It’s one of those catch phrases that never really seems to die out. Wherever you look in the operating systems world, at personal blogs written in crummy English, or at high-profile quality websites, there is bound to be someone, somewhere who used it. Even I, myself, used it in articles in a far and distant past, and I’m not particularly proud of it. “Ready for the desktop” is no longer acceptable – in fact, it’s on its way out.“Ready for the desktop”, mostly in conjunction with Linux, is a catch phrase that never really served a purpose anyway. The problem is that it is undefined; what does it mean to be “ready for a desktop”? Is there a set of rules? Are there stone tablets somewhere with ten requirements on them that you need to fulfil before you’re “ready for the desktop”? Is there a standards body somewhere that has written a 10000 page specification detailing what you need to do to be ready for the desktop?
There isn’t, of course, and that’s exactly the problem. What makes an operating system ready for my desktop doesn’t mean it’s ready for anyone else’s desktop. I’ve lived an entire year with QNX 6.1/6.2 as my desktop operating system; it fulfilled all my needs, and I was happy with its stability, speed, and looks. It allowed me to browse the web, read my email, listen to music, you name it. For me, QNX and PhotonUI were “ready for the desktop”. However, I was only one of the three men and a cow who could use QNX as a desktop – the rest of the world wasn’t completely crazy and dismissed QNX as a desktop operating system.
In other words, being “ready for the desktop” is a relative term, and in and of itself means absolutely nothing. It needs a proper context, a set of rules put forth by the person uttering the phrase. What does it mean to him? What are his requirements that the operating system in question does or does not fulfil?
So, I would like to join Jeremy LaCroix when he says “it’s time we officially retire this criterion”.
In the article, Jeremy LaCroix points out a new trend in reviewing operating systems, one that we’ve seen linked to on OSNews a few times already as well: a “normal user” forced to do a set of tasks on an operating system she (mostly she) never used before. LaCroix is clear: “If one person is not able to be productive in Linux, does that really mean anything to the rest of us?” Of course it doesn’t.
My university has a campus-wide wireless network with all sorts of fancy security stuff. This is quite a hassle to set up, but at one point I could configure Mac OS X to connect to this network from the top of my head, without any configuration guide or whatever. Contrary to popular belief, OS X is not always easy and user-friendly; configuring advanced wireless networks was a pain on Tiger, because the dialogs and configuration utilities were rather messy. For Leopard, Apple completely revamped the dialogs and tools.
Which brought me back to square one. I’ve been using Mac OS X for a long time now, and I consider myself a power user on this system. Yet, when Apple changed how to configure an advanced wireless network, I was lost. It took me hours and hours of fiddling about before the thing would work.
You can imagine that pulling an inexperienced user from a Windows environment, and dropping them in an Ubuntu environment is sure going to give them headaches. It’s only elementary, and does not really say anything about how easy to use Ubuntu, or any other system, is.
In conclusion, I agree with LaCroix. Let’s not talk about being ready for the desktop any more, and let’s not regard helpless users’ responses to a few dialogs as an end-all-be-all way to determine ease of use.
While we are at it can we retire ‘Enterprise Ready’ as well? It’s yet another nebulous phrase.
You can imagine that pulling an inexperienced user from a Windows environment, and dropping them in an Ubuntu environment is sure going to give them headaches.
If they are that inexperienced, they might not be so accustomed to the “windows way”, and perhaps adapt to any other solid desktop environment, like Gnome, more easily. Non-techy experienced windows users might be more of a hassle, though.
I took my in-laws AOL based computer (that’s all she ever used) and switched her over to Ubuntu. Both her and her husband fight for use of the computer now. There are a ton of games for him to play that are not arcade and she has discovered internet radio for Costa Rican music and talk shows.
What I am getting at is this, sometimes moving people outside their comfort zones helps them enjoy their PC more.
I don’t see your point.
For games, wouldn’t Windows be an infinitely better choice?
Internet radio is not restricted to Ubuntu. I haven’t found a radio player on Linux that is half as good as Screamer Radio (for Windows).
Not Necessarily.
Only maybe, if your only interest is DirectX games. And many of those old & new can work well on Linux. Not to mention many Cross Platform commercial & Completely free Games & Simulations.
I have not found any major issue with Linux Media stuff, and now prefer it, Radio, TV, SAT, HDTV, etc, etc.
Maybe it is not marketed, and sometimes it may require more involvement, but well worth it.
If vendors & developers choose not to support something it is probably their decision & their loss…
While there maybe interest & need for some for Windows, then use it. But it is not that necessary anymore……..
I am only one person, But tend to only purchase those things that support my platform or at least open standards………
Still there is the Wii & PS3 they don’t do DirectX and even run Linux.
