to really look at thier offering and make it a better product. As of now, they have no reason to improve, they have no real competition. Maybe it will happen with linux but personally i think it’s still quite a few years before we will see good penetration on the desktop.

I know it’s not linux’s fault. I admire the people who work on linux distros, and I’d prefer the open source philosophy. But I just can’t honestly recommend it to some one without the warning: this is gonna give you headaches, just to get the basics.

Another perspective from which it is a problem is that (most) people don’t like to have too many decisions. There is a well-documented decision making paralysis that people tend to encounter when faced with too many choices. There may be a dozen candidates for president on the ballot, but the media (and by extension, the voters) never deal with more than 2 or 3 of them. The most complicated decision a lot of people can deal with is “this or that”, and Linux offers them a choice of “1, 2, 3, 4, … 100, 101 …”.

In fact, Microsoft has shown that most desktop users are happy with no choice at all.

More than one distro is healthy, but most people are inherently afraid of having too many choices. That’s why we never have more than 3 presidential candidates in the media (despite there being a good dozen or so on the ballot). If people perceive that they have more than 2 or 3 choices, they tend to encounter decision-making paralysis. And, as Microsoft shows us, many people are quite happy with no choice at all.