OK, I've been wanting to answer this question for ages, but there's just so
much to say. In the end, I've given up trying to say everything completely
cohesively, and I'm just going to allow myself to ramble and hope it helps
some. First, a little background. I have a pretty good computer background. I
wrote 6502, Z80, 8088, 68000 and other machine languages starting 25 years
ago. I was a programmer for 15 years, writing network protocol software before
the TCP stack was generally available, Unix device drivers, and a bunch of
distributed control systems. Eventually I moved to corporate teaching, which I
still do. I was using Linux to teach TCP and Unix system administration in
1994, and other than Linux, I'm mostly a Solaris body. I have 3 Linux systems
at home, two of which dual-boot with windows so I can run Photoshop in a color
managed environment. I use VMWare for some other windows stuff that's less
crucial to me. I also have a dual processor
SPARC/Solaris 10 system. I loath and detest bill gates and everything he
stands for. I regularly point out to my students that his company is a
marketing company (very effective one, sadly) not a technology company. I
believe they've never invented anything good, and have damaged many, if not
most, of the ideas they've "appropriated". Until about 6 months ago, I was on a
one man crusade to try to get my friends all using Linux. Around about then
(after one success,yay! :) I finally gave up :( I can't begin to tell you the
heartache, sadness, and sense of failure I felt when I reached that decision.
Anway, what follows are some of the key/memorable personal experiences that
wore me down and made me give up. Please remember that I love Linux, I love the
people who put their effort into creating and maintaining it, and I think it
has improved tremendously in recent years. I blame nobody for the "weaknesses"
outlined below, other than what I see as bill
gates' unreasonable and amoral (but sadly, probably entirely legal) practices.
1) Hardware issues.
If you just walk into a store and ask for a machine that will be good to go
with Linux, they'll look at you blankly. It's a major effort to check the
details yourself. Most off the shelf machines don't tell you exactly what cards
they contain, and then it's often hard to find the devices in the HCLs.
New hardware--inevitably--is most likely to be unsupported or buggy.
Finding the HCLs used to be hard. I just checked, and this seems to have been
fixed (thanks someone! :)
HCL is online, and I don't usually have access to the internet when I'm in a
store browsing!
Whichever way you slice it, having to care about the exact hardware is a
pain. I don't see any way (other than having the leverage of micky$loth) to get
round this, and I certainly laud the efforts that have been made to improve life
2) Photography related. I use Windows to run Photoshop CS2 in a color managed
workflow. In this, Linux doesn't cut it for two reasons:
Color management. I tried to work out how to do the LCMS stuff, and a bunch
of related color management options I though I was looking at, and just gave
up, too much like hard work. Also, I seem to have the wrong colorimeter
hardware already and am not willing to pay all over again for something else.
GIMP is only 8 bit. That's fire in theory, but when you mess with stuff much,
you quickly run into posterization (I see this even in some professional's work
and while those in question don't seem to care, I personally hate it).
3) Irritations with web plugins. Idiots out there keep writing stuff that's
windows only, and there always seems to be trouble trying to get the latest
Flash player. When it's available, it's tricky to install.
4) Palm pilot-:
Several versions of palm device just don't sync, needless to say, this
includes some that matter to me.
I don't know how to sync my palm and evolution-etc. with web calendars like
google or yahoo. That's important to me. I gave up using my palm pilot because
of this. Consequently, I'm appallingly badly organized and regularly double
book myself and miss meetings.
5) Video; I have failed repeatedly to build a system that plays all reasonable
kinds of video. Mostly this seems to be a deliberate policy on bill gates' part
(and the lawyers and the evil patent system, of course). I've reached the point
where I can do most file types with the exception of AVI with the type 9 codec.
6) Strange inconsistencies ("That can't happen"):
These are really hard, time-consuming, and often fruitless to debug. My
laptop (dual core 64bit Intel) won't shut down without crashing the kernel. It
will hibernate, and the file system journaling means that I've been able to
kill it when I have to shut it down completely, but it's still irritating, and
I long-ago gave up trying to fix it.
Updates that break things, the various methods that I've found my systems
using to auto-patch seem prone to failure. Usually complaining about something
incompatible. I have one machine (admittedly running 9.3) which has been trying
to upgrade Mozilla for the last two years. I can't seem to stop it trying, the
warning blob thingy always says updates are ready. I don't really care, but
it's not reassuring.
Biggest pain for me is that it seems like every time I decide I want to
use/install/build a new piece of software, I have trouble with dependencies. I
fetch a package, but then it won't install because something is missing, or the
wrong version. I try to find the required stuff, but that won't install because
something else is missing, or it's incompatible with something I already have.
It might well be that I'm doing it all wrong, but I only have so much time to
give to this stuff. Mostly I want a machine to just work. Usually, I give up
and accept that I'm going to live without whatever new function it was that
seemed exciting.
All of which sounds like I'm really unimpressed with Linux. That's not the
case. I know what work goes into this stuff, and I use it as much as possible
anyway (the only things I do with Windows are run Photoshop, for the reasons
given, and one check-writing program that I run under VMWare, because I always
did, and GNUCash was too complicated to bother finding out about, and too much
like hard work to migrate to). My problem, which is a huge personal
disappointment, is that I realized about 6 months ago that I can't ask my
friends to move to Linux. They just don't have what it takes still to cope. Me,
sure, I can muddle through, but then again, I don't like to make this effort
and I tend to accept restricted functionality as the price I pay to take my
moral high ground and reject gates as much as possible. I also prefer the
relative security that I get from avoiding "the Internet's petri dish"
Generally, I would prefer to see less effort on "improvement" and more on
stabilization. Pin down the compatibility issues (remember the Unix wars?--I
do.) between versions of libblahdyblah or whatever, so I can just fetch a
package and use it. Meanwhile, Linux seems to me to be a good choice for
companies where one install effort can be rolled out to hundreds of users, but
less viable for intermediate home users who want to do interesting and
different things, but aren't able to help themselves. The really basic users,
who browse, send email, write the odd document, and look at jpeg images from
their cameras have no problem. I have one such friend that is completely
computer illiterate and quite happy using OpenSUSE 10.1 with ICE window manager
(old, weak hardware, couldn't run Gnome or KDE adequately). All other attempts
to migrate my friends were met with legitimate objections that I couldn't
counter.
With thanks to all who've made this what it is, and with continuing faith that
one day it'll be what it deserves to be, and have the acceptance and mainstream
support it deserves. Hope this ramble helps,
$0.02
Simon
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