Why Linux Can’t “Sell” on the Desktop
lockergnome.com
lockergnome.com
Coming to Linux as an XP-era Wingeek was momentarily pretty terrifying, I suppose. I would agree that it's not for everybody -- especially as a KDE user, it will sometimes be the case that some of KDE's components just stall, and I don't know why or even how to describe the problem so as to fix it. There's a lot of "rough around the edges." Thankfully there's not as much config as before, but some things are still horrifying. (I will give you one example: I have very interesting ChatRoulette sessions because Fujitsu decided it was a Good Idea to put the webcam in upside down, and then to tell Windows to flip the image right side up in software. After some configurations that I barely remember, 64-bit code flips the webcam too -- but 32-bit code like Skype needs to be executed with a special command to do this. I never figured out how to get Firefox to launch flash with this special command, so that flash would also rotate its webcam input.
Honestly, the touch experience is probably also a bit better on Windows. Linux only recently got kernels capable of multitouch and configuring KDE to "do the right thing" with multitouch is still a pain.
And yet, today, I couldn't imagine going back to Windows and all of the ____mgmt.msc things typed into the "Run" menu when you needed to get useful things done. I guess love is a verb, and a transformative thing at that, and while it's hard for me to tell people why they should be infatuated with Linux in the first place, at this point it's something of a natural fit for me.
The first thing to say is that, for my everyday usage, it's no worse. Firefox still works beautifully. For some aspects, it's absolutely beautiful: setting up my university WiFi on Windows required visiting a web page (with what internet?!) and diving through at least seven different menus to check or uncheck certain Advanced Options that had to be hidden from laypeople. In KDE's network manager that wasn't an issue, it was all on the screen which popped up immediately, "WPA2, TTLS, PAP, save my password, done." IRC, BitTorrent, web browsing are all the same on both, KPatience takes the role that random solitaire games did on Windows while waiting for a small script to run. One thing which binds me to KDE is that I like Kate more than I like other code editors.
Software management is a huge factor, I suppose. Security errors in Debian packages get reported at a rate of several per day or so, and get regularly fixed: and if updating all of my software isn't as simple clicking two dialogs and typing in my password, then I'm likely to put it off for several months and fall behind.
That and installation. I like that I can just tell my computer "install airotools-ng" and it says, "done! you can now see how easy it is to hack your home WiFi". The fact that I do a bunch of scripting is pretty pivotal to my current workflow: for example, I have a quick script which runs in the terminal in Kate to copy a LaTeX file I'm working on to a random filename in /tmp, and then open it up in KDE's PDF viewer. It's just called /usr/local/bin/preview, so that I can just write "preview writeup.tex" and get to see what these equations are while I'm writing them. For that matter, all sorts of command line stuff is groovy -- programming REPLs and DNS queries and random passphrase generators are pretty sweet, as is piping the output of an aptitude search through a grep, and day-to-day git and other such things.
With hope, the rough parts will even out as time goes on. Actually they're already pretty even, now that we don't need to go through the nightmare of configuring your wireless card. Meanwhile, I'm just in it for the feeling of unlimited options, that some effort now can make my life easier every day.