Andrew’s Adventures in Linuxland
Andrew Cory
Way back in the day, I did a post asking if Microsoft was replaceable. I looked at a trio of applications and tested them against their Microsoft equivalents. I decided to try it again, this time going so far as to replace the operating system itself. I found a lot of features to admire, but a couple of glaring holes in the system.
I am going to first recount the experience, then tell the bad things about Linux generally, and end on a positive note with the good things.
For those who care, System specs:
(Geek)
The process: First thing I tried was Mandrake 10.1. The installation was fairly straightforward, though the partitioning aspect was a pain. When I point it at a chunk of empty disk space, I expect it to salute and install. Instead, it wanted me to play around with settings and mount points. But I got everything set up...
Mandrake had issues. It was unable to find my sound card, and wasn’t able to connect to the internet, despite spotting both of my network cards. After a couple hours of fiddling, I gave up and blew it out.
Next up was XandrOS. The XandrOS installation was much simpler, and it found my soundcard and network. It had some rather nice features, which I’ll get to later. Weirdly, I had a several application crashes, as well as having the system suck up a lot of RAM. At least, I presume that's what happened, as my I had no system resource monitor to tell me for certain. It might have been video card issues, though I was able to install the latest drivers...
I turned the monitor off twice during my several hours with it, and discovered that when I turned it on, everything was blurry. Logging out and back in again cleared up the problem, but give the other weirdness, I decided to blow that out, and try something else...
The last distribution I tried was Red Hat'sFedora Core 3 Fedora went in smoothly, found my network, found my sound card, had no RAM issues, and couldn’t find my other drives. My hard drive has a trio of partitions, one of which has Linux on it, the other Windows, and the third has a bunch of utilities, my movie files, and all my music files. Fedora wasn’t willing to let me access them, saying I didn’t have permission. At least, I think those were the drives; HHD01 is not the way I would have designated a drive, and the place it buried them is not at all a user friendly interface decision.
Fedora had a nice update function, just press a few buttons and it was ready to install all the new components-- including updating the Gnome interface! It took me about 7 hours to actually download all the updates, though, leaving me mire than a bit annoyed. Since I have a DSL line, This shouldn’t have taken quite as long. Once downloaded, installation only took a few minutes, and crashed my system...
The Bad: Yeah, the above is fairly negative. None of those problems seem inherent to Linux generally, though, just to the distributions. The constant problem Linux had was installing programs. Here is the way it should work: I download a program. If necessary I unzip the program, I click the icon called "installer", or some such. Then it shoves the program wherever I tell it to go, puts a shortcut on the start/launch/application menu, and asks me if I want one in the quick launch area.
How it does work: I download a program, finding it wherever it ended up, despite the fact that I told to land on the desktop, unzipping where necessary. If the program is nice, it just needs to be shoved into a spot on my hard drive, and I need to create a shortcut on the quick launch menu., changing the icon so as to be more pretty. I don't know how to get a shortcut on the application menu. If the program isn’t nice, I need to open a terminal, make compile, wave a magic wand and to the hokey pokey. When that fails, I scream and throw the program in the garbage. Oh well, I can live without Thunderbird...
Also, every distribution maker spent time making the desktop look pretty. The application makers didn't. Even Firefox looked blockier and uglier than the window’s version. Along with that, did you know font’s are intellectual property? Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple each own a version of Times New Roman. This means that visiting the same webpage will look different depending on which OS you are using. The Linux fonts are a little bit harder to read than the Apple and MS ones...
The Good: Did I rag on Linux too much? There are problems, and glossing over them does no one any good. However, there are some big successes as well. Indeed, every little feature I’ve thought should be in Windows was present in at least one distribution of Linux. A dictionary seems to be built into the interface, allowing spell check to be easily integrated into any program that needs it. Word processors, Email, even Instant messaging...
Wallpaper changing was interesting; with XandrOS, I was able to tell it that certain pictures were available, and to cycle through them every 10 minutes. Windows has a similar program, but it isn’t as configurable, nor is it built into the system. Multiple desktops are a fairly nice feature, though they should be called "work areas" rather than "desktops", as your icons and system tray stay in the same spot every time...
A hell of a lot of programs came pre-loaded with each Distro. Given my experiences trying to add new ones, this is a good thing. The applications were varied, useful, and most of them easily updateable...
Verdict: Linux is almost ready for prime time. Once the issues I mentioned earlier get fixed (and they are fixable), Linux will be a viable desktop contender even for my parents. And once they are fixed, Microsoft needs to be very scared...
In fact, I take the radical viewpoint (radical, at least, in the eyes of some Linux zealots
FYI: the default browswer, Konqueror, displays fonts strangely. Since Mozilla also comes with it, I used that instead. No real problems.
