What killed the Linux desktop

Linux is too hard to configure; if the distro gets it right out of the box it's fine, but not otherwise. I started with Windows 3.1 in 1995, mostly used Slackware, and some Windows 95, from 1996 to 2000. Slackware and Windows 98 from 2000 to 2004. But from the time I got on the Internet in 2004 to the present I have mostly used Windows (98, XP, and Vista) because I have not managed to get any version of Linux that I have tried to connect through a dial-up modem. I have to admit I have only tried sporadically, since Windows just works, and my efforts to get some Linux distro to work have been so frustrating. (Note that though a frequent user, I am not a programmer or professional sys-admin.)

ADDED: jrockaway's comment, added while I was writing this, hits it just right: "I think the issue is that getting everything working requires a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole." Which is what makes it so frustrating, even to very intelligent people who have other interests than computers in and of themselves.

It sounds like you're agreeing with the article - things work on Linux when you have a deep understanding of them. While it's good to encourage a deep understanding, the group of people using any given OS will always follow a curve of some sort. There will always be beginners; there will always be people who know just enough to be dangerous; there will always be experts.

Requiring everyone to be an expert will prevent Linux from being a dominant OS, because most people do not care enough to gain a deep understanding of any OS, so they'll pick one that's easier to learn the easy bits.

I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point.

Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it.

Before I go on, let me say that Design is NOT "making it look pretty". In fact, thinking that this is what design is, is what leads many linux advocates to reject the needs of design.

Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.

Design is about usability and understanding the user and making an interface for the user that works well according to the users understanding, perspective and needs.

Design is an engineering discipline.

Seriously.

The Linux community hasn't had that, and I've seen many of them reject it. In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example. You see it all the time in lots of contexts. Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows.

Literal copying is about as far from design as you can get.

Sure, over the years, designers have taken cracks at bringing design to linux, including the work of Ubuntu, but it is rejected by the community.

Rejection of design is a cultural trait of the linux community. They reject it as a discipline, doesn't even see that it exists. (broadly speaking, of course.)

But as users, they have been influenced by it and many of them have switched to OS X because it is the best designed operating system.

And then they write long blog posts about how its wrong that OS X does things a certain way ... based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way.

Its ironic.

But its fine- if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design, more power to you. Won't ever fault someone for making that decision. We should all use the systems that we prefer.

But the culture that doesn't value design, and can't even see it as an engineering discipline, is going to have a great deal of trouble making something usable by the mainstream.

I think the article does a great job of explaining the problem, but doesn't explore the ramifications far enough.

Let me give an example: a few months ago, a new version of Skype was announced for Linux. I was excited, since I used Skype 2 for Linux but then it stopped working for me and I couldn't be bothered to fix it. But if you go to the Skype for Linux download page, you will find a few downloads for specific distros, then some tar files which are, statistically speaking, guaranteed not to work.

Long story short(er), I still don't have Skype working on my desktop, because my distro isn't in the list, I can't get one of the other distro packages to work on my system, and of course none of the statically-linked binaries work.

(I could almost certainly get it to work if I was willing to install 32-bit binary support. But it's 2012. If your app requires me to install 32-bit binary support, I don't need your app that badly.)

Steam for Linux, recently announced by Valve, will run into the same problem. I suspect it will actually be Steam for Ubuntu and Debian, possibly with a version for Fedora, assuming you have the proper libraries installed and are using the right sound daemon and graphical environment.

But if big-name software comes out for Linux, hopefully distros will get in line. Do you want to be that distro which can't run Steam? Doesn't really matter if you think that OSSv4 is superior to ALSA and PulseAudio...if Steam requires the latter, you will toe the freaking line, or disappear into obsolescence.

So... one of his key problems is that when (not if) things break, you need to learn more than you ever wanted to know about the low-level internals of an OS to fix it. And you say you've never had that had that problem; you should have a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole in order to be able to use Linux.

But that's exactly one of the major problems he's complaining about!