| Linux not ready for prime time on the Desktop |
A guest column by Dennis G. Allard (Updated Dec. 12, 2001) . . .
Foreword: Last summer, Dennis G. Allard decided to install Linux-based desktop computer systems for three of his friends: a newbie; a priest; and his brother. In this guest column, Allard describes some of the many challenges he faced and frustrations he (and his friends) experienced, and offers some suggestions of things that need to be done to make Linux more suitable for use as a desktop computing environment for 'ordinary' users.
Note: Following an extensive series of talkbacks in the Desktop Linux forum in response to this article, Mr. Allard has posted a lengthy followup in that discussion thread. (Allard's new comment is also available here.)
Linux not ready for prime time on the Desktop
by Dennis G. Allard
Linux is in NO WAY ready to compete with Windows on the Desktop.
I spent nearly two full weeks this summer helping three friends try to use Linux (Red Hat 7.1). It was a disaster for two of them, one a total newbie who wanted to mostly download music, another a priest who needs his computer as a vital work tool, the third my brother who uses PCs to play Yahoo Bridge, write, and do email.
Let me summarize my overall experience very tersely: Linux is *not* ready for prime time on the Desktop!
Why?
The Newbie
The total newbie found the Mozilla web browser and mail client to be slow and confusing and I don't blame him. Also, he basically just wanted to download and listen to MP3 music. Turns out that Red Hat 7.1 workstation, out of the box, understands MP3 as long as you have a .mp3 file to click on (and because he had me, who knows that to configure sound you still need to use the sndconfig command). But he wanted to do what he sees all his music-listening friends who have Windows do . . . Namely, use Gnutella or some other music service to browse and listen to music, to turn the puppy of a machine into a radio, the promise of the Internet revolution. I'm not an Internet audio junky, at least not yet. But I tried to help him. I knew of Gnutella and after a bit of Google-based Web searching, downloaded a Gnutella client (don't have the exact name of the client with me -- will look it up later). Well, it was just a broken piece of software. It would come up with a kind of OK-looking User Interface (but not as nice as a Windows widget would appear). And it would get tantalizingly close to actually working. It would locate Gnutella servers, it would start to do downloads. Then, shortly thereafter, . . . Poof! Gone. It just broke, dumped core, and we were stuck.
I still use Netscape even on Linux, and his experience does not make me want to switch to Mozilla just yet. To be fair, I like what I'm seeing in Mozilla -- true WYSIWYG non-HTML email composer so that I can actually *tell* what my email text will look like after line wrapping occurs. I have wondered for years (Millenia in 'Netscape time') why the undergraduate Computer Science exercise of wrapping text has failed to make its appearance in any of today's email composers and, for that matter, in normal HTML composition windows such as the one I am typing into at this very moment.
Another problem, not the Newbie's fault, was the inability to open up Word DOC attachments. To defeat the Borg, we are going to have to assimilate it lest it assimilate us. I.e., if AbiWord understands Word 97 documents, ALL Linux distros should be preinstalled to open up Word DOC files from browser attachments. N'est-ce pas?
The newbie ended up giving up. I think partly because he found out how complicated *any* computer is to use and not because he thinks he wants to go with Windows.
The Priest
The mere fact the it took me over a day to get his LaserJet 6L to print and then it stopped working reliably, whereas when we converted him back to Windows it took about twenty seconds (literally) to configure the printer and it's been working since, is almost enough to say 'case closed'.
But there were so many more loose ends and just plain bad UI design issues (in AbiWord; in Netscape, especially in reading attachments) compared to his Windows experience, that Linux reminded me of where Windows was a long time ago.
For example, after I helped him set things up so that Netscape would understand how to open a Word DOC attachment (that he gets dozens of each day -- so WHY oh WHY doesn't the Linux community figure out that understanding a .DOC attachment should be BUILT-IN to the default setup?????), then AbiWord would not pop up correctly.
When he needed to SAVE an attachment, what an ordeal! He would have to manually tell AbiWord to save as RTF (it does not know how to save as .DOC). To do THAT, he would have to select the RTF file type AND manually enter '.RTF' into the filename field. If he changed directories, AbiWord would immediately forget the filename and file type and he would have to again manually reenter the name and type (and rechoose the file type for the export pulldown).
