I want to rant a bit about the reasons why I think Linux is not ready for the Desktop. There are many reasons important to me which I will outline in this article. Anyway I use a Mac because, to quote the advertising, ‘it just works’. I don’t have hack my system using a Terminal to get things working. I am afraid to say that after years and years of hearing Linux fanboys say “Linux is ready for the desktop” and me wanting to whole heartedly agree, I am here to tell you boys and girls that no it isn’t ready. Really. Linux isn’t really for anyone’s god damn desktop.

So let me firstly tell you about my experience with Linux. About four years ago I switched from Windows to Linux. The initial experience was nice. Moving from monthly reinstalls of Windows over to the Linux was a breath of fresh air for me. Well at least until I wanted to do anything. It was an experience which lasted a good three or four solid months and was completely void of Windows. I had many problems but I did give Linux a chance. Actually I gave it four chances, those being: Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware and Suse. In the end I did go back to Windows because although it was buggy and crashed a lot and got viruses… at least I could install an application without using a monolithic package manager and I could get a broadband connection up and running every time. With Linux, it was a very very different story.

The reason I am just so jaded with Linux is because it’s crap. Linux is crap second rate software that may or may not improve in the years to come. It’s buggy, has none of the polish that is absolutely critical to a desktop operating system and has been playing a never ending game of catch up that I don’t see it winning anytime soon.
And my opinion: Spotlight > Beagle, InstallShield > Synaptic/APT/RPM.

Many of the features that Linux touted such as stability and speed are no longer selling points for me and I don’t see why I should use it for anything other than a file server on an old PC in the corner of the room.

Recently I installed Fedora Core 6 on a friend’s laptop. After installing it I got Flash, Win32 Codecs, Audio, Real Player, Windows Media Video, VLC, and that was a major major pain to get all those working. It took me a whole day and I feel really bad for my friend because he would have a solid system if it weren’t for a few details. I asked him how he liked Fedora and he said, “Linux really drives me crazy man”. Are you listening Linux developers? Listen up because he is right:

• Wireless networking is not supported
• Microphone recording jack doesn’t work
• Automatic discovery of DNS settings doesn’t work (why?)
• Installing applications sucks
• Some menus are still confusing
• Big lag between starting an application and having it actually open

Those are the problems we had with his laptop it is completely unacceptable for a modern OS and rather disappointing.
Fedora is not completely bad though. His Fedora Core system looks nice and so far is my favourite of all the distros I have tried. Compared to the eyeball burning shit brown theme of Ubuntu, I have to say that the Fedora team have done a great job with their default theme. The menus are nice and I really like the DNA wallpaper. However, eye candy does not offset the problems with usability. If you plug in an ethernet cable connected to an ADSL router, you would expect to have internet right away with a computer right? Not with Linux. Every time I start up Fedora I have to manually open my router’s admin page in Firefox and get my ISP’s DNS server IP and copy and paste it into the network settings before it will let me browse the web. And it never remembers these settings. I have no idea why but it frustrates me to no end. I was on a forum looking for answers and someone said this:

“the gui doesn’t really work properly, you have to use the Terminal to configure that because the gui overwrites the .conf file on boot”

This is the spit and polish that you expect from an operating system and if Linux wants to fight with itself about whether the command line or GUI rule the system’s configuration settings, let me know when someone wins. I am tired of trying Linux distributions and my DNS problem seems to be a recurring issue. It has happened on every distro I have tried. I’ve read about other people having the same problem and all they seem to get is a useless response from some ‘elitist’ Linux user who usually points them to a “How To” page which looks like it was designed with frontpage sometime in the early 80s. Needless to say pointing someone to a mountain of difficult to read how to pages does not solve Linux’s shortcomings. I want to say to people, “Dude! No it’s not you, I have the same problem too!” but normally I’m too frustrated with whatever problem I might be having at the time to bother leaving a comment.

If you have gotten this far through my rant then thanks for reading my article. Feel free to leave your thoughts on this.

When Linux community all pull together and stop winging over petty licensing issues and they finally manage to get the Linux desktop finished, let me know.