The point I was trying to make, I admit that it is kind of fuzzy, is that even people you would not think capable of switching to a Linux distro can do it.
The games I was talking about are all the ones you can get via the Add/Remove application. Click on it, look under games and it like shopping for them. No CD’s to buy and they don’t worry about system requirements. Tetris clones, samegames… you know, time wasters or puzzlers.
I know and agree that internet radio is not exclusive to a platform. However, it was so easy with Rhythmbox for her. I use Amarok personally, but to each their own. I had never heard of Screamer, but it looks nice for a windows app.
Yes – and no. Some people don’t need or even like the arcade games you usually get from the big game vendors, they like the small card, logic and puzzle games better. If such a person crosses your way, be nice and give him some Linux distro and be sure to install every game in that distro.
But probably the pre-setting of the app she discovered on her system was right for her, and probably the only way she found out something like internet radio even exists was to find the application in her menu and getting curios.
One size does seldom fit all, and it is a pitty that in a usual computer shop nobody asks you which operating system you prefer, and give you hints towards the strenghts and weaknesses of each system in case you know nothing at all.
I had an very similar experience. A friends Windows PC died while he was working on his final Paper studying Film. I offered him to use my Laptop, which however had just Linux installed and i wasn’t very keen on changing that fact.
I was really surprised that he had no trouble at all working with that machine after i just gave him a five minute introduction and told me that he actually found the folder structure better than the way it is on Windows (i always thought the folder structure is what “the Windows crowd” would have trouble getting used to).
The reason his next PC runs Windows now is because he requires a lot of Film editing Software which isn’t available for Linux, otherwise he even would have switched.
Maybe you want to install this for him
http://www.supergamer.org/
I found that as a new entry at Distrowatch only now, but it looks very interesting.
The question that should be asked, is “ready for OEMs?”. Ready for the Desktop is irrelevant when you have to install an OS over the one you got for ‘free’ [sic]
probably the question should be turned on it’s head:
“Are the OEM’s ready for the operating system?”
They seem to be ready for Apple, and for Windows.
Dell is just trying to wade into the shallow waters with Linux, but seems to be reluctant to plunge fully into it. Some of this may be due to hardware/driver issues.
And Dell probably does not want to have thousands of people pounding on the support doors, so they don’t actively advertize Linux preinstalled PCs. They want to sell Linux PCs mostly to people who know their way around Linux, so they don’t need much manpower for support.
Yes, it does need to be retired, because Linux is more than ready for the desktop.
it is just that people think “windows” when you even Say or Mention “PC” or “Computer”, and that needs to be fixed.
amazingly enough, people don’t even think “Mac” unless you SAY “Mac” or “Apple”.
Linux is more than ready for the desktop. All it needs is
1. third party applications that would enrich the Linux environment.
2. a new generation of users that don’t think the windows’ way.
… or a new generation of Linux programmers that don’t blame the users rather than the software.
Linux already has both of those. What Linux really needs is a better public image amongst those who’ve heard of it but never used it.
What a lot of people perceive of Linux is the old image of ~10 years ago:
* Ugly desktops
* command line hell
* having to compile everything you want to install
* lack of drivers (though Linux would benefit from more manufacturers porting OS drivers instead of binaries / OSS advocates having to reverse-engineer their own open source drivers)
* and other such FUD.
I’ve been using Linux pretty much exclusively as my desktop OS at home for a few years now and, aside professional music production, I’ve never once thought “I really need Windows to get this job done right”
Unfortunately Linux’s poor public image is a bit of a “chicken and egg” scenario.
It’s hard to introduce new users to Linux while they already have a fully functional desktop (be it Windows or OS X) so you need to get OEMs on board to sell systems with Linux pre-installed. However OEMs aren’t going to ship Linux systems if they don’t believe the market is there (it simply wouldn’t be cost effective for them).
Thankfully with the OMPCs shipping with Linux, Vista’s high system requirements and bad publicity – the tides are changing (albeit slowly).
NB Sorry for the long post guys hehe.
Edited 2008-05-19 21:29 UTC
Shouldn’t that be “It’s time to retire the desktop”?
I suspect that what a lot of people hear when “ready for the desktop” is mentioned is “works just like Windows”. So it’s not very surprising that proponents of other operating systems aren’t keen on the idea.
Like it or not, Windows sets the bar for Joe Public and so long as he finds having a bar useful as a point of comparison, a phrase like “ready for the desktop” will continue to do brisk trade. One day there will be another bar, but not for a few years yet (alas, you may say).