Unbelievably bad UI design! I mean, if something that elementary is THAT poorly designed, well, we have a problem here. Finally, when he did click on an attachment, AbiWord would start but not pop up to be visible -- he would have to know to click on the AbiWord icon (unfortunately there were several of those since each document resulted in a new instance of AbiWord showing up as an icon).
Then there was the printer. I simply could not get his Laserjet 6L to work reliably. I called Red Hat Tech support and they were of no help. I scrounged the Web. It started to work, for a while. Then I'd get a phone call that the printer was not working or spitting out gibberish.
I'd say I spent about 8 hours hassling that printer setup. Once we converted him back to Windows, the printer setup took about 20 seconds and it has worked flawlessly since.
Oh, BTW, Red Hat (both KDE and GNOME) doesn't consider a printer to be a 'peripheral'. (If you don't believe me, check out the Settings|Peripherals menu).
Mozilla bites. It is slow as hell, absurdly complicated, and crashed consistently on my other friend's machine. I tried to get the priest to use it at first but it was so bad we put him back to Netscape.
Pathetically, the above points are just a subset of the hassles I had to confront.
My brother
This should have been the easiest situation. It was, as far as the install went. We just upgraded from Red Hat 7.0 to Red Hat 7.1. Our hope was that AbiWord would download and run without complaining about the need for gal.blah.blah.so like the last time we tried.
And, indeed, AbiWord was up with due dispatch. It did at one point crash and leave a file that it could no longer open containing my brothers poem or whatever -- his only copy. He had to have me hack the file with Emacs and, in my opinion miraculously, fix it by removing a spell check XML construct. A newbie would not have been able to do THAT.
One disappointment in my brother's case was getting PPP to work (he is using a dial-up connection). Why, oh why, does Red Hat ship with two different ways to set up PPP? And why is the setup so complicated? Anyway, we got it working, although it asks for root password every time he dials. How inconvenient.
The 'control panel' in Red Hat 7.1 does not have the same kind of Display settings as does the Control Panel in Windows, where you have very ample control over your display settings. Similar remarks apply to the network settings.
I like UNIX and its command line settings, but non-techies need the Control Panel approach. The goal for Linux should be: provide a control panel and a clear mapping of GUI settings to the files affected by those GUI settings.
The main disappointment was that after a year of very reliable Yahoo Bridge Java applet use by my brother in Red Hat 6.2, the Red Hat 7.1 system is now quirky in one way -- one of the Yahoo Bridge applet windows does not pop up like it used to. In fact, I think in Netscape it just didn't work anymore, so at the moment my brother is using Mozilla for web browsing (to play Yahoo Bridge) and Netscape for email (because, for some reason, the Mozilla people made the .mozilla file hierarchy too complicated to hack files on, while trying to append old mail from one's old IMAP directory into one's new Mozilla POP directory).
Other remarks
Linux needs a widget layer much like Windows has Active X controls for things such as the File Lookup Dialog. And, when Linux *does* offer a File Dialog widget, such as in AbiWord, please, if I do SaveAs and it brings up the Dialog with a default directory showing the filenames available, then, please, three things - Make the directory I last selected become the default, the next time I bring up the SaveAs or FileOpen dialog
- If I adjust the directory to, say, the parent directory, DON'T erase the SaveAs file name, forcing me to retype it.
- Make the widget work across *all* applications.
*Little* things like the above permeate the Linux Desktop UI. Things like that are WAY more important to get right than the background, or whether the Enlightenment UI is preferable to KDE. I DON'T CARE about such tripe. What I need, is good solid UI design -- the kind I offer my clients and CAN offer my client on Windows platforms.
Conclusion
It is easy to forget how horrible one's experiences with Windows in the past have been.
Yet it appears that Linux, as a Desktop, is threatening to repeat the Windows trajectory of semi-stability leading to, hopefully, stability.
The best, at the moment, one can say for Linux as a Desktop is that it's tantalizingly close. But its weaknesses are noticeable.
I *do* plan to try using it myself in coming months. In fact, I installed Red Hat 7.2 on my Sony Vaio laptop, which is now mostly a Gnu Chess and Maelstrom (Asteroids) game machine. It installed without a hitch, the S-Bus mouse works (use mouseconfig command to make that happen), and hibernation mode works.
Note from author: I have used UNIX for 25 years and have championed and written about Linux for several years, including in Linux Today. Also, I live in Linux -- I work on several machines daily, displaying emacs to my Windows X-Win32 X server for my work using Apache and Oracle.
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