Not Ready For Primetime
While I’m having fun playing with Ubuntu it has become abundantly clear to me that it isn’t ready for prime time yet. It’s the most user friendly of all the Linux distros and there is a tremendous amount of awesome help available in the Ubuntu forums but you see that’s the very problem; anyone moving from Windows (or Mac users who never look behind the GUI), is going to need that help. Joe and Jane Average simply want it to work right “out of the box” and it doesn’t. In part it’s the old hardware compatibility problem, a lack of hardware drivers. There’s also the reality that you often have to drop into a command shell to get something done, and that right there is a non starter for the vast majority of potential users.
Case in point, I recently had a problem with my NVIDIA Geoforce 7300 video driver when my second screen stopped working. It took a lot of help from forum users to get it fixed simply because I was unaware of a command (gksu) I needed in order to be able to edit the NVIDIA config file while still in the user shell as the NVIDIA configuration utility would not over write the config files while running as user. How many people do you think are willing to do that? Not many I’d say.
For any Linux distro to make it to prime time these type of problems must be overcome and to do that software developers need to port their apps to Linux and hardware manufacturers need to provide drivers for their devices. Linux is simply going to have to get to the point where it just works, and works in a way that feels identical to the end user as their experiences with Windows or Mac did.
In the meantime, as I said, I’m having fun and learning a lot. Feeding my inner geek. I’ve switched to Ubuntu for everything except work and a few apps, like Quicken, that I need and aren’t available in Linux.
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