Sorry I missed responding to your comment until now. Your point is well taken, that at the extremely low price points the free nature of Linux does have a significant effect. However, my point about the cost of an OS being negligable compared to the potential benefit to one’s productivity still applies. I would just then add to that: there’s not point in skimping on the computer, either, if it will in any way slow you down.

Now, if somebody can’t afford to spend more than $300 on a computer, then productivity is probably not a big issue. In that case, I must admit I am wrong and my argument doesn’t apply to that demographic.

Having said that, I’m still not convinced, though I will try the Live PC link you suggested. Unless it bears no resemblance to any Linux desktop distro I’ve ever seen, I can’t imagine the $300 Linux computer will be a hit. The idea of the Walmart-shopping NASCAR crowd running Unix at home strikes me as a candidate for the most humorous business model of the year. “Edna, the Indian man on the phone says we got a corrupted package database and that you gonna need to sue doe are em var slash cache slash… Screw it. I’m just gonna shoot it, alright?”

Let me get this out of the way right at the beginning:

I AM A WINDOWS GUY.

That being said, let me qualify that statement in a couple of important ways. I am a Windows user because I am a PC gamer. As a PC gamer, I really have no choice but to use Windows. So, I am not some Microsoft cheerleader. I would love to see someone make another good OS that can run Direct X 10. I’d be willing to give them a chance. I also like to build my own systems.

Now, having said all that, I think that Microsoft makes a pretty decent product. Let’s face it, fanboys, Windows is more than adequate for what 80% of users do with a computer (Internet browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, games, music and movies). Many in the cult of Apple like to pooh-pooh Windows and love to sing paeans to the innate superiority of OS X. I will concede that OS X is a better, more stable OS than Vista. However, Apples’ job of making an OS compatible with the various types of hardware found in Apples is geometrically easier than Microsoft’s.

For me it boils down to choice. As a gamer, I like to build my own PCs and upgrade and tweak them. That is not an option with an Apple. And if I want to game on the machines I build, I have to run Windows.

And I’m fine with that.

Like you, I’ll be surprised if Microsoft lasts 30 years, but let me ask you this: If Windows and Mac OS X disappear, where will the desktop Linux community get all of its ideas?

Why is it that some people can’t fathom the idea that one can dislike desktop Linux without being part of some commercial conspiracy against it? I’d LOVE to be wrong about desktop Linux. It’s just that I call them as I see them, and I see Linux constantly behind the curve and falling even further. Heaven forbid MS gets its act together or Apple gains critical market share. Should one of the two happen, Linux will be dead on the desktop. It is only through the sheer incompetence of MS that Linux is even where it is.

But it is, in key respects. Go back to my first post: security, stability, robustness, footprint, portability. And, now it’s enabling a whole new class of low-end computer. You can spend more on a toaster than on a gPC or Eee. Granted, it’s a fancy toaster at Williams-Sonoma vs. an entry-level computer at Wal-Mart, but there’s a point there.

Incidentally, if you want to try an Eee without buying one, go to http://www.moka5.com and try out their virtualization thingie. They have lots of virtual machines (”LivePCs”) to try, Eee and gPC among them. I’d be interested in your impression.

Except in my case I wasn’t generalizing. I know Windows can and does. Second, Linux, being the underdog, is in the unfortunate position of having the burden of proof on it, not Windows or OS X. If you’re going to undergo the labor of switching operating systems, you will only do so if the new one offers significant advantages over the one you already use and know. Thus, if there is a tie between Windows and Linux, Linux still loses. And despite the protests otherwise, I don’t see how anybody can argue with a straight face that Windows, as bad as it is, is really that much less reliable than the popular Linux distros. A very unscientific survey made by googling “Linux graphics driver problem” and “Vista graphics driver problem” comes up with a similar number of hits. I know the million reasons why this is a bad way to quantitatively gauge users’ experience, but my point is that there’s not a huge difference: people have lots of problems on both. Linux needs to be better, not just as bad.

I’m not sure why you thought that would change my mind much. The post was about somebody who had the experience of Linspire autoloading a driver, and then incorrectly stating Windows would not have done the same thing.

