All of us, apart from a few misguided individuals, know that Linux is horribly inadequate for the average computer desktop. (Litmus test: can your granny use it? Answer: no). Now, I’m not some big Windows advocate – guess what operating system this web site was developed on? – but the fact is that an operating system that can be used comfortably by ‘developer’ types is far, far removed from an operating system that’s suitable for public consumption. Anyone who claims that Linux is “ready for the desktop” just means that they can use it – but as they generally turn out to be experienced computer users with slight masochistic tendencies, that’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.
What’s brought this mini-article on, anyway? Two things: first, the BBC’s Click Online programme has been showing off the power of the supposedly newbie-friendly Linux distribution, Mandrake, over the past few weeks. Their hardened technology journalists have been unable to get it working. “Incompetent fools!”, you might scoff, but the point is that these people are just the kind of incompetent fools who use computers, day in, day out. They want it to work, and work straight away, not after they’ve spent hours recompiling their kernel until they find a setting that works, or editing XFree86Config because their mouse wheel actually causes the pointer to skitter across the screen like a frightened bee.
Secondly, I’ve just had to edit php.ini to turn the security hole disguised as a feature, register_globals, off. That wouldn’t normally be worth shouting about – I’m not the most competent administrator in the world, so overlooking that for over a year wouldn’t be a big thing – but the thing is, it was definitely off before. Yet when I upgraded my PHP installation, using the handy Debian package manager, it decided to overwrite my old configuration with this new one. Not the most intuitive of things to happen, but this illustrates one of the major problems with Linux today. Either you do everything by hand (something your average granny isn’t going to be too happy about), or you abdicate some of the responsibility to the package managers, which manage to be inconsistent, over-reaching and often impenetrable, all at the same time. With a thousand and one different versions of various applications, all dependent on a billion other libraries, which are of course, in turn, dependent on other things too, you can’t blame the package managers for sometimes throwing their hands up in the air and overwriting half your stuff just to make things sane again.
Linux is a programmers’ and a developers’ operating system. With all its many and varied distributions, braches and versions of the core applications, no computer novice can keep up. Linux zealots are wont to call these people “idiots”, but the truth is that they’re normal people going about their lives, unwilling to spend hours learning the intricacies of their operating system just so they can get on with some Web surfing, email or whatever. They use Windows because it works for them – they don’t have to recompile their kernel or upgrade bintools every few months – but the Linux programmers, writing the operating system for themselves, fail to see that not everyone is like them. That’s no problem – it’s the evangelising “Linux is for everyone, honest” people that annoy me. Linux is not for everyone. Fact!
N.B. OK, I wrote this a months or two ago while I was preparing the site on a Linux system – nothing compelled me to post it now other than laziness. Anyway, it’s just as relevant as when I originally wrote it for testing purposes. :-*
