So the other day I reached my personal nerd-vana and set up a dual boot on my laptop of Windows XP and Ubuntu. It's real nice now that everything works, but it really underscored why I don't think Linux distros will ever have much of an audience beyond techies and small businesses.
The install program for Ubuntu is really nice, you basically install it like a regular Windows app and it creates a partition on the drive to boot from. The tricky part (and this has happened on every Linux distro I've ever tried to install on a laptop) was that when it first boot into Ubuntu it didn't recognize my laptop's display screen. I had to poke my way through critical install screens with a display that looked like a TV on rabbit ears between channels. What's worse, is at the end it popped up a dialog box saying that the open source drivers for the display card in my laptop wouldn't work and I'd need to use the manufacturer's drivers. The way it was written would have easily led a less than technical user to infer this was a bad thing to do. The one thing I can say was always easy with Windows was the setup. in 15 years of installing Windows, the worst thing that ever happened when it didn't recognize my graphics card was that everything was in 640x480 resolution until I installed the manufacturer's drivers. May have been some big ass window boxes, but at least I could see them. The default generic display drivers for Linux seems to still have a long way to go.
It may seem like a trivial thing to get all ranty about, but if someone is trying out a new OS and runs into something like that, you just scared away X amount of potential users of your product right off the bat. Again, once the setup was done everything is smooth as silk, everything does run a lot better than it does in Windows. Getting to that point is still above the heads of the great majority of end users and I think sometimes the stereotype of the Linux user being an uber-nerd who writes his own drivers for every device sometimes gets in the way of making a really nice OS even better.
The install program for Ubuntu is really nice, you basically install it like a regular Windows app and it creates a partition on the drive to boot from. The tricky part (and this has happened on every Linux distro I've ever tried to install on a laptop) was that when it first boot into Ubuntu it didn't recognize my laptop's display screen. I had to poke my way through critical install screens with a display that looked like a TV on rabbit ears between channels. What's worse, is at the end it popped up a dialog box saying that the open source drivers for the display card in my laptop wouldn't work and I'd need to use the manufacturer's drivers. The way it was written would have easily led a less than technical user to infer this was a bad thing to do. The one thing I can say was always easy with Windows was the setup. in 15 years of installing Windows, the worst thing that ever happened when it didn't recognize my graphics card was that everything was in 640x480 resolution until I installed the manufacturer's drivers. May have been some big ass window boxes, but at least I could see them. The default generic display drivers for Linux seems to still have a long way to go.
It may seem like a trivial thing to get all ranty about, but if someone is trying out a new OS and runs into something like that, you just scared away X amount of potential users of your product right off the bat. Again, once the setup was done everything is smooth as silk, everything does run a lot better than it does in Windows. Getting to that point is still above the heads of the great majority of end users and I think sometimes the stereotype of the Linux user being an uber-nerd who writes his own drivers for every device sometimes gets in the way of making a really nice OS even better.
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