2 posts tagged “open source”

Ubuntu and Linux in general has a ways to go before it's ready for mainstream desktops.

I'm a techy geek (professional and personal) and a few months back loaded Ubuntu on an old laptop with what seemed like a fair amount of difficulty. After a lot of doinking around and failing to get the pcmcia wired ethernet card working I managed to get a wireless card working. Unfortunately the laptop only had a 2gb HD so space was always tight and it would usually choke if i tried any of the automatic updates. Well, in an attempt to clean off unused features I accidentally killed the OS. Since I was really unhappy with the HD space situation I tried a few smaller distros like Damn Small Linux and couldn't figure out how to get the wireless card working in the time that I had available. Plus....well, it just had a sort of crude feel to it.

A couple days later I brought home my MSDN CDs from work and loaded XP Pro on my laptop. XP Loaded like a charm with minimal involvement from me, correctly detected the Wireless card, only used about a 800MB of install space and seems to run more smoothly and take less time to load apps than Ubuntu ever did.

Frankly I was rather disappointed by this. I had really wanted to believe that Ubuntu would be better than XP. As far as the rather limited array of Linux distros I've used it's quite nice. However, I had really expected that it would be more efficient than windows and it that just doesn't seem to be the case.

I think there are three main areas that need to be addressed in order to win the general public's loyalty.The UI, the behind the scenes install and config and the documentation.

The UI - It's important to have a nice Windozy UI for neo-luddites such as my wife. Ubuntu did a good job with that; Better than most distros I've seen and I think they are on the right track.

There are, however, issues with the behind-the-scenes install and config. As I said before, I'm a fairly technical person. I've been in the professional IT world for about ten years starting with desktop support, help desk, network admin then for the last seven years as a dba working in SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and DB2. Now, we've all worked with those IT people who we wouldn't trust with setting our VCR clock. I'm NOT one of them. For the first three years of my career I was the IT dept for a small software vendor. I regularly had software, hardware and oddball requests thrown my way with the explicit instructions to "make it work." I have a bachelors in CS but truly pride myself on being self-taught. To my great irritation after graduating with a BS in CS, I discovered that my degree provided very little in the way of actual useful skills/experience in the job market. So imagine my surprise when I start trying to work with linux and felt like I was floundering. (My professional experience is almost exclusively windows and my Unix experience has very minimal admin aspects to it.) My laptop was very drivespace challenged and the debian app loading model while very good for a neo-luddite is not very helpful for someone used to being able to decide where an application should be installed. After some head scratching and a couple of script changes I was able to install apps to an external USB drive but I had to troll the internet for ages before figuring out how to do that. To be honest, Linux is a gadget lovers dream. It's free, it's flexible and it's fun. However, as someone who used to do desktop support it's got miles to go before the average IT desktop support guy can manage it.

Finally, there is very little documentation provided by the authors of the Ubuntu distro and in fact with most distros I looked at. Working with MS products has the advantage of there being tons of documentation online. So much, in fact, that it's often a big pain in the ass to cull it down to something useful. Linux seems to rely on the user community to provide it's fixes and documentation. In many ways this is good but it has the disadvantage of missing some essential overview materials and causes at least me to be suspicious of the fixes you do find that were provided by "joe user". (Pet Peeve: Forum posts where someone has "THE" fix for an issue. Unless you are an author of the actual distro then 99% of the time it is not "THE" fix but rather simply "a" fix that worked on their particular system.)

 In closing I'd have to say my biggest disappointment was Ubuntus lack of efficiency over XP. Aren't the *IXers the ones always complaining how windows is bloated and inefficient?  Somehow I feel like I've been let down.  

I get tired of things like Zune coming out that are great hardware but then fall down on the software. In Open source software, you can write it to do whatever you want and share it. So, I wish there was a way to make an open source portable media player.

I'm not sure exactly how it could be implemented but imagine if you will being able to buy components that sort of snap together without the need for soldering. A screen, a hard drive, some sort of programable chips, whatever. (Duh, in case you haven't figured it out I'm not an electronics guy.) Or go to a website and order I want this screen with these components etc. Pay for it and a company/geek builds it and ships it to you.

Then use some tiny distro of Linux to run it. Would it be as sleek and tiny as an IPod? No. However, with your own hardware and software you wouldn't be screwed by politicians and money grubbing business people.

Ah well. Pipe dreams....