Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Fri 11th Jul 2008 22:30 UTC, submitted by pas de calais
"Recently a blog post entitled 'Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy' has come across my feed-radar a few times. It's yet another in the long line of 'Linux ain't ready yet' jeremiads and it doesn't really say anything new yet it got on my nerves. Why?" Ryan Cartwright at Freesoftware Magazine is on fine form with this wonderfully splenetic broadside. Read the full tirade at FSM.
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Member since:
2006-01-23
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Not true. The original blog post I responded to rattled on about mp3 playback "not working out of the box", I pointed out that there are plenty of GNU/Linux distributions whee it does. Some others deliberately do not include it for reasons of freedom. If you disagree with the stance of the latter the former is available at no charge.
The thing I don't like to see is that rather than educate (and thus assist) the end-users we hear that we should make the interfaces more dummy-proof. It's like people want Star Trek-like computers and they forget the problems Picard had getting a cup of hot tea.
Sorry if some people didn't get the cultural reference there.
cheers
Crimperman
If everything worked perfectly on Star Trek, each series would have lasted only one season. "If you keep going like that, you're going to overload the thing." type of statements were necessary to see how long people would watch. If it was boring who would care?
It's true that, because of licensing and legal issues, Canonical/Ubuntu has withheld certain pieces as shipped. Free software has limitations.
However, a non-technical user doesn't care. They want it to work and they don't want to stare down 12 boxes (or downloads) which all say Linux, attempting to understand the differences.
Linux is good, but there has to be a clear leader in usability to get it past the corporate setting.