Linux -- Not quite ready for the desktop

For better or for worse, I ditched Windows XP this week. I've got an old (single core) 2.4g Dell with 2g of ram and two 500g hard drives and a nice Nvidia card under the hood. Despite the upgrades, the system is starting to show signs of age. While it's got more than enough power for my day to day tasks, it's just one notch too low to play Oblivion.

With everyone starting to migrate to Windows Vista, I decided that to truly capture the Windows Vista experience I'd probably need to buy a new computer with an extra core to take the sting off Vista's increased resource demands, extra memory to offset it's memory requirements and a state of the art graphics card to handle the new desktop.

Or I could install Linux and see how that went.

Obviously I chose Linux.

I chose Ubuntu as my distribution since it's supposedly the most user-friendly of all the installs. I don't need a lot of power, just a good office suite (I'd been using Open Office on windows so no problem there), good Internet tools (Firefox and Thunderbird), a good media player, and text editor (yes, I use glorified text editors to maintain my entire site). Ubuntu had, or could run, all of the necessary tools.

The initial install went very smoothly. I gave it an entire hard drive to format and claim as its own. No dual-booting for me, I'm going cold-turkey on the Windows. The post-install however illustrated the problems Linux still has in its quest to become the world's desktop.

Warning: Very Graphic Problems!

Although I have one of the world's most popular graphics cards (Nvidia), the drivers were not included and my resolution was capped at 1024x768, something my LCD monitor would not tolerate (throwing warning after warning that it was not operating efficiently because the resolution was not 1280x1024). After scanning Ubuntu's Starter Guide I followed the instructions and installed the Nvidia driver.

The problem was not solved however. Although the monitor I use is a NEC, one of the biggest names in computer monitors, Linux had not managed to identify it. I only discovered this after I searched Google and it found an obscure forum post where someone had a similar problem. The solution was to edit one of X11's configuration files and manually add in the supported resolutions.

I consider myself a fairly tech savvy user. Getting Linux to properly support my video card and monitor took a fair degree of effort and experience. You can be pretty much assured that the average person who trundled down to Best-Buy to pick up their copy of Vista would be ill-equipped to duplicate my success.

A hard problem!

An unexpected problem was that Ubuntu refused to recognize the second hard drive which I'd left as an NTFS drive with around 200 gigs of media and other personal data on it. For this I used Ubuntu's documentation which asked me to go to System->Administration-Disks, only to discover that there was no Disks program in the menu tree – anywhere.

The starter guide had me drop to the shell and issue a bunch of commands, and then apt-get install ntfs-3g, which then told me that it couldn't be found.

So now I was stuck with all my data on a drive I couldn't read.

I actually lucked out because programming.reddit.com had a news item on a stable NTFS driver release that day so I was directed to ntfs-3g where after a few shell commands I had my driver installed and drive working.

Again, I have absolutely no illusions that an average, casual person could duplicate my success.

Ubuntu killed the radio star

Once my video and hard drive problems were overcome, I faced the problem that none of my video files would play, even my mp3 files wouldn't play! The starter guide was of no use and it took quite a bit of Googling to find Easy Ubuntu, which promised to solve all my problems in one download. Not only would I get the codecs to play my media files but I'd get hardware acceleration drivers and all my favorite windows fonts!

Unfortunately the nvidia legacy driver screwed up my hard-won successes installing the Nvidia driver and monitor resolutions so I spent the next half hour undoing Easy Ubuntu's graphics installations. When I was done, however, I was able to watch my DVD's, play my MP3s, and all of my video files from avi to wvm. I do have my doubts as to the legality of the software I installed, but I'll worry about that after I finish watching Serenity.

Again I have no doubts or illusions that an average person who isn't a professional or enthusiast could duplicate this success.

A working System

After a good eight hours, I had a system that was basically equivalent to my Windows desktop in functionality. Since I had installed Beryl I even had some of the visual functionality of Windows Vista. The good news is that once Linux is installed and configured it is a perfectly adequate desktop. In some areas it is even a cool, and superior desktop to Windows. The problem is that getting to that state is beyond the abilities of most people.

Although I'm able to do all the tasks I was able to do under Windows, the overall user experience is degraded. The biggest problem are the Fonts. This is probably related to the fact that I use a flat-screen LCD monitor so special consideration needs to be made to make the fonts look nice. On Windows LCD users have to go through the step of configuring ClearType, I was unable to find any similar technology for Linux.

I read an article once about Steve Job's life-experience contributing to Apple. In his younger days he took a college class just for the fun of it, that class was calligraphy and he learned how to use, and understand the importance of beautiful fonts. That experience was incorporated into the Mac computers and Microsoft duplicated that in Windows. Linux has fonts but it has none of the technology that Mac and Windows use to smooth them out* and the fonts that are used in applications are often over-sized and downright ugly. (*)Remember my overall experience with Ubuntu is “out of the box”, linux may have font-smoothing technologies that I haven't discovered yet. If it does, it's a crime it isn't installed by default.

