MatthiasEndler

It was a brilliant idea to create an operating system that is free for everyone to use and to edit. Thousands of hackers around the globe share the dream of open source information technology without monopolism. Everybody who is into computing has heard of Linux and lots of them are using it for daily work. Even inexperienced users try out Linux by testing distributions like Ubuntu, openSuse or Knoppix because they are easy to use and to install. But that’s not the complete truth.

Hardware woes

This so called “out-of-the-box” experience can instead be very tricky and much to complicated for a normal user. When you insert the Ubuntu LiveCD you will be welcomed by a smart boot menu that lets you try out all the functionalities of a full-fledged Distribution without installing.

The window manager has a fresh, clean-looking aqua-style interface. You click on install and almost everything is pre-configured and runs automatically. In most cases a distribution like Ubuntu auto-detects your hardware and installs the right modules. Hopefully. Sometimes it happens though that your printer is not working or your wireless connection was not recognized. This is mostly the case when you have shiny new hardware that linux hackers were not able to test yet. This can be a brand new inkjet printer (cups and gimp-print have a long way to go) or the high-end graphics card.

Hacker perception

Not a problem you might think. Look for a new development driver on Google, do a quick apt-get, set-up your network connection and off you go! BUT explain that to Aunt Tillie sitting in front of her PC thinking that a Wlan card is a trading card her six year old nephew Gregory wants for Christmas. I don’t have to add that she never opened a PC because she simply doesn’t bother what’s in there. You might say that it’s also hard to configure your network a Windows PC. Well maybe it is - but it’s already configured when you buy the PC - and that makes a big difference. Installing new software packages can be painful for normal users. Have you ever tried to explain to a non-geek why it’s handy to use a terminal for daily work? At best you get an answer like ”I’ve used DOS and that was a piece of crap” or maybe he just says “You are still sitting in front of a black text-mode only window entering cryptical commands to configure your system? This is not 1969!”. Many people don’t understand why typing chmod is smarter than clicking through ten windows opening the “properties” submenu with a right mouse click on a file and finally adjusting the access rights. Why should somebody use ‘dmesg | tail’ to get some system information. The problem is: When somebody refuses to learn those shell-commands they won’t understand 90 percent of the system. They can’t see what went wrong when there is some internal dependency error. Linux will only be easy when you understand what you are doing.

Software woes

Even if you know how to work with a command line you can’t be safe from so-called ”dependency hell”. You want to install a new office suite called “OfficeSuite” and download the packages directly from the developers site. But sadly it won’t run because you don’t have those three other packages installed which are all needed by “OfficeSuite”. OK. So you install those packages as well but they depend on three other libraries that you don’t have as well. As a result you end up downloading and installing six packages in order to run “OfficeSuite” - now that’s what I call productivity from the very beginning. The big problem behind this mess is the fact that there are no real standards in the Linux world. There are thousands of different flavors and to some extent this is great and it’s exactly what free software has to look like but to get more traction we urgently need better standards to focus developing power. Don’t get me wrong: There must be different package formats (like rpm, deb, tgz…) or various window managers (KDE, Gnome, fluxbox, icewm…) but they all must have a mutual basis to build up on. As we have seen the biggest problem is usability. Other Unix-like systems such as Mac OS X show how it can be done. Common guys! We can do better than that!

Why it matters

Some of the brightest Linux advocates don’t realize that non- techies want a system where they don’t need to know anything about bash, emacs or vi to successfully configure hardware drivers and network sharing (samba…urgh). Those who say “Screw it. If Linux is too hard for you, just don’t use it” are misguided. It is vital for open technologies to reach a critical mass and receive widespread adoption. Otherwise big companies like AMD and NVidia and EA have little interest to invest development time into open source projects.