Walt Mossberg is a very well respected technology journalist for the Wall Street Journal, and he was recently known for being the one to head up the Steve Jobs & Bill Gates interview. His articles typically revolve around either Windows or Macs, but his readers had been asking him to jump into the Linux side of things.
Mossberg was able to get his hands on a Dell 1420N laptop preloaded with Ubuntu. Right there you know he should have a great out-of-box experience since there shouldn’t be any hardware complications (such as getting the wireless card to work). That was partly true, and here’s a quick overview I put together of the good and bad things he discovered while using Ubuntu:
The Good:
- It’s free and open source
- Looks a lot like Windows or Mac OS X so it is easy to get used to
- Runs on the least-expensive popular hardware configurations
- Essentially free of viruses and spyware
- Built and constantly improved by a world-wide network of developers
The Bad:
- No control panel for adjusting the way the touch pad works
- Every time the computer awoke from sleep, the volume control software crashed and had to be reloaded
- Codecs had to be downloaded to play audio and video files, and the user is warned that some of the codecs might be "bad" or "ugly"
- Several computer reboots were needed to recognize a Kodak camera and Apple iPod, and the iPod had problems synchronizing
- No built-in software for playing DVD’s
- Nobody is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product, and open-source developers often have an imperfect feel for how average people use software
Are all of these things the fault of Ubuntu? Not at all. In fact many of the problems could be reconciled if the hardware developers would create proper drivers for the Linux operating system. Instead Linux distributions are often left on their own to make sure the different hardware configurations are supported.
Mossberg isn’t saying that all of these things are show stoppers, instead he’s just trying to get the point across that Linux isn’t quite ready for the mass market. He even quoted Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, as saying "it would be reasonable to say that this is not ready for the mass market."
Here’s a 5-minute video that Mossberg put together to explain the details:
This is perhaps the correct assessment. But i think things are going to change quickly.Ubuntu is taking rapid strides and will overcome these problems eventually.
WTF…..
* No control panel for adjusting the way the touch pad works
Did your hardware guy take care of making his wares linux compatible??
* Every time the computer awoke from sleep, the volume control software crashed and had to be reloaded
See first
* Codecs had to be downloaded to play audio and video files, and the user is warned that some of the codecs might be “bad” or “ugly”
Did this guy ever hear of VLC or Mplayer
* Several computer reboots were needed to recognize a Kodak camera and Apple iPod, and the iPod had problems synchronizing
Hmmm….iPod…..want the same when it was not there for Windows
* No built-in software for playing DVD’s
VLC player
* Nobody is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product, and open-source developers often have an imperfect feel for how average people use software
Did he ever use firefox
I dont know how much he got from MS for this kind of commenting. Guys I do not trust WSJ anymore eversince they came up with a story that I did comment on in my blog
* No control panel for adjusting the way the touch pad works
(On my laptop it works fine. If he wants he can download gsynaptics and that will let him control his touch pad.)
* Every time the computer awoke from sleep, the volume control software crashed and had to be reloaded
(Never really used sleep so i can’t say)
* Codecs had to be downloaded to play audio and video files, and the user is warned that some of the codecs might be “bad” or “ugly”
(Windows Needs you to download the codecs as well)
* Several computer reboots were needed to recognize a Kodak camera and Apple iPod, and the iPod had problems synchronizing
(Never had a problem with USB sticks etc…)
* No built-in software for playing DVD’s
(Windows have nothing like that in Windows XP)
* Nobody is ultimately responsible for the quality of the product, and open-source developers often have an imperfect feel for how average people use software
(I would say that’s a good thing in a way)
You’re definitely right, and hopefully as the big KDE and GNOME releases make their way out we see some big usability improvements.
@100rabh & Richard – Many of the points you made are valid, but he was looking at it from an average consumers perspective. He didn’t want to go hunt down VLC just to play a media or adjust the mouse sensitivity. And as far as the codecs goes Windows Media Player 11 comes with almost all the codecs you need (including DVD playback) and that’s available through Windows Update. So it’s safe to say that most users would be able to playback almost all media without needing hard-to-find applications. I think that is the point he was trying to make.
The problem is, as I had stated before, most of these features that are missing, help.ubuntu.com]'>audio codecs and built in DVD player can’t be included in the package for legal reasons. help.ubuntu.com]'>User have to go out and find these things. Windows and Mac let you watch a DVD without and additional fuss. The same is true about playing an MP3 files.
Until Linux can included these basic and expected features out-of-the-box, it will continue to be a geek only product.
As for the hardware issues, Walt Mossberg was right on the money. Because hardware manufactures don’t provide native Linux support the OS is not ready for the masses.
From help.ubuntu.com]' rel="nofollow">Ubuntu’s “DVD Playback”
” 1. Install the libdvdread3 package (see Chapter 3, Adding, Removing and Updating Applications).
[Note]
You will need to use Synaptic Package Manager to install this package
2. To activate DVD decryption, type the following line into a terminal prompt:
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh
3.To play DVDs with Totem, you will need to install some extra codecs (see the section called “Multimedia Codecs”).
4. However, the Gstreamer framework (used by Totem) does not support menus or subtitles for DVD playback. For this reason, you can install a separate DVD player, Xine, which supports these. To install Xine, install the gxine package from the “Universe” repository (see Chapter 3, Adding, Removing and Updating Applications).
5. You can then open gxine from the Sound & Video menu.”
Doesn’t sound main-stream to me.
I agree with Walt. I consider myself a far-above-average Windows user but have been frustrated the several times that I’ve taken a stab at Ubuntu. The greatest hurdles for me were wireless card not working and incorrect screen resolution on my laptop. These were likely hardware issues but they were issues none-the-less. Then there were the dozens of low hurdles that required me to spend hours searching the less-than-helpful forums for solutions.
Linux is going to take a while to be ready for the mass market, if ever at all. I don’t think developers want to mass-market it.
Well that may be so but i was basing my view on Windows XP SP2b OEM and that includes only Windows Media Player 9 and no codecs. Realistically average user would find windows hard if it was not pre-configured when bought from the Store
I don’t think they do either. Doing so would create more widespread complaints on issues they may not be ready to tackle yet. It will eventually get there, but if the userbase remains low they can focus on all the high-priority issues first before diving into the smaller issues.