Over-sized in Linux is a common problem. Screen real-estate is a precious and valuable commodity, but in any given application almost a quarter of the screen is taken up by the bottom toolbar, the top toolbar, the window title bar, the menu bar, and then assorted application toolbars. The result is that, despite having MULTIPLE desktops, Ubuntu feels more cramped and confining than a well configured windows desktop. Even when the system toolbars are configured to autohide, the over-sized fonts and spacing in the application just take up too much space.

The crack in Beryl's emerald

Beryl makes Ubuntu unbelievably fun. Windows peel and shake and the cube to switch desktops is just amazingly awesome. Linux partisans point to Beryl as proof of Linux's obvious supremacy in the Universe and they would almost be right. What they won't tell you is that it's not installed by default because it will drag most applications down to crawl. Scrolling a page in Firefox is a smooth, effortless operation in the default graphics shell, in Beryl it's a painful stop-motion process.

Like Vista, if you want the full sparkly effects Beryl offers you'll probably need a multi-core processor and even then I'm not terribly sure that would solve the performance problem. I got the impression that the problem wasn't necessarily my hardware but that Beryl was fighting the application for the mouse context (That is the system was hanging trying to decide if I was dragging something in the application or dragging to start some nifty Beryl eye-candy).

Aside from performance, Beryl's biggest problem is that it's documentation consists pretty much of its configuration console. Good luck trying to figure out how to get that fancy cube without going through the hundreds of configuration settings until you find the option to change the key-binding (which will, fortunately, show you what the CURRENT keybind is).

I'm not holding this against Linux however, the software IS in beta and even Vista requires beefy hardware to activate glass. However Beryl IS used to advertise Linux by its partisans so it's only right it should be marked as a bit of bait and switch. Your legacy 1g Celeron is not going to be able to provide you this experience.

Gnome, the dumbed down interface for power users

There's been a bit of a scuffle in the Gnome camp with the assertion by Mr. Torvalds that Gnome was too dumbed down. In my opinion he's right. Windows is a dumbed down interface but if you poke around enough you eventually get to the more advanced options that let you tweak and customize your system. In a corporate environment virtually every single aspect of Windows can be tweaked and configured and deployed on a corporate-wide basis.

During the install, I had installed Ktorrent as one of my applications, when I started a torrent file in Firefox it asked me where to find this application. That would have been a simple and trivial task in windows, just right click on the application and check the properties to find the path and file name. In Gnome this information was kept hidden from me. It took five times longer to get the application working simply because the interface was so dumbed down I couldn't right click on a menu item and get its properties.

I find it very ironic that an operating system that takes virtually a degree in Computer Science to install and configure properly uses a graphics shell that has been designed for children. On the other hand, once the OS has been installed, Gnome really IS a great desktop for children (and receptionists), there's very little damage they can do.

So I hate it, right?

As a matter of fact, I'm sticking with Ubuntu. It's different than Windows, it's not as polished, and it's got way more bugs and problems than Windows, but it is the road less traveled. I get the feeling I can make a difference here. That if I don't like something I can pull out one of the many, many development packages and roll my own. There's an attraction to that.

But Linux, or at least Ubuntu isn't ready for the desktop and their aversion to including binary drivers automatically, and inability to nail the installation process (an unaddressed problem in Linux for well longer than a decade now) will probably keep it that way for the next few years at the very least. There are just too many speedbumps on the road to getting a working desktop in Linux.

A few weeks ago there was a post by a fellow who's father had asked him to install Vista. Instead the guy installed Linux and his father never knew anything and loved the new Operating System. That worked because the father never had to go through the install and configuration steps. If something happened to his son and he needed to re-install his OS, it would be beyond his abilities in all likelihood.

So the moral of the story is, if you have a smart kid who can get your desktop up and working, Linux might be for you. If you have to do it yourself, unless you're a professional or a serious enthusiast Linux just isn't anywhere near ready for you.

The flip-side, and the upside is that Linux IS ready for the business desktop. The more your employees use Inter and Intra net applications the more attractive Linux becomes. While I'm not keen on the polish of Linux apps, I found no major differences between using the Internet on Windows and using the same applications in Linux. Firefox allowed me to go everywhere I could go in Windows and see the same things. For most office documentation management Open Office is a perfectly acceptable alternative to Microsoft Office and interoperates reasonably well.

So basically, the only barrier to entry is the installation process and if the IT department is setting up those desktops then Linux becomes a very attractive and cost-saving alternative to both Microsoft and Apple.