The point of my experiment is to compare desktop linux to Windows and the Mac in terms of usability out of the box. I am actually fairly knowledgeable about unix in general, and run RHEL4 on my work box, and have edited my X11 config by hand to work fine with my two monitors. My point is that the idea of desktop linux is to be usable to somebody who doesn’t do unix, and I think it currently fails at that, or at least Ubuntu does. I’m sure I could’ve fixed my problem with Ubuntu if I’d wanted to spent time on it. But that’s not the point. I’d rather spend $100 to not have to. And I’d certainly rather just reboot into my Windows, which (perhaps to my luck) has worked surprisingly well with multiple monitors.

Every year, the blogger downloads the latest distribution, installs it, tries to get the second monitor working, doesn’t know what he’s doing and ruins the Xorg configuration file. Then he proclaims that “Linux sucks” and gets rid of it for another year.

How is the blogger going to learn enough about Linux this way? He gives up at the first thing that is different.

Here’s a tip for you. Don’t worry about the second monitor. Use Ubuntu, or PCLinuxOS or whatever until you actually have enough knowledge of the operating system as a desktop OS, to do things correctly.

I’m a Windows amateur – never really used Windows, and I don’t even have a copy of it now. Because I’m quite knowledgable about browngoods and (now) about Linux, people keep asking me to fix their Windows problems. You’d probably laugh at my attempts to get a Windows computer to connect to a wireless network, or to figure out what graphics card driver it needs and install it. Before I try fiddling around with these computers I should really get to learn the Windows operating system, but whenever I get a call for help there’s no time.

You have the luxury of time to learn desktop Linux. Just don’t go too deeply into the system until you know what you’re doing. And if you do that, then I’ll try to remember to refer all Windows problems onto Windows experts.

PS My mom kicked me out

But to respond briefly to some of the general threads of criticism: First, I wasn’t trying to fire shots on behalf of MS in the OS wars, as many assumed. Do a tag seach for Vista on this blog and you’ll see I’m no MS fan. I base absolutely none of my identity on the OS I use; I dualboot Windows/RHEL4 at work and use a Mac at home. I have equally profound ambivalence for them all. Despite breathless media commentary to the contrary, we are just at the very very beginning of the information revolution, and our tools are understandably crude. What we use in 2040 will bear no resemblence to what we have now and we’ll (a) wonder how we dealt with the inconveniences of 2008 OSes and (b) laugh at ourselves for bothering to fight over which one was better. I follow Linux to the extent I do because I really do like the idea in most respects. Having said that, I’m starting to think there are fundamental problems with Linux as a desktop environment meant to replace Windows or OS X. (And to the person that pointed out the OLPC, I agree that it’s great. But it’s not trying to replicate Windows or OS X, is it?)

To the critique that Ubuntu is not representative of the best of the Linux community: My understanding is that the problems I encountered would’ve happened under GNOME on any distro, but I have to admit I didn’t pursue the problem enough to prove whether it was GNOME or something special to Ubuntu that was to blame. So the point is well taken that I should try others, and I will.

Finally, I should’ve done a better job making it clear I’m only talking about desktop Linux as a replacement for Windows or OS X, especially for the general public. I wasn’t trying to criticize the entire movement, and especially not opensource in general. I use GNU/Linux in my work all the time; I run all my simulation and design optimization code for my optics research on RHEL4 using the GNU toolchain. I just don’t think Linux and opensource are a good match for a general use desktop OS, especially one which is attempting to largely replicate existing commercial ones. I think I can make a strong case for this, and will do so in my next post.

-Jonathan

Tell that to the grannies who are buying Eees and Wal-Mart gPCs, or the third-world kids using the XO PC. Your view is out of date. Linux has come a long way since Red Hat circa 1997.

Plus, your comment about VMWare is not terribly illustrative. I use VMWare (am writing this on a PCLinuxOS virtual machine running under it in Windows, as a matter of fact) and can assure you from painful experience that Windows Updates can break VMWare too, necessitating a reinstall. In Linux, if a big update breaks something, you just run a reconfigure thingie which takes perhaps 20 seconds to complete, then you’re good to go. But, I update kernels frequently (why not take advantage of the latest and greatest?) and the worst VMWare breakage I’ve endured was that VMWare Tools would not track the mouse as perfectly as it did before. Otherwise it worked fine. Maybe the situation was different in your distro? That’s entirely possible, unfortunately, given the fractious nature of the Linux market and the spotty quality of some distros.

