Will Linux succeed on the desktop?
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
Loading ...iTnews rehashes the old refrain of ‘Why Linux won’t succeed on the desktop‘ articles.
These sorts of articles come out all the time, and they are always written by people who have not used Linux much and therefore don’t understand how it works and how it is developed. The article is not without merit, but it does display many misunderstandings. Most telling are the omissions — the fact that the real strengths of Linux are ignored and the deficiencies of Windows overlooked. It gives undue weight to proprietary software development and totally forgets about the free alternatives that are available for Linux. And by ‘free’, I mean the proper ‘free as in freedom’ definition, not the tired-old ‘freeware’ misconception that the author makes. As for the antique ‘too many distros’ argument, people only need to use one, and some quick reading would easily narrow the choices down to a small handful, if not one. I personally find the different ‘distros’ of Windows (including WINCE and so on) to be more confusing.
Most Linux people are very well versed in Windows, so they generally know of which they speak. My experience is that many Windows people expect everything to work exactly like Windows, and they complain whenever something is even slightly different, even if it is better. For some reason, they accept crashing, viruses and poor security as a fact of life, and so aren’t attracted to Linux. In fact, it goes further than that: to most people, Windows is computing. Anything else is just heresy.
These critical articles about Linux aren’t new, but they should not be ignored. Linux has many rough edges to smooth out, but then again so does Windows. At the end of the day, it often comes down to people being set in their ways and being afraid of the unfamiliar.
I’ve seen this happen even with Microsoft products: Windows Live Messenger, Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, but mysteriously not consistently in Outlook) and Windows Vista have been widely criticised for adopting odd and inconsistent interfaces. The first three lack a basic menu bar (each using its own weird alternative), and Vista doesn’t have a Start button (it’s a round circle with a Windows logo). It’s a tech support nightmare. Yet despite the resistance, people force themselves so that they eventually accept them. Some even grow to defend the changes. What possessed people to behave in this way? Is it the marketing, or even the cult of personality that Bill Gates has managed to build, as the article proclaims? We are now in a position where it is easier for an MS Office 2003 user to move to OpenOffice.org than to Office 2007. Why aren’t we seeing this happening more often?
Never underestimate the power of inertia and marketing.
The fact that Linux can prove to be such a great system despite its miniscule desktop market share and lack of resources compared to the proprietary world (which is much bigger than just Microsoft) shows the strength of the free and open source software (FOSS) model. One needs only to look at Mac OS X to see a desktop that is almost unquestionably superior to Windows in every way, thanks in part to its extensive use of FOSS.
Another thing to remember is that the desktop computing market is but a tiny fraction of the overall information and communications technology sector. Linux is quite prevalent, and even dominant, almost everywhere else [PDF]. In most of these markets, Microsoft isn’t represented at all.
By the way, the ‘year of the Linux desktop’ thing is not taken seriously by more established Linux users. The phrase is used mainly by journalists looking for attention, or by more recent Linux users. For everyone else, it’s become more of a running joke, much like Linus Torvalds’ faux ambition of ‘world domination’.
Update: Yet more reasons for why Linux is supposedly unsuitable for the desktop.
Update 2: Here’s another rebuttal to these articles.
LotD: I failed basic chemistry
The “too many distros” argument does have some merit. The wider the variety of distros that are on the desktop, the more difficult it will be for people to get good help in solving problems. The way you do something in Kubuntu is not the same way you do the same thing in Gentoo. I don’t think it will be as big an issue as reporters do, though. Clearly, Gentoo is not going to appeal to many Joe Desktop users, and Ubuntu I think already has the lion’s share. As desktop users begin migrating away from Windows, there will only be a small handful of distros that they are switching to.
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.
Comment by Wolfger — September 20, 2007 @ 10:02 pm
The “too many distros” argument has some merit. From a support standpoint, people can get frustrated if they have a problem, and it’s not an issue for some other distro, but it is for theirs, and they need to find people with their distro for assistance. Even if it’s broken on both distros, the fix for Gentoo may well not be a valid fix for Kubuntu. If the fix involves installing another package, the answer would be completely foreign.
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.
Comment by Wolfger — September 20, 2007 @ 10:11 pm
I absolutely switched from windows to linux. I have all the tools I need for my work, and it’s not a techy work, just office work. I have OpenOffice, a msn clone, thunderbird for email, firefox for web browser and for gameing a little I have Enemy territory. But still, linux has way to go if it wants to compete along with windows. Some applications are not very easy to install. Windows users are used to click setup, next next and finish and they expect the same in linux. In linux some applications are not there, but the majority are. I’m confident that in a year or 2 linux will be much much better and will be head to head windows whatever version of windows.
Right now i’m using Ubuntu 7.04 and absolutely satisfied.
Comment by Bruno Cunha — September 20, 2007 @ 11:53 pm
I would recommend linux to everyone if it just worked. But it doesn’t:
- Ubuntu Dapper, could not for the life of me get sound to work, despiting looking up several problems, no 3d acceleration, …
- Ubuntu Feisty (on my laptop) network manager doesn’t recognise the fact that my wireless drivers installed by default do support WPE! I have to edit interfaces manually to get it to work! i also get BUG: cpu#0 lockup far too often. had to download compile and install alsa drivers seperately to get sound to work. I had to follow a guide online to get 3d acceleration, XGL and compiz to work. It took me forever to find out that I had to use a low latency kernel for rosegarden. The JACK server is just primitive, why do I have to guess which settings to use? Cubase on windows just works!
-Windows: everything just worked.
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.
Comment by Jadd — September 21, 2007 @ 12:31 am
I think the problem is that the people that use linux consistantly don’t understand just exactly what the target market is. We’re talking about the last frontier essentially for linux to conquer…the desk top. The problem is, to do that linux has to sway the average “Windows user”. Most of these potential converts only know a few things…1.log in, 2.point-and-click, 3.use Word or Excel, log out for lunch, repeat steps 1-3, log out for the day. Most probably have never opened a DOS prompt in thier life. You’re gonna lose a bunch of them back to Windows if the first time they hit the forums for help, all the geeks jump outta the woodwork telling them to open a command propmt and enter in some archaic jibberish,”sudo apt-who what? and what’s this command thing you’re talking about?” You can’t drop this stuff on those “Windows users” like that because then the best you can hope for then is a very slow trickle of people crossing over. This gives M$ too much time/oppotunity to develope a new game plan.
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.
Comment by anon — September 21, 2007 @ 3:08 am
I think we must stop talking. We have lot of homework to do, and we have done lot of good things so far. We must deliver good products, as Firefox, as OpenOffice.org, as NeoOffice, as GNOME/KDE, as Linux kernel, a Samba stack. We must keep pushing it. We must take small steps to attain big targets.
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.
Comment by Peteris Krisjanis — September 21, 2007 @ 7:48 am
Desktop linux with all its free alternatives is still about as useless as what Windows NT would be to us now. The linux desktop is always playing catchups.
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?
Comment by Solomon Box — September 21, 2007 @ 11:11 am
Linux rocks
Comment by diego — September 21, 2007 @ 1:22 pm