Linux Desktop?
Joho points to and analyzes an
Amy Whol article about linux for the desktop. As Joho says,
Usability? Hah! If you want to see the barrier to desktop Linux's acceptance, watch over my shoulder one day as I try to use KDE or Gnome to do ordinary tasks such as keeping my MP3 player running if any other sound is emitted (oh yeah, guessing which processes are audio ones so that I can then manually Kill them hoping that I got the right one is reaaaal user friendly) or downloading and installing a new application. Fabulous end user experiences.
Lord love Linux and godspeed to it, but desktop Linux is so Windows 3.0.
Linux folk still don't seem to get it: although everyone claims they want the ability to "hack around" in their desktop systems, their perceived needs are about as genuine as people in Manhattan driving Hummers: They don't need that much power, and they're probably endangering themselves and others by demanding it.
Customization and open systems are great, but what most desktop users really need is relatively simplicity and, above all, consistency. When most users talk about customizing their OS, they're talking about being able to add a new icon to their taskbar, or change their wallpaper, or changing which application opens a specific filetype. They're not talking about configuring their own kernel or even writing cron scripts. And while those affordances aren't all that linux offers, the linux field seems to spend the majority of time developing elegant hacks to obscure problems rather than making the desktop and productivity applications more consistent, stable, and usable.
Of course, that doesn't mean linux's hype won't propel it to some measure of acceptance: look at how far Windows was able to get with the hype about Windows 3.0 versus Mac.
(Note: I'm not writing this from the sidelines. I spent most of last year with Linux as my primary OS for writing, web development, email, scheduling, and presentation, among other things. Although there were things that I really liked about the OS, I eventually moved over to a PowerBook running OS X, which gave me most of those features coupled with a usable interface.)
Posted by johndan at November 22, 2003 11:34 AM
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