Miguel de Icaza On Usability and Openness

doperative points out comments from Miguel de Icaza on the struggle for usability in many software products: "De Icaza uses OpenSUSE as his main desktop (with the GNOME interface, of course), says he likes Linux better than Windows, and says the Linux kernel is also 'superior' to the MacOS kernel. 'Having the source code for the system is fabulous. Being able to extend the system is fabulous,' he says. But he notes that proprietary systems have advantages — such as video and audio systems that rarely break. 'I spent so many years battling with Linux and something new is broken every time,' he says. 'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'"

Windows is popular because it works.

[Gandalf_the_Beardy]

I use both Linux and Windows at home and the office. The reason is simple - for back end stuff where I need to write custom stuff, hack data about and get it to do stuff then Linux or occassionally *BSD is king. For front end usage where I want a clean slick and above all consistent interface I'll often use Windows. Partly because I need to interoperate with other people, but mainly because it offers a better and easier working environment. Linux on the desktop is good if you are doing teechnical stuff, like writing an encoding system for digital amateur radio (my current pet project). For using the computer more as a commodity tool for email/word processing/video watching etc Windows still is better presented and more importantly doesnt break grotesquely with every new update that appears like Ubuntu does (and yes I'm looking at 9.10) Until Linux, or more strictly I suppose GNOME/KDE etc get over this then I suspect that further adoption of linux on the desktop will stall.

Re:So is this the year?

[MightyMartian]

Maybe there will never be a year of the Linux Desktop... There'll just be the Year of the Linux Smartphone... The Linux Embedded Device... The Linux tablet...

Re:Hasn't used RealTek

[MightyMartian]

I had an el-cheapo HP notebook that had absolutely horrible video playback under Windows, just terrible. Put Ubuntu on it, and other than having to download the WiFi drivers (ethernet worked fine), it ran waaaay faster... Could watch DVDs, hidef, you name, but under Vista it was just a horrible dog.

Of course, being an el-cheapo HP notebook, it fried itself.

Re:Windows is popular because it works.

[robmv]

Windows alone does not works, a new laptop or desktop with Windows and every driver needed and applications installed just works. Do not compare a tested hardware and software configuration with using Linux in any crappy hardware you could have. I am a ThinkPad fan and even when I received my free upgrade to Windows 7 for my small Windows partition (Fedora is my distribution of choice) I needed to use for a clean install the extra DVD with the Lenovo Updater, to download a lot of drivers and applications to make Windows usable. that kind of support is possible, the real problem is that there aren't many Linux hardware sellers and they are very small

I think it's more likely...

[brennanw]

... that certain components (for example, audio) take a long time to figure out how to make work, and end users tend to get impatient about such things. That doesn't mean no progress is being made, or even that good progress isn't being made.

I've used Linux since about 2000-2001, and I'm not really an expert. From my perspective, Linux of today is leaps and bounds over what it was then in terms of user friendliness, configurability, etc. And in terms of multimedia, well... it's somewhat usable but not there yet. But it gets closer constantly. That doesn't mean it isn't frustrating, and I still cuss out pulseaudio (and eventually uninstall it) every time I try to get it to do things that seem intuitively obvious to me... but each time I've used it I notice improvements, and I'm pretty confident that one day it will just work... at which point there will be something ELSE that everyone complains about.

Because Linux developers don't have direct access to proprietary information, progress on proprietary-heavy aspects of an operating system (like audio, and video, etc.) is unfortunately slower than other areas. Nothing can get around that other than companies open sourcing their drivers and putting patents in the public domain (which is a longer way of saying "nothing can get around that.") But the progress is still both remarkable and laudable. Though I still reserve the right to cuss out the parts of Linux that don't work when I want them to. It's nothing personal, guys, it's just a pain in the ass.

Re:Is there ANY real news here?

[dkleinsc]

The basic thing I'm noticing is that for a guy who in his history of GNOME [ximian.com] describes himself as a "free software entusiast" [sic], he seems awfully disinterested in making Gnome better, or if the Gnome devs don't like his ideas forking off something of his own.

The other fascinating point I see in your second statement is that it's not the open source world's fault that the latest and greatest high-performance video and audio cards aren't supported as well as they are on Windows. Microsoft, Apple, etc have very little to do with that level of support - it's Intel, ATI, NVidia, etc that are doing the hard work to make their stuff work on Windows, and just don't care about the Linux market.

On the flip side, unless you're doing high performance gaming, you really don't need to care about having the latest and greatest hardware. And one thing Linux does very very well is support older hardware.