Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Nadav Har'El]

For years, people have been saying that Linux might be good for this, and
good for that (and the list of "this" and "that" has been growing every year) -
but Linux is *NOT* ready for the desktop and ordinary newbie users.

Well, for the first time ever, I believe the situation has changed.
Linux *IS* ready for the desktop!

I have just installed a new Linux computer for my mother-in-law.
She is the quintessential newbie - she knows hardly nothing about computers,
doesn't want to know much about computers, and only wants to use her computer
for a limited set of tasks, such as:

	1. Browse the web (mostly specific sites, e.g., her bank).
	2. Read and write email (using gmail).
	3. Make video calls over skype.
	4. Conveniently view photos of the grandkids (e.g, with Picasa).
	5. Play children movies for the grandkids.
	6. Bonus points: If I could control her computer remotely, fixing
	   problems and sending new photos, movies, etc., without being there.

I have good news, and bad news.

The good news is that, as I said, I believe Linux *is* ready for the desktop.
I was able to build for her a Linux setup that does all of the above, and more,
she was very pleased with the result. Interestingly, she found the "Gnome 3"
interface very usable and understandable, despite what some pessimists have
been saying about it recently. Perhaps Gnome 3 does show promise after all.

There is some bad news, however: NEVER suggest to anyone but a Linux expert
to install Linux on their own - in my case Fedora 15 (but please don't start
a distro war). After I installed Fedora 15 on her new computer, I had to
spend over 10 hours (!!) configuring it to be usable as I wanted. In
particular, I "enjoyed" the following activities:

1. I had to install all sort of allegedly illegal software which doesn't come
   with Fedora, but is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for any modern user. This includes
   mp3 playing and video playing with various codecs.
   I didn't find Fedora's pretense that this software was somehow optional to
   be comforting.

2. I had to install various free-as-in-beer but not free-as-in-speech software
   that doesn't come with Fedora, like Skype, Picasa, and Flash Player plugin.
   Because these programs aren't built specifically for Fedora, they don't
   fit into it very well. In some cases (e.g., Picasa) I needed some dirty
   tricks to get it to work at all.

3. I had to set up ADSL. It turns out that in 2011, the pppoe package still
   doesn't come preinstalled, and when you do install it and set up ADSL, you
   discover that NetworkManager has a bug that prevents it from starting the
   connection during boot. I spent more than an hour to circumvent this bug.
   
4. I had to enable Hebrew - but just a bit (she's an English-speaker, so she
   wants most of the UI in English anyway).
 
5. I had to find my way through bugs in the Fedora installer (which got stuck
   while configuring the date (!)), bugs in selinux setup, bugs in the
   pulseaudio setup (these were the worst), and other problems that should
   never have existed in a seriously-tested distro...

And probably other stuff I don't remember. But to make a long story short,
there is absolutely no way that a beginner - or even an experienced Windows
user - could ever do any of these things. A "Linux installation party" would
not be enough either. And even a Linux expert (like myself) would need a
second computer and an Internet connection to be able to solve some of the
problems he encounters.

There is only one short-term solution, and it is to do what I did: Computer
stores can, and should, sell preinstalled Linux systems! Some computer store
employee could spend 10 hours like I did setting up a typical Israeli setup
on the typical computer he sells, and then offer buyers to have this OS for
free (but with no warantee either), saving them 400-800 shekels on the price
of the computer, a saving which is particularly significant when you consider
that the current retail price for a newbie-oriented but feature-packed
computer is just 1000 shekels.

When 99.9% of the people were addicted to Windows, Linux was "picky about
its friends", and the price of Windows+Office was just 20% of the computer
price, customers might have declined this option. But today, when Windows
isn't the only show in town (iOS and Android are everywhere) and Linux is
more mature and user-friendly, and the price of Windows+Office is 80% of the
hardware price, I would bet that more and more users would make this choice.

So long live Linux, the new choice for desktop.

P.S. Whether or not the desktop computing paradigm itself has a future at
all, is a different question ;-) I personally think the answer is that it
doesn't, but this is a different story. Here I was assuming that desktops
are here to stay, at least for a while longer. 

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                    Friday, Sep 16 2011, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |I had a lovely evening. Unfortunately,
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |this wasn't it. - Groucho Marx