Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote about "Re: Linux is ready for the desktop!":
> 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.

Well, if Fedora 15 wasn't that intertwined with NetworkManager which tried
to do all of this automatically, maybe this is what I would have done.
But the current situation is that ordinary non-root users are not expected
to take network interfaces up and down. Or, if they are, I'm not sure how
this is supposed to work. Maybe you can tell me.

> 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

This is how *I*, an experienced user, feels. But for a newbie, even a
"yum install ..." is too complicated. All a newbie wants is somebody who'll
tell him, step by step, what to do. And the sad fact is that for Windows
he can get that help from many places - his ISP, the product's official site,
and so on - but for Linux it's harder to get this advice.

> 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

You're missing something: I *know* that MS-Word isn't available for Linux.
It's a fact of life, and when I said that I think "Linux is ready for the
desktop", I said that despite the fact it isn't available. I really believe
that Word isn't as important as it used to be, and believe it or not, my
workplace actually stopped installing MS-Office on new computers.

But, Picasa *is* available for Linux. Google's site lets you download it
for Linux. And then, when you try to run it on Fedora 15, it just croaks.
As you said, under the cover, Picasa is actually a Windows program, and
Google's Linux installer installs it with a copy of wine. However, this
copy of Wine doesn't actually work on Fedora 15 (it worked on earlier
versions of Fedora), so to run it, you need to use your system installation
of Wine together with Google's directory. Not something a newbie could
ever guess.

> me that Word is more of a necessity than Picasa. You do not need the
> latter to view someone else's pictures, do you?

Maybe Picasa is just a personal favorite of mine and is not a universal
need. In any case, there's indeed a Picasa web interface, but the Picasa
application is (still) much more advanced and more responsive for viewing
pictures stored on your own computer. And since I copied all my pictures
to her hard-drive, she has a lot to look at :-)

> Wait till your
> mother-in-law gets a Word atachment in the mail and OOO barfs.

I don't think this will ever happen. OOO hasn't "barfed" on Word files
in years. The only complaint people make is that sometimes if you load
a file in OOO and save it again the result doesn't look exactly like what
the original person sent. For the type of documents I expect her to get
(mostly forwarded jokes and the likes ;-), I doubt this will matter.

> 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.

It worked in Fedora 14, but stopped working in Fedora 15. The workaround
isn't difficult, but it's not something an ordinary user could ever handle.
It's not something documented on Google's site either.

> 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.

Indeed her installation included Totem and Rhythmbox, and the file browser
(I'm not even sure what that is - Nautilus?) runs those automatically.
But then, when you click on an actual mp3 or .avi or something, it
simply tells you that you are missing the appropriate codec.

None of the necessary codecs, or any of the alternative movie players (VLC,
Mplayer, etc.) are on Fedora's repositories (I believe this is also the case
for other major Linux distributions). There is a workaround, and it's not
very difficult - add both rpmfusion and livna to the repo list, and "yum
install" a bunch of codecs and plugins. But it takes time to figure out
what exactly needs to be done - even for an experienced user which hasn't
installed a new system from scratch recently.

> 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?

I didn't skip anything, and she had many different players - it's just
that mp3 and other patented (or whatever) codecs were all deliberately
disabled until you install separate "non-kosher" packages.

> 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?

I'm not sure this discount even applies to computer stores like, for example,
Ivory. I don't think there's any hope for major laptop labels, and frankly
I don't really care about these (this is a separate discussion ;-)).

Nadav.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |                  Saturday, Sep 17 2011, 
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Why aren't fishmongers generous? Their
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |business makes them selfish.