A reminder of Linux’s failure to launch
Last night I was reminded of why Linux’s failure to launch on the desktop will continue. It still does not survive the grandparent’s test.
In my case, my stepfather wished to view videos and flash on the web. That, of course, doesn’t come naturally with Kubuntu, unless you’re wanting to watch video on with a free/open-source codec that is used by about 0.000001% of the web. If you’d like to use Quicktime or WMV, that offers a bit of a challenge.
He called me up and said, “I researched this and read on the forums on how to do it… open up the terminal, make these directories, type this shit and all that shit, some apt-get somethingorother… and what does sudo mean?”
I offered to come over and help. Regardless, I know that automatix2 is the cheap way out of this situation and potentially borks up the system, but with the little time I had to play with, I didn’t have much choice.
Ultimately, the Linux community still just doesn’t get it. Let me reiterate this for you. Your product - the fruits of your labor or whatever you wish to call it - will not… repeat… NOT… EVER… SUCCEED on the desktop until you find a way to make this stuff easy and work out of the box. Period. Stop expecting that grandpa can open up a terminal session and whack his way through commands on the terminal. Give him an icon to click. Then… and only then… will you start to succeed.
Until that day, you will continue to fail in your quest for larger desktop share.
/me shrugs.
Hey, maybe you didn’t want a larger desktop share anyway. If that’s the case, that’s fine. Then you’re succeeding. We’ll just continue on fighting those zombie drones that pick up orders from IRC every day. Not a problem.
Bother.
Update: How ironic that this opinion article just showed up on my feed reader. I did not know there was a heated debate forming on this - but at least this issue is getting recognized by the concerned parties with a stake in the ground.
September 25th, 2007 at 2:24 am
Well, the fact that a lot of those codecs are decidedly non-free doesn’t help either. Distro’s can’t easily distribute them because that’s simply forbidden by the licenses.
On the other hand, Flash 9 is easily apt-gettable through Synaptic or whatever user-friendly program you want to use. As is gxine with its Firefox plugin, and Totem with its plugin [I don't know enough about KDE's tools]. Then the only job is to get the win32codecs pack and put them in the right dir [one big pile of them]. That’s easily scriptable, or can be done with a simple GUI program. Automatix used to be such a program, IIRC.
So, it’s not just the Linux community. I recently read that the Totem media player has support for automatically look for the right codec through the distribution’s package management system. I’d say that’s quite a step forward already [and a lot better than the useless never-finding-the-right-codec windows media player implementation].
September 25th, 2007 at 6:41 am
I actually used automatix2 to get my stepfather out of this situation. It worked beautifully, although I’m aware of the possible borkage that it can do to ubuntu.
As for licensing… part of the annoyance that is Linux is the whole licensing mess. I understand most of it is not the *fault* of Linux developers, but they should at least get some folks in line to work to solve the problem. All too often when a Linux distro or developer runs up against a licensing restriction of some kind, they simply throw the work away or work around it in an unacceptable fashion (in terms of usability). They need to step up and work with the licensing party and come to terms with it.
That’s probably what Novell had in mind when they first approached Microsoft and they were subsequently roasted for it. That kind of attitude will keep Linux on the down low.