Using Linux
16th September, 2006I started college about a week back and I’ve made quite a few new friends there. When greeted with the fact that I used Linux, they nearly keeled over. I was hence named a genius and they were completely and totally amazed. To be greeted with that astounding response made me think what kind of an image the Linux community is projecting. Of course there is elitism in every community which doesn’t help at all, but there is this image of Linux being only accessible to computer geeks and geniuses. Is it necessarily true? Some would say no, but you could argue that yes it is. I had to spend literally hours at the command line when I first used Linux with a cable dangling out my window to connect to the router, just so I could get ndiswrapper to work with my wireless drivers. 3d support with my ATI card took another 3 or 4 hours to set up.
There are people who use Linux who advocate to non users the benefits of Linux, but I am reluctant to recommend it to most people for fear of its sheer complexity to set up. I use it because I was forced to when my Windows broke. Through that I got used to it and I began to understand how to do certain things. Had Windows not broken, I would never have attempted to work it. Windows is far too easy to set up, as it sees nearly every device you put in it.
People say Linux is ready for the mainstream. I don’t think so. I still think it needs a few more years.
The installation issues you mention are in no way limited to Linux, when I purchased my previous laptop, which died not long ago, it came with Win98SE preinstalled, this was in 2004. There was no way I was going to leave 98 on there due to security concerns. The laptop had a sticker on it saying it was “Designed for” 98SE and 2000, I was already dual booting linux on my desktop and I had a legit copy of 2000 lying around so I decided to install 2000 and dual boot with Mepis (hadn’t heard of Ubuntu at the time) upon installing 2000 it informed my that 13 drivers were missing including the ethernet adapter and the modem, to make matters worse the wireless card I had purchased to use with had a driver that came on a floppy and the laptop had no floppy drive. After 2 frustrating days trying to find the necessary drivers and get Win2k working I gave up and stuck in a Mepis LiveCD just to see what would happen, everything ‘just worked’, including the wireless card. I guess my point is that sometimes the genius of Linux is not that you have to be a genius to use it but in how simple it is to use. Of course with the wrong hardware any system can have you tearing your hair out.
Tim
In my experience, things tend to be the other way around. To give a recent example, I bought a laptop from tesco last week. It (obviously) cam with windows installed, and I booted into that first to make sure everything worked. I had to mess around trying to find the wireless drivers, set up all the graphics drivers manually. After finding everything working, I installed Ubuntu. Everything apart from the sound worked straight out the box (including the wireless). The sound took a quick google to find what i needed, and about 2 minutes to do. in a total of 2 hours, I had formatted, installed the OS, configured it to how I like it, and installed Xgl. Much less hassle than I’ve ever had with a windows setup, hence why I try to convinve as many people as possible to switch
I think the problem is that Linux _is_ ready for mainstream, but the majority of hardware vendors aren’t ready for Linux.