[Sandwich]

After reading this thread, I started thinking about Linux - particularly, why such a computer-savvy computer geek such as myself hasn't taken the plunge and installed Linux.

There's two reasons, but since the first is just a bad first impression, it's really the second that matters:
[list=1]

• The first time I installed a Linux distro (IIRC it was Red Hat, about 4 years ago, and KDE), I could not for the life of me figure out how to change the screen resolution from 640x480 to something a bit more sane.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid. Especially not with computers. But try as I may, I couldn't figure it out. Oh, sure, I could have gone online and posted my problem and gotten an answer in 3.765 seconds, but that's not the point, really. The point is that it's not (ok, wasn't) there yet, which leads me to my second complaint:

• Pardon my French, but WTF IS WITH ALL THE GAZILLION LINUX DISTROS???!?!?!?!?

Seriously, guys, gimme a break. Get your act together, get rid of all the distros, and package the basic (yet friendly) OS into a box called "Linux". No Mandrakes, Red Hats, or even Knoppii. Take a page from the Mozilla book, and provide all the added functionality as "plugins" for those who want to mess around.[/list]
I mean, I WANT to check out Linux. It's something I need to DO in order to keep up with "things". What I DON'T want to do is figure out what the differences are between the distros and which one suits my needs better, especially not when they're ALL claiming to be just as powerful and/or friendly.

You know, I have over 150 downloaded movies and over 50 DVDs at home, from a wide range of genres. But when friends come over to see a movie, it takes over an HOUR to decide on one.

Too much choice is a Bad Thing™.

And don't even get me started on KDE vs. Gnome vs. whatever-else-they-have-now. If anyone has illusions or dreams of Linux ever becoming mainstream, they need to stop focusing on making this or that distro the perfect one, and concentrate on merging them all somehow (use Merlin's magic wand, I don't care) so that there's a comparability between the 2-3 main Windows flavors we have today (Home, Pro, and the Server line), and the one or two Linux variants. "Variants", NOT "species".

Anyway, all this to say that I think THAT's why I - and many others - haven't even ventured far at all down the Linux path. There's too much pre-packaged choice. Look at the online systems in place at Dell or IBM/Lenovo(?) for laptop purchasing; there's about 3-4 main laptops, which you can configure further IF YOU WANT TO. Not 20 different laptops, each one of which can be further configured to be any other laptop, if you go far enough!

[aldo_14]

Are you sure those 2 complaints aren't solely caused by starting off with Windows?  I always thought point 2 was a strength of Linux, myself; as was the principle that you (or more likely, a company) can grab a distro and update it to their needs.  Choice is never bad IMO, only indecision is.

[Grey Wolf]

My problem is that my sound card was not supported. For this I blame Creative.

[Unknown Target]

I don't like Linux simply because it's too hard to use, and there are hardly any supported games. Yes, yes, I know, it's not Windows and you have to do all this crap to learn it, and I know that there are some games - but there are only some games, and I don't want to have to read a 600 page manual to learn how to use my OS.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by aldo_14
Are you sure those 2 complaints aren't solely caused by starting off with Windows?  I always thought point 2 was a strength of Linux, myself; as was the principle that you (or more likely, a company) can grab a distro and update it to their needs.  Choice is never bad IMO, only indecision is.

No, that's EXACTLY the point! These hypothetical companies aren't going to be moving their employees from pen 'n paper to Linux, and they sure as heck ain't gonna "switch" from OSX. Face it, Windows users - on both the corporate and personal levels - are the target.

Take that company again... imagine they can't provide in-house tech support for their 600 employees who now need to learn Linux. So they need to find a tech support house that not only supports Linux, not only supports their chosen distro of Linux, but also is familiar with the modifications they made to their chosen distro of Linux! It's a ridiculous situation, and although I'm all for moving to Linux, I'm amazed that there are as many government entities switching to Linux as there are.

[bash]

>>Too much choice is a Bad Thing™.

