Recently I decided to format my 2006 dell inspiron which, while never really any good to start with, was getting seriously bloated down with 3 years worth of sedimentary programs. As I got to looking for the dell windows xp cd, I found an ubuntu disk (8.04) and wondered if linux was yet a viable alternative.
Linux has never been too attractive to me. I'm a PC gamer at heart, and switching to linux on my main computer would most likely mean a halt to my favourite pasttime. But now that i'm sporting a monstrous desktop PC with windows, I thought it was a good time to lobotomize my old laptop and give Ubuntu a looking at in a real installation situation. I wasnt disappointed at first.
I've read over the while criticism over Canocial and Ubuntu not 'giving back' to the linux community. Some guy apparently went on a rage about how
Ubuntu had given next to nothing back to the linux kernel. What this guy is missing in his rage is how much they'd given back in other areas. They've taken what others have created and forged a more complete distribution; one which is almost to the point where everyday people can get a copy of ubuntu and run it as their everyday system without a massive learning curve or geek-code errors. Ubuntu has the potential of making linux usable. Within a few releases I could even see it becoming cool. Something that people will
want. And that is something the Linux community as a whole should be aiming towards.
This is probably the biggest problem in the Open Source community. There is much elitism. I know many a linux user who think they are 'cool' to be using it - because its hard, and so few people do. Linux is 'theirs' - and they dont want random everybodies intruding on their grounds. 'Especially the type of people who use windows'.
Of course i'm not saying that all members of the open source community are like this. On the contrary, I think this is a minority. They exist, however, along side the other elitists: the accidentals. The kind of contributor who doesnt mean to be elitist, but is anyway. Accomplished by not providing for a large enough sample of population when coding - and that is usually by accident. Not many coders have access to that sample to test with. They may think that x is sufficient for all users, but its really not.
Back to ubuntu for a moment. I was truly impressed with the system for a while. I could do pretty much everything I needed to from the beginning and came across few obstacles. Things just worked, and thats exactly how it needed to be for an average user. the apt-get system was brilliant when it worked - get what you need off the internet, when you need it, and install it straight ready to use.
Then I strayed off the track as I went to try and install some libraries I needed for some Ruby coding. My nightmare started here. Pages of incomprehensible (at first) errors with no clear resolution. It turns out after a long time googling I was missing a couple more libraries. This is the problem.
In the world of programming you surely cannot provide for every situation, but in the world of distribution I belive you have a duty to provide for nearly all. Missing libraries is a core problem that needs to be addressed, even if its just pointing to a list of other packages that the program depends on. Long lists of errors should not be the default, imo.
The second issue I had was with a computer behind a proxy. apt-get was useless here, and I was forced to download packages off the net (this time to set up an SVN server). I still have not resolved why it would not install (this time it was too basic - 'Cannot install (path)'). apt-get seems to be the lifeblood of the system which assumes that all computers have internet access at all times. This is inherently flawed. There should be more manageable methods to installing to an offline computer. For the common person, building for source is not often an alternative - unless you provide some sort of GUI for building from source.
Basically, until this sort of thing is resolved, Windows still has one up on you. I see great things for Ubuntu in the future, but less so for other linux distributions. Open Source has to step up its game if it wants to be more than a fringe community for geeks and cost cutting, security orientated organizations. Because until you do, that is all you will be.
