Linked by Jeremy LaCroix on Thu 3rd Jun 2004 07:02 UTC
During the majority of my time working with computers, Windows was the operating system of choice. Reason being, it's all I've known. In 2002, I took a college course titled "Linux Administration" which entitled me to a few cd-roms of Redhat 7.x. While this course was nothing more than a few extra credits for me, I fell in love with Linux and went through the entire textbook a week into the class. It was a nice feeling to use something "different" than what I was used to.
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I've almost given up on Linux ever producing a decent distribution for the casual user. I think that the sign of a good operating system is that you forget that it's there, it just does what you need without fuss.
The first thing that needs to be done is for Linux to reach a maturity level where a user can be confident that all of the functions we expect from a modern computer system will work out of the box. In rough order of priority I'd say these are: a useable gui, internet connection, printing capability, easy access to all other partitions on the computer, working sound, cd burning capability, digital camera compatibility.
The Linux distros I've tried in the last 3 years include Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera, Lycoris, Gentoo, Knoppix, Buffalo Linux, Debian, and Xandros. They've all failed on one of these basics. While the goal of "just working" does seem to be getting closer, I have yet to find any distro that will meet these very basic requirements. Of course you can tweak it to work, but I think tweaking should be something to improve performance, not to just make it useable. With every distro I've tried I have also tried the next update that came out, hoping that the problems I was having would be fixed. More often, the new release will have additional bugs that actually make it less useable. I'm now using Fedora Core2, it's the closest I've come on my system to something that "just works".
I believe the future of innovation in computers is in the OS community, probably with Linux. I refuse to use MS or Apple products any more than I have to. But it's frustrating that the OS community can't come close to the elegance exhibited by BeOS 4 years ago on processors that were 20% as powerful.