No, I thinkI disagree here. Most Linux ditros are specially designed to serve a specific purpouse in particular. Therefor, the choice isn't really that hard once you decicde what you need your os to do.

>>My problem is that my sound card was not supported. For this I blame Creative.

Well, part of this is MSs fault. In order to get your Windows drivers MS certified you have to agree not to port those drivers to other OS. The "MS Certified" label on the hardware box is still an important thing for a lot of people who are not as versatile with pcs.

[Grey Wolf]

Actually, no. For this its entire Creative's fault. In fact, the drivers are hard enough to set up in Windows, let alone Linux.

[WMCoolmon]

I have yet to meet a Linux distro that I consider fully working.

Seriously.

Let's start with sound. Right now I'm using an Ubuntu desktop with an Audigy 2 NX. The system recognizes it as a sound card, I can even plug it in while the system's running and it'll work. Did that right out of the box, right?

Nope.

Apparently, sound starts with ALSA. This handles the soundcard->program interface. Then, there's an OSS emulation layer, for the sound system that has been deprecated for 3 years or so. Then, there's the 'enlightened sound daemon', which Gnome uses for its system sounds, and seems to seize control of ALSA/OSS/whatever the hell it's called.

Why on earth everything doesn't simply use ALSA, I have the foggiest.

To get my soundcard to become the primary, over my built-in sound, I first had to edit a modules.conf file with a hack. Then, I had to spend hours learning how to and writing about 5-10 lines to tell ALSA to automatically resample to 96000hz, because apparently nobody noticed the severe crackling and distortion that results from sound being sent to the card in anything other than 22, 48, or 96 khz. Finally, if I forget to turn it on when I turn on my computer, I have to unmute the card (Usually I open up the console ALSA mixer, because the GUI one is worthless).
Next I'd have to set OSS, ESD, and everything else to use my virtual ALSA device that resamples. However, I chose to change each individual device to send sound to my virtual ALSA device...this has further restricted my program selection in some cases.
For games, apparently, OpenAL sits on top of ESD. I set that to use ALSA as well.

Finally, I have my soundcard giving me decent sound. Although it's still not as good as in Windows.

Now, in order to play MPCs, I have to use beep-media-player as I've never gotten support working under XMMS. It still crashes half the time due to some bug. Ubuntu also doesn't support the MPC plugin, so I had to compile and checkinstall it by hand.
In order to play MODs, I have to boot up XMMS.
Fortunately, both can play OGGs and MP3s.

In order to play movies, or DVDs, I have to open xine or Totem. Xine also has the habit of suddenly closing whenever I close certain dialog boxes, so often times I end up dragging-and-dropping files and can't use it's playlist functionality.

The fun thing about software is that with so many different distros running around, there have to be pretty much equal numbers of package versions due to the difference between directory structure and such. In the end, you usually have to compile from source to get the latest update of programs.

Not to mention that most programs are either bug-ridden or half-functional...if you combined three Linux programs, you might get the equivelant of one Windows one.

I'd like to recompile my kernel, except there are three different sets of instructions on how to do it on the Ubuntu wiki. God knows how many there are on the forums. My attempts at it have resulted in, at best, a kernel panic.

And just recently, I learned that my partitions are apparently corrupt, I did them all with the Ubuntu installer partitioner. Here I must commend Linux for gparted, and qtparted, because they're pretty functional and easy-to-use graphical partitioners. If only the engine didn't create corrupt ones...

Linux is also touted as the system of development, and the reason that it's so difficult to use is because the people who use it are so capable and computer-literate. However, VC++.NET is just worlds better than trying to do the same thing with gdb, gedit, g++, makefiles, etc etc. The customizability is nice, but when you're talking about using over six different programs to code and release a program, that's just absurd. I've tried anjuta, but never figured out how to get it to integrate with these programs, not to mention that it likes to pollute my source with a half-dozen makefiles and READMEs. Even starting an MFC project isn't so bad under Windows.

There are probably dozens of little annoyances that I'm forgetting; I could probably write a 10-page paper on the problems I've run into on Linux that I wouldn't have run into on Windows, with a summary of what I did to fix it.

