

Why Linux Can’t “Sell” on the Desktop - charssun
http://www.lockergnome.com/news/2012/03/20/why-linux-cant-sell-on-the-desktop/

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drostie
I migrated to Ubuntu around the time early folks were migrating to Vista, and
today I've moved to Kubuntu but have also experimented with FreeBSD.
Admittedly, I'm not on the desktop but on a convertible tablet laptop. If I
were on a desktop I might be more interested in gaming.

Coming to Linux as an XP-era Wingeek was momentarily pretty terrifying, I
suppose. I would agree that it's not for everybody -- especially as a KDE
user, it will sometimes be the case that some of KDE's components just stall,
and I don't know why or even how to describe the problem so as to fix it.
There's a lot of "rough around the edges." Thankfully there's not as much
config as before, but some things are still horrifying. (I will give you one
example: I have very interesting ChatRoulette sessions because Fujitsu decided
it was a Good Idea to put the webcam in upside down, and then to tell Windows
to flip the image right side up in software. After some configurations that I
barely remember, 64-bit code flips the webcam too -- but 32-bit code like
Skype needs to be executed with a special command to do this. I never figured
out how to get Firefox to launch flash with this special command, so that
flash would also rotate its webcam input.

Honestly, the touch experience is probably also a bit better on Windows. Linux
only recently got kernels capable of multitouch and configuring KDE to "do the
right thing" with multitouch is still a pain.

And yet, today, I couldn't imagine going back to Windows and all of the
____mgmt.msc things typed into the "Run" menu when you needed to get useful
things done. I guess love is a verb, and a transformative thing at that, and
while it's hard for me to tell people why they should be infatuated with Linux
in the first place, at this point it's something of a natural fit for me.

The first thing to say is that, for my everyday usage, it's no worse. Firefox
still works beautifully. For some aspects, it's absolutely beautiful: setting
up my university WiFi on Windows required visiting a web page (with what
internet?!) and diving through at least seven different menus to check or
uncheck certain Advanced Options that had to be hidden from laypeople. In
KDE's network manager that wasn't an issue, it was all on the screen which
popped up immediately, "WPA2, TTLS, PAP, save my password, done." IRC,
BitTorrent, web browsing are all the same on both, KPatience takes the role
that random solitaire games did on Windows while waiting for a small script to
run. One thing which binds me to KDE is that I like Kate more than I like
other code editors.

Software management is a huge factor, I suppose. Security errors in Debian
packages get reported at a rate of several per day or so, and get regularly
fixed: and if updating all of my software isn't as simple clicking two dialogs
and typing in my password, then I'm likely to put it off for several months
and fall behind.

That and installation. I like that I can just tell my computer "install
airotools-ng" and it says, "done! you can now see how easy it is to hack your
home WiFi". The fact that I do a bunch of scripting is pretty pivotal to my
current workflow: for example, I have a quick script which runs in the
terminal in Kate to copy a LaTeX file I'm working on to a random filename in
/tmp, and then open it up in KDE's PDF viewer. It's just called
/usr/local/bin/preview, so that I can just write "preview writeup.tex" and get
to see what these equations are while I'm writing them. For that matter, all
sorts of command line stuff is groovy -- programming REPLs and DNS queries and
random passphrase generators are pretty sweet, as is piping the output of an
aptitude search through a grep, and day-to-day git and other such things.

With hope, the rough parts will even out as time goes on. Actually they're
already pretty even, now that we don't need to go through the nightmare of
configuring your wireless card. Meanwhile, I'm just in it for the feeling of
unlimited options, that some effort now can make my life easier every day.

