[aaronmorey]

I think this is a microcosm of a problem I've seen in the open source area in general... a preference for code over people.

Open source software won't take over by being 1.86x faster and using a totally sweet heap sort algorithm. I'm a geek and I find that kind of thing interesting at an intellectual level, but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. "Normal" people absolutely don't care and won't put up with the hassle.

With Steve gone, there's a taste-shaped hole in the entire technology world that I can't see anyone stepping in and taking over. Until the open source world gets its own Steve Jobs -- someone out there who starts focusing relentlessly on the users (how to make software "just work" and look/feel great at the same time), it's never going to unseat the dominant players (as much as I might want it to).

[0x12]

> but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card.

Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing.

Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of fish but you can't really blame the Linux driver writers for that, they need information to work with and if manufacturers are not going to supply that info it needs to be painstakingly recovered, which is not always possible and almost always incomplete to some extent.

[Locke1689]

Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of fish but you can't really blame the Linux driver writers for that, they need information to work with and if manufacturers are not going to supply that info it needs to be painstakingly recovered, which is not always possible and almost always incomplete to some extent.

Who cares? It doesn't work. When I buy an Apple laptop I know all the hardware works. That's it. There is no blame to Linux devs (I've counted as one at times). This is the real world -- I'm not giving out consolation prizes to software that almost works.

[hamoid]

I've encountered several printers and scanners that did not work on OSX but did have working Linux drivers. I've used graphic tablets, external sound cards, printers and scanners that just worked as I plugged them in under Ubuntu. Not so in Mac.

[vacri]

So you're after short-term profits instead of long-term gains? Supporting a locked-in system now strengthens that system, but supporting an open system may take longer to get to 'effortless', but you'll be able to do more down the track.

[Locke1689]

Unfounded assertion. Also, I'm mainly interested in the technology, not the license. I'll use whatever helps me get my job done the best and I'll pay good money for it too.

[ordinary]

When a user installs Linux and can't get her brand new graphics card to work, she doesn't care whose fault that is. When the brightness adjustment keys don't work, all I think is "crap, my computer does not work".

The vast majority of people are like that; my use of the first person singular was not an accident, I count myself among them. It's not a matter of assigning blame, it's a matter of recognizing reality.

For Linux to take over the consumer desktop market, it doesn't just need to be as easy to install and maintain as Windows or OSX; it needs to be significantly easier. That is the hole a "Steve Jobs of free software" could fill.

[tychobrahe]

Hey, NH, I'm not the poster, but why is this being down voted? Linux being easier to use and easier to maintain isn't something we all could benefit from?

And for fucks sake, don't say "it's FUD". I had a hard time installing drivers for an NVidia graphic card this month in Ubuntu's latest stable version, running in Dell workstation. I could even put out some videos.

I'm tired of people who had difficulties with Linux being called liars and getting down votes here.

Linux is great, but it's not finished yet. There's room for improvement. (Same with Windows. Same with OS X).

[ajross]

Did you contact Nvidia for support? That driver you were installing was proprietary software delivered by the vendor. Why are you blaming the free software for it not working?

[tychobrahe]

Nope, I didn't. Actually the issue was getting the correct packages from apt-get. DLL hell all over again. In the end I simply formatted the machine with a non-stable version and the drivers installed as expected. Easy peasy.

EDIT: But that wasn't the point. The point is that those kinds of problems still happen with Linux, but only sometimes, with specific distros in specific gear, but when they don't happen (such as with Ubuntu 99% of the time) Linux gets praise and adoption from non-techies.

[chromatic]

When a user installs Linux...

Someone who installs an OS has immediately gone beyond mere "user". A fairer comparison must include pre-installed machines.

[wnight]

> That is the hole a "Steve Jobs of free software" could fill.

How? By writing drivers for undocumented hardware?

> it doesn't just need to be as easy to install and maintain as Windows

Have you tried to install Windows recently? Fat-finger one prompt and you need to return it to the store to get it back. Make one little mistake in your backup and you need to buy install disks, etc. Don't buy anti-virus software and kiss it goodbye.

It's only easy because nobody does it - they all just pay the $100 install tax and have the store do it for them.

If you actually had to install a system and run a non-trivial program Mac would win, followed by Ubuntu, and then the rest would trickle in at the unusable-by-the-masses level.

[hennypenny]

Other than making baseless accusations without a shred of evidence I don't see any point in your post.

Windows 7 install (recently) from disk is dead simple, please give an example of something you could destroy through fat-fingering. Anti-virus is pointless for most users who don't pirate software and who use a modern browser (along with some common sense... Like say, not installing viruses). Kiss it all goodbye is ridiculous, when was the last time you heard of a virus doing anything other than installing spyware or a botnet?

Most people pay your so-called tax because there is no viable alternative, these aren't the kind of people who will buy the parts and put it together themselves.

Finally, I found ubuntu to be more difficult to install than windows. Think "proprietary" drivers... And there are a bunch of fat fingering opportunities in the ncurses version of the install.

[wnight]

> please give an example of something you could destroy through fat-fingering.

Destroy as in magic smoke? No. But have to take back to the store to have it reset. Yes.

This initial language prompt the computer booted to didn't have a back button once you'd chosen. If you get that wrong, good luck changing it if you're a casual user.

> Anti-virus is pointless for most users who don't pirate software and who use a modern browser (along with some common sense... Like say, not installing viruses).

