Linux blog online

After reading the “Windows Is Free” article earlier, I felt compelled to write my own blog entry. I do agree with the analysis to a point, but there is a major point where I differ. The “Just Work” factor. Now I know, I know, the newer versions of Ubuntu and OpenSuSe and Mandriva do work with most hardware. But most, isn’t enough.
Case #1. A few years ago I tried to install Red Hat 4 onto my box computer. Right off the bat, my wireless connection did not work. My video card had no 3d support. My sound card did not work at all. I couldn’t access any of my MP3s or videos because there was no fat32 support short of a package download, which I couldn’t do because of the aforementioned wireless problem. That install lasted for 5 days while I toiled away trying to solve any of the numerous problems I was having.

Case #2. Around a year ago I tried to install Mandriva 2007. Now this was making progress. I had moved into a new house, and had my box right next to my cable router. So I have no idea whether or not the wireless support was at all improved from the previous distribution I had tried. However, I was able to get a reasonable display resolution (1280*1024). I was not however able to get my 3 year old Sound Blaster Audigy 2 to work. Not for two weeks. I tried and I tried. Why wasn’t my new operating system able to detect my old (by technology standards) sound card? I went for help in several different linux forums, but came up with squat. I also still had the problem of not being able to access my MP3 and Videos.
Case #3 Around three months ago. I tried to install Ubuntu onto my box computer. This time, I was able to have a decent resolution, and the audio worked. However, I had once again moved, and this time was on a wireless network. No amount of tinkering would get my wireless card to work. I tried for several days, and then once again gave up. This ties for the closest experience of “Just working”.
Case #4 around a month ago I tried to install Ubuntu onto my shiny new HP pavillion 9428NR. Complete bust. I couldn’t even boot into the install unless I went into safe graphics mode and specified what resolution I had. Once it installed, I could not boot into it at all. I looked around different forums, and tried some solutions. One (I can’t remember what the procedure was at this point) almost worked, only to completely freeze on the final line I had to type (Ironically, had I typed it right to begin with it would have worked, but I had to delete it the first time due to a caught typo). I have no idea whether or not it would have worked with my wireless card or not, because it wouldn’t even boot.
Case #5 about a week ago. I installed OpenSuse 10.2. The installer booted up. It recognized my graphics card. I was starting to think…”Well maybe I finally found a distribution for me”. Then I came back to reality. Once It booted, the wireless card did not work. It is a standard broadcom wireless 43xx wireless card. I tried something like 8 different methods (I think it was on www.linuxforums.org, but not sure) to get this thing to work: Ndiswrapper, extracting the firmware, so on and so forth (I can’t remember the other ways). I finally gave up when NDISwrapper would show that the drivers are loaded, but the GUI would say that it wasn’t (and the light indicating whether it is on or off showed off).
That has been my experience with linux over the past few years. I have tried 4 different distributions, on two different systems. Not once has everything worked properly from the get go. I understand that sometimes things require a bit of tweaking. Thats fine. But when tweaking doesn’t work and you have to be a genius, that is a problem. I am not most people in that regard. Most users, you know, average joe and jane, won’t even stand for having to tweak something to get it to work.
That is why Linux is failing to cash in on the fact that it is free. It really isn’t. Their is labor involved in getting it to work right. I am not talking about little labor like installing a virus scanner like average joe does in windows, and then remembering to run it every friday. I mean real labor. Going through the command prompt and changing things that one doesn’t even understand. Then compiling this and extracting that. Find someone you know who is a “just works” user and ask them if they know what it means to extract firmware from a driver. ask them if they would want to do that.
I am by no means a 00ber 1337 hax0r, but I do know how to fix and operate computers. When it takes more then a couple (say four) hours from start of installation to finish, it is beyond the complexity threshold that most users will tolerate. I am not saying that Linux hasn’t made huge gains in the past few years, but even with those gains, it is far from a mainstream friendly product.

Again, this is all personal experience.

My old Box:
P4 2.8GHZ
2GB ram
ATIX800XL
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
Hercules wireless card.
and before that
Linksys wireless card

My current laptop
AMDx264 at 2.2 GHZ
2GB ram
Geforce Go 6150
2GB ram
Broadcom wireless card