My opinion is that nowadays Linux *is* easier to install, handles basic hardware better and provides a much more stable and secure desktop for “normal” work.

I believe that average windows users will feel pretty confortable using a linux desktop *if* their mind is set to “try something that may be better in some ways”. Not the people that say: “I’m used to windows and windows’ apps and I see no reason to change, not even to something possibly better” (I’ve heard this about OS X too).

Who of the so-called “technologically impaired” installs windows on their own pc? Most of them don’t. Others (geeks?) do it for them. It is a complex, frustrating and time consuming process… Any recent linux distro installs quickly within few (informative) configuration screens, without consecutive reboots and plays nice with other installed OSs.

For its price, what kind of software package does windows make available for users after installation? Think DVDs, PDFs, *Office, Ogg, Archive management (zip, rar, tgz), Messaging, Email, Imaging… Yes, it means hundreds of added MB of commercial software with huge licensing costs (or shamelessly pirated) or hundreds of MB of open source alternatives… My point here is simple: Value for money.

I have to admit that gaming support is really really bad. Who’s to blame? Many. Who is loosing because of it?

I am a Linux user for almost 9 years and I use a Linux desktop exclusively for about 5.
Windows users around me aren’t changing to Linux because of the following main reasons:
1. lazyness
2. lack of interest and/or desire to improve efficiency
3. shameless piracy

At the end of the day, Operating Systems are just sandboxes for applications. Applications are what allow us to improve our efficiency at whatever tasks that computers do better. If different platforms provide similar (or the same) applications for our work or personal tasks, switching between them becomes painless. Why this struggle and why is everyone addicted to Microsoft products and we’re all discussing how hard is it to switch to Linux? Piracy, Microsoft’s market domination and further locking techniques, which may well become the route of their eventual demise.

Cheers everyone!

I have to disagree with this. As a relatively new Linux user I have found that by using SimplyMEPIS 6.5 I don’t need the console. I occasionally use it for experimentation, but it is not needed to have a good running secure machine that is free and comes with almost, if not all, the software you’ll need.

Indeed I gave our local school principal an Edubuntu CD over a year ago, with a little initial guidance he has now installed it onto nearly all of his computers including his laptop, he adds accounts, sets up email etc. I told him how he can set up an Edubuntu terminal server, and then holding his hand while he pressed enter at the install screen questions, he has done it all himself, he’s unplugged the thin clients hard drives and is amazed at how quite the room now is. A year ago faced with a bill of $1800 to upgrade his library software he found Koha, payed someone $300 to install it, done. He says that soon he’ll convert the last few computers. Children pick it up with ease, and they can install it at home for free. I do like it.

Givas Said:

Lots and lots of demands… Since you’ve hurt my personal feelings (a little bit, I admit) here’s my take:

Linux *is* very complex under the hood and nobody is really trying to simplify things (esp. for us geeks).

I think I am a geek myself and I like challenges. Are you sure simplicity and geekness are not mutually exclusive?

Why should I care about /etc/* ?
…
But when it comes to solving stupid problems in configuration files

Yeah, I can almost feel your pain - that’s when too much power (i.e. configurability) becomes obstacle.

or spending all day long on configuring an application to make it easy to use because the developer thought that he should show the world how much he knows, then I’d rather delete Linux from my computer and only use Windows.

Easy now. You’d only delete one particular Linux distribution and there are so many of them! Then again, there are only a handful of Windows distributions (or rather, versions or releases) in which all things seem to be taken care of. Mind you, if something goes really wrong with Windows registry, I for one, cannot repair that. On the other hand, I was always able to fix my Linux installs. Luck? Knowledge? Both?

What really drives me crazy is when GPL zealots tell me that my life is better if I don’t use proprietary codecs/software, so nearly all distros come without them.

Yeah, that’s silly to some extent. But in my opinion the ultimate goal (open and free codecs, drivers and other software) is fair and noble. I hope you’d agree if there were such things already, you won’t have problems with them at all. All would just work and you wouldn’t even have noticed.

Well, then just *play* with Linux yourself

I would rather call that working towards improving the current situation.

and I’ll stay on Windows where everything actually works for most people (except for those 2% who have problems because of crappy hardware).

This is very opportunistic and I can sense *lots* of impatience. “You silly Linux! Do what I say, and do it now! Or go to h*ll!”. Know what? Check back with Linux in five years, you would not recognize it.

Do we really need all the complexity under the hood? Why do we need /etc/fstab if all that could be automated? Why do we need an overly complicated folder structure?

I think you haven’t seen the Gobo Linux then.

Why can’t you just make things simple where the complexity doesn’t help anyone? Sometimes I have the impression that the Linux community is trying to give geeks a lot to explore, at the expense of unnecessary complexity.

It’s called standards compliance. Linux systems are (mostly) compatible with POSIX standard and/or UNIX specifics. Hint: you might not know the importance of this fact.

Get rid of that! Give power-users tools to do complex and uncommon tasks (command-line) and give us a very simple (just-works, almost no configuration) GUI that makes the easy tasks really easy. Even at the system level, the computer should be *easy* for power-users to learn and understand.

Sound like you know *exactly* what the best Linux system should look like. GNU General Public Licence gives you the best opportunity of your life: a power to create *your own* Linux distribution. Do it and earn lots of money! I’m serious - you can start with Linux From Scratch, for example.

Give us common, unified standards and rules for everything: One single configuration file format! A clear and simple folder structure! Automate system stuff like FS mounting at the kernel or API level if power-users don’t *really* need to deal with that.

