Linux is ready for the desktop!

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 08:29:37PM +0000, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> 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).

Have you looked at Digikam or Shotwell?

> 	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.

[snip]

> 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.

Who are you and what did you do to Nadav Har'el?

Also see below,

> 
> 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.

Those packages are not in the repository because your distribtion cannot
maintain them. Including them in the official repository would give
users a false promise that Fedora can fix bugs in Skype of Acrobat
Reader. This is simply not the case.

That said, there are distributions who choose to strive to provide that
guarantee. Consider e.g. Linux Mint. I figure there should also be a
similar spin of Fedora.

You knowingly installed Fedora with its policy (of not getting sued by
patent trolls). Debian and OpenSUSE have basically the same approach
here.

One technical point: I'm not really familiar with how this works in
Fedora, but in Debian there really aren't that many "crippled" packages:
all Gstreamer-based packages just need a few extra gstreamer plugins
from a separate package. Anything that uses ffmpeg/libav (which is,
well, basically everything) will use all the new codecs once you
installed a copy of it from Debian-multimedia.org . Those two cover most
common things, IIRC.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
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