Yet another reason Linux won't make it

As mentioned a ways back in this blog, I bought an Asus EEE 901 last year when I decided to experiment more with netbooks. The 901 is a nice, well-engineered piece of hardware. The only places where I've deviated from the standard installation is in upgrading the RAM to 2GB (pretty much essential if you want to run without a pagefile in Windows) and in upgrading the secondary SSD to 16GB from the 8 provided. I've run various flavors of Windows on it mainly - Vista and Windows 7 have been on here as experiments (mainly, I travel with my Mac so I'm not generally too worried about having this all usable).

This week I downloaded Windows 7 RC. I installed it already in a Parallels VM, but I decided that before I upgraded to the RC on my 901, I'd try and run it off Linux for a while. So I downloaded Ubuntu (currently that's pretty much the standard desktop Linux distro) 9.04 - the netbook version. Bad sign #1 was when I looked up the compatibility notes for my 901. Not a good beginning. So it's great except the buttons don't work and you can't put it to sleep. I did it anyways, though.

Installation was pretty easy - I did the flash drive installation using a spare SD card I had. That part worked pretty well, and the installation was much easier than most Linux distros I've done in the past. Chalk one up for Canonical. The tough part came afterwards.

(before I go any further - let me remind the reader that I know Linux from ample past usage, I know how to find and install apps, and I'm even comfortable on the command line. This is trying to replicate the OOBE for a new user - so my standards are a little diferent for this project)

So post-installation, much like with Windows, there were a ton of updates that had been released since the image was built. Which was no big deal - I was plugged in to my Ethernet jack so I downloaded them all in a flash.

That is point number 1: I had to use my Ethernet jack because the wireless adapter wasn't even recognized! Not good. I did look at the wireless connection tool, though, and it would (assuming the wireless card was up) let me type in the name of any wireless network I wanted to join and the key for it.

What it would not do, though, is give me a simple tool to enumerate the wireless networks I saw and then pick one to connect to. You know - like Windows and Macs do. Now I'm sure I could have found a way to do it buried within, or downloaded a .deb with a better wireless app, but this is OOBE we're talking about again. And that part of the OOBE sucked.

So then I noticed that sound didn't work either. And that the installation repositories still seem to give me a listing of so much crap to sort through in order to find the one or two apps I might actually be interested in that it was nearly useless (this isn't just Ubuntu - Linux distros have been doing this since day 1. More does not equal better).

Honestly, I never got to the point of using the built-in productivity apps and such. Nor did I make too many further notes on the GUI. I do like Ubuntu's practice of requiring authorization to do most admin-level activities.

So my next task was to plug in my USB DVD drive and boot my DVD of Windows 7 RC. Half an hour later it was working, with all hardware functional. As much as I like to complain about Windows, it worked out of the box and Ubuntu did not. Needed a couple of extra drivers from Asus for optimization, but it all worked.

And this is why Linux just doesn't get it done as a system for everyone. There are millins of people without any real technical qualifications running Unix on their desktop - unfortunately for Linux advocates it's Mac OS X that they are running. Everyone else runs Windows and only the truly devoted run Linux. I've been using Linux and building Linux systems for 15+ years now (my personal site was built off the original Slackware release on a homemade server), and the biggest improvement I can see in that time is that now Xwindows is much better at detecting and auto-installing. Nowhere near enough community effort is going to the end-user experience - and that is what will have to be overcome before Linux is ever going to be a viable option for The Rest Of Us.