However, for the everyday user, whom use computers for email, internet, and word processing this could be accomplished on linux or many other OS.
Long post…go fetch a coffee now before starting to read!
[Rant]
I’d put that a slightly different way. For an everyday user who has been on Jupiter for the last 20 years and has never used a Windows PC then the learning curve of using Linux is starting to approach that of Windows.
However, the average non-techie person who has struggled part way up the learning curve of Windows is likely to find Linux a bit of a culture shock with a long re-learning curve. This will put many people off.
One of the biggest battles I have at work is walking the fine line between providing the super-geeks with the bleeding edge technology that they want when we’ve got many thousands of users who are struggling to use their PC for simple tasks despite the slow rate of change we try to adopt. Many of us in this forum could make the jump to Linux without too much difficulty, but there are millions of Windows users who would find it frustratingly difficult.
One of the big problems I see with Linux, from an end user perspective, is the fragmentation of the distros. RPMs are great in RedHat…if you can work out where to find the matching set you need to install the latest security patches and don’t end up having to type in 3 mile long command lines to recompile Apache from scratch! If you look at Fedora you’ll find YUM waiting in the wings to make life easier. If you look at SUSE you’ll find APT-GET sitting in the same spot. All three systems work differently. As a techie I could probably make all three work the same way, or install YUM or APT-GET on any of the distros. The average user doesn’t want that kind of choice though…they just want to be able to turn on the PC, create a letter, print it out…and when they get stuck be able to speak to someone who knows their system environment well enough to know how to fix their problem. The different tools available on each distro make the Linux support person’s job much more difficult than for a Windows support person.
I believe that this fragmentation is mainly brought on by the Open Source culture. Source code is available, so anyone can download it and fix their own problems or develop new functionality that they need. Hmmm…how sensible is this? Most code is fairly inpenetrable unless you’re the author and I wouldn’t like to have to try to understand the millions of lines of code that make up a Linux distro! I’m a coder (although not that much lately), and I’d find it difficult. The average user wouldn’t stand a chance.
Open Source brings a bigger problem though…forking (and I’m not swearing!). For example, Team ‘A’ write Hokey-Cokey and it’s a pretty good product. Unfortunately some of Team ‘A’ start to lose interest in adding new code and flatly refuse to add code to allow it to integrate with a new printer that a lot of people are starting to use. Part of Team ‘A’ (lets call them Team ‘B’) take the existing code (which is allowed under GPL/Open Source) and fork it, i.e. modify it creating SonOfHokey-Cokey. They add new functionality and it slowly drifts away from the original package functionality. However, now Team ‘B’ refuse to add bits of code that Team ‘A’ are adding to Hokey-Cokey. The poor end user is stuck trying to weigh up which of the diverging packages suits them best. Worse still the split of Team A/B has diluted the coding effort of the overall project which then slows down both projects and you end up waiting for years for updates to either package.
If you want a good example of this, just look at PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, Xaraya, Envolution, and the myriad of other Nuke related CMS/portal packages! PHP-Nuke forked to make PostNuke. Postnuke then had a bust up and forked into Xaraya and Envolution. There are now four different incompatible packages under development all trying to address a similar need.
Whilst this kind of activity persists it will be difficult for the typical user to find a package which will be supported into the future by a reliable group. Of course at this point the Linux evangelists will say ‘develop your own package or provide your own support’. Yeah…right…Joe Public is going to spend decades learning to code and then writing their own package?
[/Rant]