You can’t “retire” language; it has a life of its own. That’s why to the fury of some Linux is called “Linux” and not “GNU/Linux”. The second is fairer and more accurate, but the world doesn’t care. As for WinXP, that is shaping up gamely even in old age as “the desktop that dare not retire”.
It gets really boring when you hear someone say ‘Linux is not ready for the desktop because it dont have X app or X feature’
How many people would have used the term for XP when it was released and was ready for the desktop, all them worms and virus’s made it pretty useless or troublesome until SP2.
Thats the thing, with XP, those X apps and X features that you mention where virii and worms respectively. So, it was ready for the desktop.
I personally think that “Ready for Desktop” was and is still just a metaphor. Used to describe something we want it to be and keep as our future objective.
It’s suppose is to inspire people to write better software for the freedom which GPL has given us.
I honestly believe that if there are enough users, those users change the face of the operating system to their liking. And that OS will be perfect for those people. When more people get in it gets even broader user base which changes that OS so that everybody likes it even more. So so more people will jump in.
Not everybody might like it at the beginning. But when it develops, revolutionizes, and keeps on evolutioning into next stages it will gain broader general acceptance over others more stiff, inflexible OSes which do not change enough in short times like year or two.
Writer is right about that there ain’t perfect desktop which will work for everybody out of the box. But I know that we can get really close to that objective.
Besides Gnu/Linux is still young. Maybe too young for global dominance. We need more time than these past fifteen years of “Linux desktop evolution”.
Designing Mac desktop took 30 years. Why should we hurry our desktops which are built to last and evolve on their own. (At least as long as there are users for those desktops.)
I think that any good Linux Distro (Ubuntu or Kubuntu) is good enough for the desktop, maybe a little bit complicated to setup at first (if your hardware is not supported by default).
What’s missing with Linux is not some fancy stuff from the OS, the OS is fine as it is. It’s the software. It’s NATIVE useful software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Visual Studio, the 100% defacto standard (in the enterprise world) Microsoft Office, iTune, GAMES, ….
Everybody will be bleeding down my neck telling me that their is alternative to all this, but most are half baked or (feature) incomplete. And what if I don’t want to use alternative? What if I’d like to use Photoshop in Ubuntu? WINE! There you go, you need hacks like emulation to use your favorite in a alien OS. And it’s even harder for games…
So then, is it ready for the Desktop? It all depends on what you like to use and how you like to use it.
It’s not Linux fault, it’s everybody else not embracing Linux that makes it harder to use on the desktop. So, what came first? The chicken or the egg? People will stick to Windows until their favorite are available on Linux, not the “different” alternative.
As much as I sympathise with you, alot of those applications are incredibly specialised. Illustrator and Indesign, although great pieces of software, aren’t titles that Joe and Jane Doe use.
For me, I used to use the ‘photoshop excuse’ until I tried the online version, Photoshop Express. I was sceptical when a mate from Sun said that its all going to eventually appear on the web. Well, having given Photoshop Express a try, unless you happen to have a really slow connection, it is definitely a viable replacement for Photoshop Elements.
So right now, I can pull down my photos with GTKam, edit them with Photoshop Express, compress video using mencoder, and so forth – infact, doing alot of stuff the average Joe and jane would never do, but easily accomplishing it on OpenSolaris.
Again, I understand what you mean, but I do think that it is short sighted to use such examples of Indesign and Illustrator as they are not mainstream desktop applications. As for things such as Quicken and MOYB, these are eventually going to make their way onto the web as software as a service. Lots of applications are eventually going to move that way.
People are now demanding that they can access their applications from anywhere in the world; companies face a choice, either port their software again and again and again to every platform that pops up or moving it to a web based application – and maybe in the future, we will see these webbased applications in offline form using things such as Adobe AIR.
Edited 2008-05-19 20:36 UTC
Erm, this is one of those things only geeks want. I’ve literally NEVER heard someone in my circle of friends or family say “I demand I can access my applications anywhere in the world”.
If there ever has been a inflated uberhype, it’s this one. People want to access their data everywhere in the world – they don’t care about the apps, just as long as it works with their data.
Excuse me, but please, think about what I said before replying. People want to be able to have access to applications which allow them to access their data. Yes, openformats and all that jazz is nice in intellectual jerk off land – but this is the land of reality. The land of reality is inhabited by companies who don’t like to play well with others.
These companies want to get their software running on all manner of devices; delivery through the web is the best mechanism where by they can target a large audience with minimal over heads associated with needing to maintain a large code base for several platforms.
Edited 2008-05-19 20:49 UTC
Who said anything about open formats? I said people want access to their data all over the world – which doesn’t mean it has to be open formats. Which happens to be another thing people don’t care about.
