Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

"Nadav Har'El" <nyh at math.technion.ac.il> writes:

> I think either you have tons of experience doing such installations
> (so every problem you saw you could fix in less than a minute), or
> you're simply being over-confident and not remembering the actual
> problems you encountered in your own installations and how much time
> it took to solve them.  Or, perhaps you are just very lucky ;-)

Luck is something you can always blame but I rather _suspect_ that
there is one difference between my install procedure and yours: I
always choose custom install and check the boxes I think I will
need. I _suspect_ you didn't, and you got surprised that some stuff
was not installed. See below for multimedia. Oh, and I check both
GNOME and KDE to have all the goodies - they all work in both
environments as long as you have the libraries (and yum takes care of
that).

Re PPPoE: every acquaintance who has a dialer on his/her Windows has
to start it, and if it crashes, start it again. It does not start on
boot, it is not a Windows service, AFAIK. And making it start on boot
was what you spent time on, by your own admission. Sorry, doesn't
sound fair.

> But perhaps more importantly, because Fedora 15 (for example) is,
> still, less commonplace than Windows, whatever you don't get
> preinstalled on your system is much harder to add later than it
> would be on Windows.

It is actually MUCH easier on Fedora (or Ubuntu) thanks to the unified
packaging. Once you enable the repositories you never need to go to
websites, download software from random sources with custom
installers, etc. Everything is packaged in the same way, and it is a
really big deal, IMHO.

If what you need is not available you are in trouble - see immediately
below.

> On Windows, if you don't get Picasa (for example) preinstalled, it's
> as simple as going to the Google site, clicking "Download picasa"
> and "yes" a few times. On Linux, it is much more difficult (in the
> Fedora 15 case, it involves replacing Picasa's built-in wine with
> Fedora 15's new version of wine).

I don't use Picasa so I never ran into any problems with it ;-). I
poked around out of curiosity: it seems that it is essentially a
Windows application that does require Wine and is 32-bit only. You
would have the same problem with Word. I don't see you arguing "Linux
is not ready because it does not have Word". By the way, it seems to
me that Word is more of a necessity than Picasa. You do not need the
latter to view someone else's pictures, do you? Wait till your
mother-in-law gets a Word atachment in the mail and OOO barfs.
  
It looks reasonable to me that something like Picasa is not in the
base repo since it belongs to Google. Yum tells me Picasa is a "yum
install picasa" away (since "yum list picasa" works), whether the
combination of the i386 application and my 64-bit Wine (that I've ever
used for anything though it is installed) will work I have no idea.

How about a PDF viewer? Never saw it preinstalled on Windows. Let's
make things interesting and ask for a *decent* PDF viewer (let's agree
that Acrobat Reader isn't)? Linux wins hands down... ;-)
 
>> This is surprising, because my Fedoras come with a variety of music
>> and movie players upon installation.
>
> I think we live in a different reality ;-)

I just ran 'yum groupinfo "Sound and Video"' out of curiousity (on
F14). It looks like the very basic setup gives you totem and rhythmbox
(I've never used the latter but I just tried it on a random mp3 file
and it worked). This may not be ideal but it should satisfy the basic
need for functionality. I don't recall totem barfing on random mp3's
or mpeg-4's my friends occasionally sent me. For some video formats
one needs VLC or Miro though.

The optional repos give you a ton of options, including Miro, amarok,
audacity, kaffeine, mplayer, vlc, xmms - these are just those I am
familiar with to some extent, there are dozens of others. I do suspect
you skipped over the "Sound and Video" box at installation. Yes, many
of those come from rpmfusion-nonfree because of codecs and stuff, so?

Think of it this way: each time you install a piece of SW (on Windows)
you need to agree to a license. RedHat+community carefully separated
the goodies by license type - can you blame them? The "non-free" stuff
is still readily available.

> But when using an iphone, they see a completely different UI than
> Windows, have completely different software (e.g., no Microsoft
> Word), and a different browser. Then, when they see a Linux computer
> which isn't Windows, they may be less surprised.

Anyone who uses a smartphone for anything work-related (e.g., syncs
with office Exchange) lists Word, Excel, and PowerPoint viewers as
absolute requirements. AFAIK all "official" smartphones in Israel
oblige. As I wrote before, no one knows what browser one uses, so the
fact that it is not IE is not noticed (until you need to log into you
company's SharePoint). No, these are not "home use" examples, but are
they irrelevant? It is "obvious" that a smartphone is not a "computer"
(even though it really is) - the difference between Linux and Windows
is on another level entirely.

Asking a random Itzik Israeli whether he'd like a Windows or a Linux
would probably be counterproductive. And then you (or the upstream
vendor, or the manufacturer) won't get a Windows license discount if
you are not exclusively M$. So why bother?

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org