Last spring I tried Mandrake on my backup system and let it have the whole hard drive to use. As I have highspeed cable I downloaded the entire 4 CD set overnight. Apparently enough time has passed that Linux is now user friendly.
I gave myself about six months to lean and get used to it. It worked well for most of what I wanted with a few drawbacks that made me give up and re-install windows.
For one I am on staff at an online support group where I use mIRC a lot. The closest Linux software was Xchat which left a lot to be desired in featuresafter using mIRC.
The other drawback that is probably the reason I dumped it. I was never able to network it with my main computer. It kept giving me similar to your HHD01: "You dont have permission," even though I was logged in as root administrator.
Maybe in another five years Linux will be ready for the big time.
On an other note I am still using FireFox most of the time, but it has a lot of isssues to work out too. Like disappearing flashing cursor while editing, crazy quirky highighting that wants to start at the previous cursor position and a text search feature that sucks.
A lot of the problems are what I'd call "tail end" problems, in that we're on the tail end of fixing them.
Fonts, for example, used to be a mess. On really cutting-edge distros, both the font renderer and the fonts themselves are really nice and hassle-free (including decent replacements for the standard fonts). Fedora Core 3 should have had all the new font goodness; the other two may or may not have.
Third-party software installation is still a problem, and people are looking at solving it. I blogged about one system just a few days ago. But that effort is still in its infancy, and the current solutions leave a lot to be desired.
I am still going to ding you, though, for insisting on installing Thunderbird your way. All the up-to-date distros ship Thunderbird. There should have been a software install tool that should have made Thunderbird a search, click, wait, done thing. Did you check? Did the tool work?
It took a bit of research to get my wireless network card working. Even though it was detected and is supported, the system apparently doesn't bother to actually make it work unless you log into the shell and fiddle around. I've created a small partition for my user preferences and told Knoppix to save my configuration, but apparently network stuff isn't saved after all.
The user experience is obviously where things fall apart for Linux. It works almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Windows. When something goes wrong the OS tends to fail in unexpected ways (unexpected to Windows and Mac users) and the error messages are generally pretty horrible. More user testing, please.
I've never heard of XandrOS, but Mandrake and Fedora are both RPM-based distros, so your experience is going to be pretty similar on both. YOu should have tried a Debian-based or Slackware-based distro for more variety.
I agree though that Linux isn't quite ready for "prime time". It's definitely going in the right direction though, and fast.
I'm probably echoing what Sandi said earlier. About 2000-2001, I got on a Linux kick. I had a spare PC which I built for Linux from the ground up.
Every negative you mentioned, I encountered then. The desktop, though, has gotten much prettier, and installing the OS is much smoother now.
I disagree with your assessment that Linux is almost ready for prime time. It hasn't really improved from a user standpoint in five years. Because MacOS and Windows keep allowing users to know less and less, I really don't expect Linux to keep up.
I'm also a much bigger than of FreeBSD than Linux, but FreeBSD needs a whole lot more coaxing to get setup than Linux.
Dude, really now.
I mean, I get that Linux isn't some people's cup of tea, and that there's still work to be done. But "hasn't really improved from a user standpoint in five years"?
I can tell you ten vast improvements that have been made in the last five years, at least a few of them very difficult ones.
The problem is, so many distributions still insist on installing the ugly, blocky, default GTK theme. (The default Qt theme is quite a bit better). So naturally, people's first experience of Linux and Firefox is a negative one from the "looks" point of view. Distributions really should pick a better GTK theme to install...
I have tried to install some stuff intended for Linux but having a Windows port. In 9 of ten, I get "of course, to use this you must have" some other thingy. In eight of 10, this turned into thing B requiring C and D and E, each of which had at least two pre-reqs, each of which... I haven't installed many of these.
Bah. All of those things (well, the ones I looked at) are free, and have distribution licenses, so why not include them and have documentation to the effect "you may want to look for updates to stuff included here" and a bunch of links?
I've installed well over a hundred WinTel packages, and as best I can recall only two had a non-MS-base-install pre-req (ONE pre-req), which was included as an (optional in case you already had it) install addon or at least a link (usually to get Adobe Reader).
In fact, you can even update your entire OS this way -- not only security updates and such, but version upgrades, quickly and easily.
There are many versions of this for virtually any Linux distro, including slapt-get and swaret for slackware.
Yeah, Chris, that can be a problem sometimes. It took me a while, for example, to find a version of cdrtools for Windows that worked for me. It's the one that doesn't require IDE to pretend it's SCSI.
Linux-designed apps being installed on Linux as part of a Linux distribution are in a different boat, of course.