In all due respects – how the f*ck can they access their information when it is saved in a format which they cannot open? Thom, please, go back to IT school, because obviously this is getting way over your head at this moment – when you fail to realise that information is stored in a format, and that format has to be presented in a way that the client application can read and thus display to the end user.
As long as it’s not ready, people will be reaching for that statement!
I keep giving Linux a try, Fedora, Ubuntu, you name it, but it’s still not ready.. i’m starting to think Haiku will get there before Linux!
Well, maybe you should have read the article before commenting on it.
So it isn’t ready for *your* desktop, most likely because of lack of games. It is perfectly fine for my desktop Laptop, happily residing next to my Mac these days and i couldn’t imagine going back to XP or even further back to use Vista.
If by “ready for the desktop” one means “on the verge of mass-adoption” then Linux or the likes will not be ready until decent gaming support arrives.
No, i don’t mean tetris, solitaire or any other office-workers past-time of which there are already several (kde-games for example); nor do i mean tux racer which is barely a proof-of-concept thingy.
I mean the true stuff that most of the “free software” people have been quietly stepping over maybe bitterly dropping a “buy a playstation or xbox” remark or two. Computer gaming has been the driving force of the PC evolution since, i don’t know, Doom. By missing out on that market, Linux misses a HUGE user base, some more, some less technical. I am probably not a good example of anything but although i’m now supposed to be all grown-up and stuff, i sometimes still get the urge to have a crack on Toca Race Driver or the latest Grand Theft Auto wallet-cleansing-utility. For that, I have to keep a Windows machine at hand. Now I am probably more motivated to switch between OS’es but nevertheless it is a pain.
Long story short, get a hold on THAT market and the Windows division will start driving buses for a living.
P.S. I acknowledge that accomplishing that task is, khm, somewhat difficult, but that does not deprive it from its grand-ness
“My university has a campus-wide wireless network with all sorts of fancy security stuff. This is quite a hassle to set up…”
What is it with campus wireless and needless complication? At my own school, they have some flashy fancy authentication system that is down for maintainance half the time. When it is up, good luck getting it working. Under windows, one must download numerous third-party apps because the system they chose is not natively supported. OSX ‘works’ out-of-the-box in theory, but it will take an hour or two of fiddling with settings to get intermittent connectivity. Linux? Forget about it, I know of only one guy who got that working, and even he has no idea what he did.
Why the need for this extreme with authentication? It’s a university (and in my case, at a remote campus), why not just have open networks available to everyone? Why the hassle?
Another example of too little experience and too much power on the part of the sysadmins? Seems likely to me…
I think ‘ready for the desktop’ is not a measure of how well the OS works or how easy it is to use, or whether or not you can browse the web and send email with it. Rather, it is more about how widely adopted and compatable an OS is with the rest of the world.
I’ll list a few examples of what I’m talking about:
1. If the OS doesn’t come pre-installed, do I personally know anybody that can come over and help me get it up and running on my computer?
2. If I buy a new piece of hardware, is it going to have drivers and a quick start manual available for my OS? And if not, can I at least look at the back of the box and tell if my OS is supported?
3. Furthermore, if I have trouble making said device work, can I call up the vendor’s help desk and get support for the OS I’m using?
4. If I’m looking for a new accounting package, can I go down to Fry’s and pick one up?
5. I just got a cool new remote control car that has some sort of USB plug so I can connect it to my computer. It doesn’t say my OS is supported. How the hell am I going to make this work?
Anyway, I think you get the point.
The “Ready for the Desktop” thing definitely has to go, he really has a point there. I mean, is there a panel of experts out there who will one day reveal to the world when Linux is in fact ready?
I think there’s merit in getting inexperienced users to try to perform common tasks on Linux though. A big priority for most Distro’s is trying to make Windows users feel at home. It has to be if Linux is going to become really successful.
That is the way out? We drop “Ready for the desktop” because “Linux is different from Windows”?
It seems pretty much to me like the Microsoft usual tactic in the middle of a deafening loss to claim victory, leave the field and run.
Sorry, I do not think it is that simple, we (penguins) attacked Microsoft on it’s play turf. Great bashing ensued and we are still going head to head and eating each hearth’s out.
Just claming “Ready for desktop” is NOT the way to put it does not change anything about the situation.
Sorry, but it is not easy.
This is war not semantic.
We started it and we Goddamn bloddy finish it or die (badly) trying, no other easy way out sadly.
