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Desktop Linux needs salesmen

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8 pointserlik15 comments

Usability isn't "tweaks", its the product. I gave up on Linux when it didn't have a "Have Disk" button for my new video card driver - no, it was not amusing for me to rebuild my Linux kernel, I had an actual job to do which was unrelated to hacking. And Windows does have a "Have Disk" button.

Desktop Linux needs people focused on making things work. For the typical case, it does just work, now, but almost everyone is atypical in some way. For example, I want to be able to play WoW without rebooting, and while if I had a different video card that would apparently be fairly easy, I gave up on it after three days and three attempts (wine, cedega, crossover). The average WoW-player probably wouldn't have got that far.

What Linux on the desktop really needs is a reference platform. If people could be sure that the hardware they were buying (or had) would work at least as well as Windows, it would help.

Not that I would mind, but why does everyone need to use GNU/Linux? The only practical benefit would be better support for things like gaming. It seems much more important to increase mindshare for open standards and free software. GNU/Linux is perfectly viable as it is.

Sort of.

But what it also needs, to really move into the desktop realm proper, is a more cohesive community. More effort spent on the mundane stuff like usability tweaks, interfaces and better package work.

Hmm. We have people devoting their efforts coding, doing QA, triaging bugs, and probably even some people who are not technically inclined, but follow the philosophy and contribute art. Mabye sales people could be recruited that agree with the philosophy to donate their efforts in the same way.

I think a lot of people are missing the future. Most people aren't going to have what we think of as a computer today. They will use their phone or some form of consumer electronic device that has a browser and an app store.

Linux needs to get a foothold in this market in an open way.

I like your thinking. And there's nothing stopping you from delivering on that idea (because it's open!)

I'm getting a beagleboard with a touchscreen for xmas and I plan to start hacking away :)

Firefox got it's big push when the geeks forced it on their friends and family. Linux is probably nearing that point.

It's probably acceptable for the ordinary punter already, but whichever family member does their tech-support is probably happier in Windows or Mac OS X.

From the data-is-not-the-plural-of-anecdote department:

My sister co-founded and works full time at a small non-profit retail business with an extremely limited budget. Faced with a slowly-dying ancient Win98 laptop as her only computer and doing all the business's finances on paper, a few months ago I donated a slightly less ancient Dell laptop and a second-hand desktop box, after installing Ubuntu on both (the desktop also included a minimalist PoS system that I wrote over a few weekends, plus stuff like GNUCash already installed).

Talking to her since then, both machines seem to be giving her far fewer headaches than the Windows 98 box did, and despite me fishing for any complaints she seems perfectly happy with Ubuntu. For context, her level of technical sophistication is around the level of "knows the difference between hard drives and RAM, and writes HTML by hand (using table layouts)", so better than the average guy off the street but nowhere near stereotypical bearded Linux users (such as, um, myself).

So, what makes Linux work for her? 1) Support from a family member, though apparently so far everything just works 2) No requirements to use Windows-only software or unusual hardware 3) Extremely limited financial resources, combined with not using the typical means that reduce Windows' TCO to match Linux (bulk/academic discounts, hiding the cost in the price of new hardware, getting pirated copies, etc.).

These three factors are certainly not unique, but the combination is somewhat unusual, and I doubt any amount of aggressive word-of-mouth marketing from Linux geeks is going to get people using it without those factors.

Is it really fair to compare the amount of headaches that an OS that came out in the middle of 1998 (and isn't even supported by the vendor anymore) gives with the amount that an OS that was just released this past year would give?

No, of course it's an unfair comparison. But back in '98 people were using that OS, including a lot of not particularly "technical" folks. The point is that Linux today is substantially better than "good enough for regular people to use".

In other words, the issue is not why someone can't use Linux, but what they would gain by using Linux--such as the factors I outlined for my sister's situation.

Mozilla was a product people had already used for years without realizing it (Netscape), so when they were faced with the reality of using it, none of their expectations were disappointed, but there were useful new features (tabs, popup block, etc.).

That's not really true. The overlap between Firefox users and Netscape users is minuscule due to the massive growth in web usage (and the fact that netscape pretty much died before Fireox took off).

There's a nice graph that shows this (and the fact that IE usage has always been growing, though it has now slowed to a standstill) here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/asadotzler/3421742213/sizes/o/

Correction: GNU/Linux distributions that are aimed at desktop users need salespeople.

I would look towards Haiku OS as the future for Free Software desktop users. It's more integrated and much nicer to deal with.

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