Reality check: it ain’t gonna happen soon. Linux is only a kernel (obviously) and the rest is comprised of GNU project tools and lots of programs and projects scattered all over Internet. Distributions just tie those building blocks togehter. The Grand Unification will not happen soon, because nobody has control of *all* the open-source projects out there. In fact, everyone can start a new project any time he wants. And nobody has the power to tell everyone how their config files should look like. This is so very Darwinian, so get over it.

*If* you want an open-source operating system that comes from one place as a well-integrated whole entity, give a shot to a one of the BSD family distributions. It’s open, most programs you likely use should be ported and Berkeley university has a tight control of their *BSD offerings. Interested?

Under the hood, Linux is still no desktop OS. You just slapped a GUI on top of it, but left the server underneath, with scripts that run ifconfig for setting up networking, and so on. Stop building a middle layer between the end-user and the programmer. Rather, provide a component system that allows for easily building customizations in your favorite programming language, so beginners and advanced users can manipulate program behavior without making configuration files so ridiculously complex that even an computer expert new to Linux can’t handle them!

Again, right now you ask *thousands* of programmers all over the world to modify their mostly working programs to follow your only-briefly-described functionality. Do you realize how much effort would that take? And for what? I estimate that lots of people are already comfortable with the current status quo. That said, some unification in system configuration areas wouldn’t hurt.

Look, if you haven’t figured out that yet yourself. Free and open-source software community works because of constructive criticism. If one finds a flaw, one should offer ideas, solutions and preferably patches to existing source code. Linux is a moving target, it constantly evolves. You either like it or not. Just making lots of complaints and demands will not buy you new friends from the community (rather the opposite, or the label of “Troll”). Remember, you got your Linux for free, right? And then you expect it to fulfill exactly all your specific needs?

How about getting to the right people with regard to bugs or problems with their programs? How about issuing a bug report or feature request in Bugzilla? How about creating a translation for some package? How about writing a small patch so the program would do what you wanted, and other people could benefit from that as well? Have you done that, huh? I did that **ALL**. And I am simply amazed by the positive responses I always got in return.

And remeber, Linux is Not Windows. It’s not better or worse, it’s just different.

Give experts what they really need. Stop making nerds with too much spare time happy. Make the system easy to use at all levels. Maybe then you’ll actually become successful.

Or maybe you should finally *buy* SLED, Linspire or Mandriva - lots of things are already done there, have nice configurations GUIs and work out of the box.

Here’s an example of what happens when you put a kid in front of Linux. In this case, it’s Kubuntu Dapper Drake (I like the long-term support releases). One of my fifth-graders wanted to try out my laptop, since “it looks cool.” I told her sure, give it a shot. First question she asked was, “where’s Internet Explorer?” I pointed her to the Firefox icon, and off she went. She took to it like a baby duck to water. She had no trouble finding OpenOffice.org, either, though she did ask me about the “funny names” of Writer, Calc, Impress, and Base. Understandable, since she’d only used MS Office before that and is accustomed to the names of those programs. But she had no trouble using OO.o Writer the same way that she uses MS Word in class.

She then asked me, “is this Vista?” I surpressed a horse laugh and told her no, this is Linux. Now she wants to try it at home, so I gave her a Kubuntu Live CD, with specific instructions to talk to her parents before she does anything. You cannot imagine how it made me feel to watch her little 11-year-old eyes light up like that.

We are doing a disservice to our children by force-feeding Microsoft on them. And the IT folks in schools should pull their heads out and remember that our core mission is educating kids, not necessarily MCSE job protection. Linux is just fundamentally a better platform to use technology to educate kids. Many of my teacher colleagues would do well to open their minds, too.

Really?
Dude, she must be some royal screwup.

When my dad switched, he went from Office 2003 to OpenOffice with no problems. He used Thuderbird and Firefox before so that stayed the same. He still uses VLC.
I had to show him a new software to listen to mp3 and to burn cd’s. And voila, painless switch. This is were you turn it off, this is where your files are and this is the software to view a dvd.

Voila.
No virus programs, firewalls, adware sweeps.
Nothing.

He know where to save his files and doesnt erase things by mistake.
He never did more than what he wanted to learn and enjoys surfing the web, listening to online news, IMing his friends in europe and so on.

My mom just got a new laptop and never touched a computer so we went straight to Linux. Most of her favorite apps are on Gmail (calendar, spreadsheet, docs, pictures) and no problem.

I’ve done the same thing with my older family members (cousins, aunts, uncles, etc) over the last 6-12months and my troubleshooting time has been DRASTICALLY cut back.
If youre the familys’ ‘computer guy’, you know its hard to say no but it was getting so ridiculous that I told them: if you want free tech support, its my way.

And it wasnt hard, I gave everyone a dozen or so Live CD’s with different Gnome, KDE, X versions and told them to check them out. The ones who were still running Win2000 on their old P3-800 had a slightly less glitzy selection but were stunned at how much faster their new OS was.
Power users who liked to fiddle in the settings were the ones who had more trouble because they were used to doing things a certain way. 3 family members who had Mac experience at work were among the easiest converts.
It seemed that older people who had very little computer knowledge were the easiest to bring over to Gnu/Linux

With the amount of time I have saved with their computer troubles, I would have PAID for Linux distros.

That;s the great thing about Gnu/Linux, some people like me think that it is a time saver and some will use and would rather overpay for crappy and buggy software.

Go figure.

Rob