Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

[Long. To some extent preaching to the choir. You've been warned.]

Hmm... Good news for your mom-in-law. Much of what you wrote actually
refers to installation rather than desktop readiness, I am sure you
are aware of it and I'll treat your post as one about installing,
rather than using, a desktop Linux machine.

I actually have a few friends who installed Linux on their own (for
the first time in their respective lives and for their personal use)
and never looked back. One or two credit me, quite undeservedly, for
telling them of the option, and make a point of saying they had never
realized what they were missing. None is a techie.

This tells me that your "no way" comment sounds too harsh. Especially
since installing Windows means infinitely more pain, what with its
concept of "installing drivers" from separate media for every piece of
HW from motherboard to network card - stuff that any Linux distro has
on the main installation ISO. No way a housewife can install and
configure Windows herself, by the same token.
 
Another observation: judging by the experience of most older relatives
and acquaintances of mine (you are younger than me, so your mom-in-law
must be relatively young, too, but I am still drawing a parallel... :)
even with preinstalled Windows tasks like connecting to ADSL/Cable or
finding and installing a program to view a movie or burn a CD are way
beyond comprehension, and even finding a file or organizing files in
hierarchical directories is often daunting (the same people happily
browse the web, read and send email, and use YouTube and Skype). In
this sense nothing is ready for desktop. Oh, and someone needs to
maintain AV! ;-)

Back to Linux, and specifically Fedora. What I always do on
installation is enable several optional yum repositores, including
extras, rpmfusion (free and non-free), adobe, etc. This solves many of
the problem you mentioned, and as a result my own pet gripes are
different. This single management infrastructure is, of course, much
superior to the Windows' horrible mess.

Typically, after, say, 30 mins of installation I do "yum update" that
may take a while depending on how much you need to download and how
fast your connection is. Then I go to a couple of sites such as Adobe
for flash (can never remember the repo or rpm name) and Skype, install
those things in a minute, and I am done. If anything is missing (I
never remember if, e.g., VLC is installed out of the box) it's "yum
install vlc" or equivalent (there is a GUI or three for that - with a
launcher from the plasma panel out of the box - but I can't be
bothered). Nowhere near 10 hours that you spent.

Some further comments and tips.

1. Never had a problem with audio or video (VLC handles the video
   stuff I need without a hitch).

2. Don't recall any serious problems with (pulse)audio during the last
   few years - even though I use KDE and it is gnomish.

3. Skype works out of the box once the RPM is installed. I don't think
   it comes preinstalled on Windows, either (maybe it will soon, now
   that they belong to the same company). I must mention that I don't
   use video, so my "works out of the box" refers to voice and chat.

4. Adobe's flash plugin is trivially installed with yum today. Not so
   long ago there was a need for 32-bit wrappers, but IIRC the 64-bit
   version is back now.

5. I always disable selinux from the start on desktop machines. I just
   don't see a point in worrying about all the extra configuration for
   a desktop as opposed to a production server. I seriously doubt
   selinux is critical for your mother-in-law - a firewall plus normal
   security precautions should be sufficient.

6. Once I pick Hebrew keyboard layout (at installation and
   double-checking in KDE) I can see and type Hebrew - IMHO much
   easier than on Windows that has an annoying habit of switching
   between layouts whenever it feels like it. My Windows VMs at work
   don't have Hebrew, and if I needed it I would have no idea how to
   even approach the problem.

7. I have never experienced Fedora installer problems, with date or
   anything else. I don't install/upgrade often so my sample is not
   large.

8. The biggest problem in my experience is setting up WiFi (relevant
   for laptops mostly, but it's important). One problem is installing
   non-free firmware for some wireless cards (Broadcom, looking at
   you!). It's not difficult for me, and Google easily finds useful
   documentation, but a newbie would have a problem. Another problem
   is the STUPID NetworkManager that is buggy, undocumented, and
   unconfigurable. By the way, "yum install wifi-radar" may alleviate
   some pain.

> 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.

9. Yum says rp-pppoe is in the main Fedora repository so it should
   have been installed (what choices did you make at installation
   time?), but in any case the setup should be as simple as "yum
   install rp-pppoe" followed by "/sbin/pppoe-setup" (I heard NM had a
   GNOME GUI that should pick it up but since I am a KDE
   user... ;-). I never ever used PPPoE (or PPTP or anything else like
   this) myself, so this point is theoretical for me.

10. I admit my ignorance - I thought Picasa was Googlish/webish and
    did not require any software but the browser...

11. A few of newbie-relevant things that I just love about KDE/plasma
    GUI (no intention to start a GNOME/KDE war, I just think it's
    relevant to the topic) are as follows:

    a) The central configuration/customization GUI for most things.

    b) The launcher widget (the equivalent of the Windows' Start menu)
       has a smart fuzzy search, e.g., if you need to burn a CD you
       can just type something vague like "burn" and the right
       applications are suggested, if you need to scan a document
       typing "scan" will give you options, if you need to reconfigure
       your network, type "network", if you need to look a your photo
       albums "photo" will help - extremely intuitive, and even though
       I generally know what my favorite applications are I tend to
       just type "photo" rather than brose the menu. For a newbie it
       must be good. Oh, and it looks like the search remembers your
       choices and puts them high in the list. Well done, and far
       superior to the Start button...

    c) When you plug something into a USB port the right applications
       are suggested, e.g., plug in a camera and the "device notifier"
       widget immediately suggests to download pictures from the
       camera with digikam or another photo app, view them with
       whatever image viewer you have installed, or open a file
       manager - all very logical choices. Again, very well done -
       never saw anything comparable on Windows.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org