But the lesson in all of this is, unless someone is extremely determined or basically forced to use Linux, and have a lot of time, it simply won't be a viable choice for an OS if they do anything past web browsing and word processing (Although I have yet to get network printing to work, and haven't tried much beyond that...)

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Sandwich


No, that's EXACTLY the point! These hypothetical companies aren't going to be moving their employees from pen 'n paper to Linux, and they sure as heck ain't gonna "switch" from OSX. Face it, Windows users - on both the corporate and personal levels - are the target.

Take that company again... imagine they can't provide in-house tech support for their 600 employees who now need to learn Linux. So they need to find a tech support house that not only supports Linux, not only supports their chosen distro of Linux, but also is familiar with the modifications they made to their chosen distro of Linux! It's a ridiculous situation, and although I'm all for moving to Linux, I'm amazed that there are as many government entities switching to Linux as there are.

The reason government entities, in particular, switch to Linux is that they can better maintain it.  They have complete code access; using a Windows system, their hands are tied and they become reliant upon Microsoft to rectify key problems.  

Particularly for government agencies - making themselves entirely reliant upon an independent company (and a foreign one at that, at least outside the US) is sort of contrary to the purpose of government entities.

If you merge together Linux into 2 or 3 codebases, then you lose that key ability.  Like Windows, you can no longer make specific changes or alterations vital for your business, because you're hogtied by what everyone else wants.

[Unknown Target]

So therefore Linux is better for companies.

What about us private users? It's completey nads to put together for us.

[Sandwich]

Well, I haven't used Linux, so I can't claim knowledge of what each distro may or may not be geared towards. All I'm saying is that my point still stands, and is even bolstered by your rebuttals: I, a computer-savvy dude who is but a newbie when it comes to Linux, am utterly overwhelmed by the variety of Linux flavors. Therefore, I haven't switched.

If I'm like that, how many other people (who can make their own decisions, not company peons) aren't switching for the same reasons?

[Martinus]

[color=66ff00]The thing that surprises me is that BSD with it's more reliable model and it's more corporation friendly licence doesn't get more airtime. It's not bleeding edge but then it doesn't need to be it's very stable, hardened and it has a large, readily available software library thanks to the ports system.

I started out trying slackware which was just gibberish to me, Kazan suggested Fedora to me which was ok but horribly bloated and hard  to handle. Finally I did a bit of reading on linux distros and saw Gentoo which, I must admit, was riding out a wave of popularity at the time but fundamentally had the idea that I wanted to see; almost complete freedom of choice.

It took me three installs to get a working system as it's been quite correctly pointed out that starting from 'stage 1' i.e. compiling the system from the ground up is not only unnecessary but a bad idea.
Stage 3 installs; those where the base system has already been compiled for a specific arcitecure are easy to set up if you follow the manual.

Gentoo's strongest and simultaeniously weakest point is that everything can be compiled from source. There are many packages that can be installed as binaries, Firefox for instance. This is a largely fast affair at the tradeoff of flexibility. Source compiliation can take minutes for the smallest of apps to literally days for something like KDE which has thankfully been changed from one massive monolithic install (pretty much) to about 300 single apps.

I've used this flexibility to install xfce4 as my window manager and I can use konqueror and konsole from KDE desktop environment. I can compile in or remove support for any number of features like ability to handle samba, ability to be remotely administered etc. etc.
The tradeoff is that there's a whole lot more to learn but then I consider it a worthy investment. I'm still tweaking DVD playback and I've yet to reinstall the bluetooth subsystem, both of which have given me trouble in the past.

Linux is by no means perfect, it has numerous issues like the previously mentioned lack of support, the deluge of similar software, the confusing array of distros. I think the significant problem for windows users is linux's tool based approach, consider that windows programs tend to try and do as much as possible from one app. Linux by comparison tends to use a large number of smaller applications which often need reading up on and memorising.
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[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Sandwich
Well, I haven't used Linux, so I can't claim knowledge of what each distro may or may not be geared towards. All I'm saying is that my point still stands, and is even bolstered by your rebuttals: I, a computer-savvy dude who is but a newbie when it comes to Linux, am utterly overwhelmed by the variety of Linux flavors. Therefore, I haven't switched.