But that doesn’t necessarily get them out of the gate, much less across the finish line. Many OS have come and gone being rejected for one simple reason – the place where Windows the past two decades has been kicking names and taking ass: Applications. Even MacOS carved out a niche by providing applications that – while available on other platforms ran better on theirs. (Photoshop, PageMaker, Quark – which makes one question what type of future they really have)
It doesn’t matter how good an OS it is – QNX and BeOS for example were/are great operating systems, but a dearth of quality applications kept them from being practical for daily use by most people.
Simply having applications is not enough either – they have to be of equal or better quality to those found on other platforms… It is here that *nix, so far as ‘desktop’ goes, falls flat on it’s face. The GIMP is a tinkertoy, Blender is no 3ds Max (though by extension 3ds max is no Blender), the word processors and their kine kern text like a sweetly retarded crack addict making it useless for people who actually WORK with text (un less yo u enj oy the he ada che of read ing tex t li ke thi s)– thanks to freetype putting ‘true to print’ ahead of ‘usability’. (Here’s a tip, if three occurances of the same word do not render identical, you’re probably doing it wrong AND it’s probably not that true to print!) – the media players are a disjointed inconsistant mess (though the same thing could be said about WMP7/newer – Let’s change the UI on EVERY release).
The only area we see competitive software is in the browser arena… Which stands to reason given that *nix’s strongest and best written software has NOTHING to do with the Desktop and everything to do with serving content.
That truly is *nix weakness – the majority of desktop applications have barely (and in many cases have not) caught up to Windows 3.1 in functionality. A lot of this is just the volume of time developers have to spend making software – and that *nix developers frown on tools that let one concentrate on features instead of development. We all badmouth visual basic programmers, yet they outnumber C programmers 100 to 1. *nix development environments are like a trip in the wayback machine to 1980, while the windows world has ‘moved on’ past that nonsense.
We make fun of him for it, but Steve Ballmer hit it right on the head with “Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers” – and normal people do not have the time to sit down and learn the inner workings of the kernel, multiple toolkits that may or may not work across distros, the *nix command line, how to make a ‘make’ file, library headers, and a bunch of other esoteric nonsense JUST to churn out a quick in-house crapplet that takes five minutes to slap together in VB or VC#.
You can see that ‘problem’ in the responses on various linux forums every time someone asks about a visual style tool for *nix – and how successful previous attempts to bring that type of RAD (Kylix anyone) to the *nix world has been.
… and if the tools to develop an application lag, so do the applications developed in it.
Edited 2008-05-20 17:35 UTC
I take it you don’t know Gambas or MonoDevelop which indeed supports Visual Basic .Net development “natively” for Linux/Mono, as well as C#, Java, Boo and Nemerle, as easy as under Windows?
Sorry, but i don’t think that theory adds up.
http://gambasdoc.org/help/install/debian?show
…and that right there is enough for the average VB user to tell you to go **** yourself… an even bigger laugh is:
http://www.mono-project.com/InstallerInstructions
Which gets props for having a self contained installer – assuming you can get it to even start and not drive you into the ninth ring of dependancy hell. (which their own “If it doesn’t work” text is a sure indicator of)
They exist, but much like other ‘visual environments’ like Lazarus, Stetic (on which the form designer in Monodevelop is based) assuming Joe user could even get them installed (of which I doubt) they are buggy, unstable and end up with a sharp learning curve (in the name of simplicity?) due to a lack of documentation, active forums or even active developers… and even getting the programs written in them installed on another machine is a nightmare from hell, even WHEN they include the ability to target specific distributions (which Monodevelop does at least TRY to include)
They are quite typical of *nix ‘clones’ of mainstream applications where they have the APPEARANCE of being identical, but people who know the original end up with that same level of dissapointment one would get if you took what you thought was “Crusade in Europe” off a bookshelf only to discover the dust jacket had been swapped with a Harry Potter novel.
The heart of these shortcomings though has nothing to do with Linux, but to do with the elitism of the majority of *nix developers who will laugh you out of the room if you ask a question about QT or GTK as it regards to anything other than GCC… You’ll get a handful of what the ‘community’ calls fringe whackos who might know a bit about doing so from Python – but for the most part using anything other than C/C++ automatically demotes you to second class citizenship.
Edited 2008-05-21 02:20 UTC
Debian isn’t used by people who feel uncomfortable on the console. Those people use Ubuntu and installing both gambas and MonoDevelop are a matter of one doubleclick in synaptic. I do expect everyone who can write an program that is more complex than “hello world” to be able to make an doubleclick.
Ironically it seems you have picked up on Microsoft’s greatest failure as some sort of failure of F/OSS. Why do you think Ballmer was screaming Developers? Why did he throw a chair across the room? What was he so upset about?
That Microsoft too was forgetting the lesson that the past two decades have taught them – and put them where they are today.