That's fine for you and me. I've only ever found one virus despite scanning what I download.

But it was a malware posing as an archiving tool not warez, and malware is everywhere and does everything to look legit. Legitimate users get burned by this all the time.

As for a modern browser, sure - up to date IE is much better than before but Flash hardly is, so IE hardly is, so Windows hardly is... A single security layer simply isn't sufficient. A browser that's so plugin-happy needs to be better sandboxed.

Which is why for a computing environment where your browser is running as the primary user, you need a virus scanner.

> Most people pay your so-called tax because there is no viable alternative, these aren't the kind of people who will buy the parts and put it together themselves.

That's exactly what I mean. There's just enough hard about the install to make it not easy and thus it's hard by most people's reckoning.

Only the Mac is really good and that's because they supply the hardware so they know the drivers, the configuration, etc.

> Finally, I found ubuntu to be more difficult to install than windows. Think "proprietary" drivers...

"Here's a machine that won't run Ubuntu - see what a tough install Ubuntu is!"

Ouch.

> And there are a bunch of fat fingering opportunities in the ncurses version of the install.

Sure. But even still, less of a "there's no back button" kind of thing and more just complexity because of difficulty. Windows by default uses the entire drive, Ubuntu could but that'd make it harder in other ways. But judging it on that sort of thing misses their simplicity in areas that can be simple. As much as can work, just does. No EULAs, no trapdoor options, no hurried backups onto DVDs you forgot to buy and had to go back to get because it doesn't come with a $.30 install disk, etc...

[rufugee]

This. I haven't had to troubleshoot a hardware problem in years, and I use Linux daily and install it quite often (I touch a lot of hardware). Don't subtly degrade something with FUD unless you speak from recent experience.

[aaronmorey]

The open source world will also be better off when everyone stops using the word "FUD". It's a knee jerk term that allows the speaker to ignore criticism as lies. I am speaking from experience. The sound issue happened to me about two years ago. About six months ago I tried dual booting Linux on my MacBook and couldn't get it to shut down without hanging.

You're making my point. I (someone who works in the software industry) had a problem with a piece of open source software. If the open source world is going to go mainstream, the reaction can't be "That's FUD." It has to be "That's unacceptable, we need to fix this immediately."

Don't do it for me. If I decide the tradeoff of effort vs. benefit is worthwhile, I can eventually resolve the problem myself. Do it for my mom, who just wants the printer to work so she can print handouts for her students. Do it for your grandparents who just want to check their email and look at their grandkid's pictures. Or just tell me I'm an anti-open source propagandist and dismiss me.

I've made my decision. Computers are made for people, not people for computers.

[alperakgun]

i want to install adobe flash on a colleagues iphone, I cant

[andrewflnr]

Every once in a while, when I open up my (recent) laptop to take it off standby, it freezes, completely unresponsive. I have to hard-reboot it. I'm using nouveau on an Nvidia Optimus card; when I activated the proprietary driver X completely failed to start. The last incident was yesterday. This has never happened to me on Windows.

[stonemetal]

When I bought a new box last year I couldn't get wireless to work. Until I went in to some random config file and forced it to load an older version of the driver because the new fancy version that is shipped doesn't actually work.

But thanks for proving his point by calling him a liar.

[0x12]

Yes, because we all know that the occasional configuration problem is unique to Linux.

Really.

Counterpoint to your story: I bought a notebook with a 3G card in it, couldn't for the life of me get the thing to work under windows vista (which it came installed with). It got so bad that I suspected that the hardware must be broken.

For kicks I booted the machine using ubuntu NBR, not only did it detect and configure all the other peripherals properly but it also auto-detected the 3G card and it made it work instantly without further configuration, other than clicking the 'connect' entry in the menu and entering the PIN code (four times '0').

Just because there is the occasional glitch I'm not going to say 'windows vista doesn't support lots of hardware'.

If you say your soundcard/wireless/etc doesn't work under a major distribution then that's really unfortunate, but that does not make your story representative of the vast majority of Linux users. Personally I haven't seen any configuration issues in Linux for over a decade unless it was because I was using some very rare and either very new or totally obscure hardware, and even in those cases I could always get it to work by using google for a bit.

Except for that one time with the 3G card under windows. But that's not proof of anything other than that there was at least one instance where someone had a hardware issue with a windows machine.

[stonemetal]

My experience flipping through the bug reports for ubuntu is that hardware isn't 90% solved it is more like 70% solved(the scary part is that each release tends to move that 70% coverage around a bit.) Both windows' and Apple's hardware support is poor as well but they fixed it by non-technical means(control of the hardware distribution channel.) Which is a perfectly viable channel for Linux, and seems to be working well for them(System 76 and Dell's Ubuntu boxes.) However as an OS that is primarily distributed after the fact, it would be nice to see user friendly hardware configuration.

[drieddust]

You must be a very lucky. Reason I am not running Linux is because I was not able to find a decent driver for my latop's Synaptic touchpad.

Now please do not say you can write a driver yourself.

[0x12]

I'm not lucky. I read before I buy.

[tychobrahe]

Way to split hairs and miss the point, huh?

But that sorta proves his point. Linux isn't good to normal people today just because it's full of geeky magic dust. It is good today because it "Just Works™".

[icebraining]

RMS is not part of the Open Source movement and he was never the one to claim the technical superiority of open source. He thinks that misses the point.