If I'm like that, how many other people (who can make their own decisions, not company peons) aren't switching for the same reasons?

Wait a mo, though.  If you weren't already using Windows, wouldn't that then be an equal part of this vast morass you refer to?

[Goober5000]

Originally posted by aldo_14
Wait a mo, though.  If you weren't already using Windows, wouldn't that then be an equal part of this vast morass you refer to?

It's inertia.  "The devil you know..." etc.  You already know how something works, even if it's not the best thing you could be using; so you'd prefer not to switch to something else unless it's in the same realm of familiarilty.

Sandwich: You might want to take a look at Linspire (formerly Lindows).  I got a promotional copy once and I'm considering installing it.

[BlackDove]

The point seems to boil down to this as I see it:

a) Either the Linux developers make a "distro" or build or whatever you call it, that is pretty much as able as Windows is (because let's face it, any moron can use Windows, I mean, it was deisgned as a tool for the common redneck, have to give Microsoft props there, they did keep it mostly very simple) so that we who aren't native to uber can comprehend it and escape the Microsoft product of doom

b) We'll all have to force ourselves to learn and become the uber in order to escape Microsoft.

Now, necessity is the mother of many things, urgency one of them, and it seems that as Windows keeps spiraling down into retardedness, we'll all probably have to pick up the basics when it comes to Linux and sacrifice the time to learn it.

But wouldn't it be better if it was shaped into something similar to Windows, only take the high logic road instead of the red light district whore street Microsoft has taken?

[Kamikaze]

1. Anecdotes from 4 years back is great evidence. Not.

2. *****ing about this does a whole lot of nothing. There's only one way to prevent this, which is to license the Linux kernel restrictively. This is not only a stupid idea, but is virtually impossible. It's impossible for the same reason why the kernel will never move from GPL version 2; it's not possible to get the permission from the thousands of copyright holders of Linux kernel code.

I really don't see why it's so hard to pick a distro. Go to distrowatch.com, check out a couple of the distros in the most popular 5 or 10. Choose.

[CP5670]

I would try messing around with Linux even if it's confusing to a newcomer, but there is honestly not much point to it.  For all of Linux's technical merits, the point of an OS is to run programs and the vast majority of the stuff out there, particularly games, are exclusive to Windows.

[Rictor]

I agree with Sandwich. It's like BitTorrent. It's good that there are many varieties to choose from, but you need to have a solid, default program. It's a lot easier to get people into if you can just tell them "Go to Linux.com and download it". If Linux wants to gain more mainstream usage, it needs ti simplfy things. I'm not suggesting that it merge into a single homogenous mass, but it needs to streamline things to make it easier for people like me to take part.

[Kamikaze]

Have you ever even used Linux? Last time I installed a distro (Debian 3.1a) the only thing I had to do was select language, partition the HD and then it automagically detected all my hardware and installed base programs. Then some post-install stuff (setting up users) and I'm done. Note that this is one of the most oldest and most server-oriented distros that exists. Not a home-oriented distro like Mandriva or SuSE.

CP5670: I agree, for a gamer Linux is useless unless it's for dual-booting or somesuch. I use a separate computer for playing most games. If anyone tries Linux thinking it's possible to use it as a gaming machine, they've been misled. Loki's been dead forever and Wine(x) will always play catchup. Aside from games there shouldn't be much of an application problem, however.

[BlackDove]

Originally posted by Rictor
I agree with Sandwich. It's like BitTorrent. It's good that there are many varieties to choose from, but you need to have a solid, default program. It's a lot easier to get people into if you can just tell them "Go to Linux.com and download it". If Linux wants to gain more mainstream usage, it needs ti simplfy things. I'm not suggesting that it merge into a single homogenous mass, but it needs to streamline things to make it easier for people like me to take part.