Whereas it’s not yet perfect, I’m impressed with the deliverables and the commitment of the folks who work on the philosophy of a “free” environment. I have nothing against Windows; I just like having an alternative and “hats off” to those who provide that option.

Dan

With friends like you, who needs enemies?

And what words do they utter after virus-trojans-spyware-BSOD-WGA-DRM ?

Linux isn’t for everyone, IMO thats a good thing.

“Free” isn’t the only benefit to Linux. Security, stability, robustness and a small hardware footprint are big draws (or were for me, at least). And then there’s portability: the ability to put a fully-featured machine on a USB hard disk or even a flash stick, carry it around, and use it wherever I happen to be is much easier to implement with Linux than Windows. For example, I can use a company laptop for personal emails and browsing without any personal content or software residing on the laptop; when I travel that means I don’t have to carry two laptops. In fact, I’m writing this on a PCLinuxOS virtual machine on a $129 250GB Western Digital USB hard disk from Costco on a company computer during a travel week.

Besides, the notion that the OS constitutes 10% of the machine cost is now obsolete with the advent of rather good but nosebleed-cheap computers like the Eee and gPC. Linux is an enabler for that whole new class of PC, as it is for $49 WiFi routers and $200 handheld GPS systems and so many other things today. About a million Eees have been sold since the Fall. Though most users wouldn’t care about the technical details, the Eee runs a version of Xandros Linux with a KDE-based user interface and are lauded for their ease of use. If you’re too challenged to install and successfully use PCLinuxOS, try one of those.

I’m not a Linux fanboi or Microsoft-basher. (I’m actually more of a Mac evangelist.) In fact, I concur with your “to hell with this shit” attitude when any machine or software starts getting in the way of what I want to do. I do continue to use Windows; like Linux, it’s a tool, a means to an end. I’ve used Linux where appropriate since 1997. And I’m here to tell you that as a desktop OS, it has reached critical mass and now represents a rapidly-blossoming new chapter in personal computer history.

Having recently gone through the whole “try Linux thing,” I agree completely. Linux is not ready for prime time. Despite the religion-like devotion of the Linux crowd, the market has spoken.

Finally text files are actually harder to corrupt than binary files since even one bad character in a binary file makes it not work and quite hard to debug. The reason xorg.conf might go bonkers would be the automatic tools modifying it or changing the hardware which just as well ‘corrupt’ a binary file. The problem is the lack of automatic tools to monitor changes in hardware or the quality of the tools.

X server is also very feature-rich, allowing several X sessions, remote sessions and lots of nifty things. And it is being developed all the time just.
But I agree that it shouldn’t be necessary to restart X after editing it’s settings.

There is also the problem of x86-architecture that there are enormous amounts of different hardware and each one requires it’s own drivers and it is very hard to make everything work together, especially with some drivers being only proprietary.

Not that in other circumstances I wouldn’t agree with you. For my work PC I couldn’t live without XP. And I haven”t tried to work with external or dual monitors. But Ubuntu 7.10 sees the NAS at home, the XP desktop, let’s Picasa see and manipulate photos across the network on all devices, let’s me play music hosted on the NAS and XP desktop thru Ubuntu out to my stereo, etc., etc.

End results – its pretty much there. My wife can use it and does so easily and with far fewer complaints vs. Vista. She might not say the same vs. XP, but that wasn’t an option as I wasn’t going to pay for another copy of XP.

Doesn’t mean that issues don’t remain but, again, for basic setups I believe it’s there.

and at the End : Ubuntu is not Linux it’s a Derivative Only. There is a world out there. Look outside from your tank.

I’d rather choose a free stable and secure operating system (then I can spend more on hardware), particularly if it comes with a full office suite by default.

I think a greater proportion of Linux users than Windows users have trouble-free graphics setups without resorting to installing additional drivers. I don’t think X Windows is as bad or unstable as you suggest.

The GPL is much more liberating than the Vista EULA.