Linux ready for the masses/desktops?
Being a fairly active StumbleUpon user I see these posts about Linux being ready for the desktops all the time. Actually I’ve been reading about it since I started using Linux back in 2002. Still Linux has not made a big leap into the home user market or the enterprise market. Why is this? Linux is a stable operating system that just keeps on working and you might think the TCO’s should help Linux on it’s way to world domination also. Still we see Microsoft and their products are dominating the market. The article/post that got me to write this one can be found at the breakingitdownblog.com.
After commenting I got a nice reply from the author, and I do understand his worries about dealing with the Linux community, but I give the Linux community a lot of credit and hope any comments here are sensible and wont start a war. That was never my intention.
If you start reading this, please read all of it. Don’t comment after reading only half because you won’t get the point.
Jungle of choice
As I see it there are a few things that makes Linux something administrators don’t want on their desktops. First of all, and this is something the open source community will hate, the number of choices. There are so many alternatives out there. Should you use RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo etc etc etc. Choice and competition is a good thing, but this is borderline ridiculous. If I don’t like your distribution or the way you manage your open source project I’ll just start my own. This is good right? No. This makes the jungle of open source products even worse. Let’s take a simple example, my parents. Go tell them to install Linux. First of all, how would they find a distribution? Would they read why a certain distribution is good for them? No. Never. They buy a computer and are happy to pay the Microsoft toll because they are able to use it.
And when it comes down to it, that’s exactly what most people want to do with their computers. Use them, not find bugs, submit bug reports or join mailing lists.
Office
I work in an organization with around 1500 users. We like so many others use Microsoft Office in our day to day work. Why? Well I guess because so many others are. That might seem like a stupid reason but try to tell a user that he/she can’t open the document just received by email because we only use OpenOffice.org, the possibility of it going the other way around is very small. This was visible already when the new Office 2007 suite was launched, because it saves documents in docx by default and Office 2003 does not open them.
Thank god there is a document converter for Office 2003 so we dodged that bullet, by installing it for anyone needing it and now it’s going out by group policies. Next you’ll try to tell me well this might, and only might be true for the corporate users but how about home users. Well I’ll tell you the same thing here. If I receive documents to my personal mail it’s almost certainly written in Microsoft’s Office, not necessarily 2007 but a version of it anyway. Well if it is written in a previous version I might get lucky and the document, spreadsheet or whatever might work as it should, but for most cases it won’t, Microsoft macros work in mysterious ways. If it is in the 2007 .docx format, well then I have some work to do. To be clear, I’m not saying this is OOo’s fault. On the contrary, I guess Microsoft doesn’t go easy on projects like this. And looking at their market situation why would they.
Let’s get on with it. If I’m running Microsoft Windows I can get the compatibility pack, or use an online converter, t to a .doc and then open it it OOo. And that’s just it, you can’t expect the average user to do this, or even be interested in doing it. They might google it and find the office converter install it and expect it to work. And it does.
Being a geek, word processors are not something that make me jump up and down of excitement, but I have tried OOo more than a few times. And it just doesn’t feel right, I can’t get it to do the things I want it to, not in the timeframe of learning I’m willing to use. I count my time in hard cash, and 3 hours of trying to make something work adds up to a Microsoft Office student license which you as a home user can buy and use, if your not making money with it.
You could argue that it took time to learn to use Office also, well it did. And that’s another reason for keeping it, why throw all those hours of training out the window if another program cant offer anything else than a smaller bill getting the software. It would be just plain madness.
Management
This is a big argument for me. I work with networks and servers and I like to keep the users as restricted as possible without making their daily work suffer. Also I want to be able to centrally manage users, passwords, desktop security settings, local firewalls and the installed software. Some of these are in fact possible to do in Linux. But it’s not as easy to manage as Microsoft’s Active Directory with systems center configuration manager.
Group policies are another thing making Active directory more attractive. We can handle system settings like services, WLAN, well just about anything via this sleek and fast interface, and most of the time it just works.
I do admit Microsoft’s products do have faults, but the good old pro/con list just doesn’t tip over to the advantage of Linux, at least not yet.
File Servers
As I said above I’ve been using Linux since 2002 and I still can’t always get file/folder permission set like I want them to. If you use shared folders, and I’d say every company today does you need a sane way of managing the shares. I like Microsoft’s approach to the security settings. Share and local settings are separated and in my little mind I can manage the settings just fine.
Nested groups helps a lot to. Since providing a group access to another groups files or folders helps to keep the rights simple. And if you manage a large file share it has to be easy and logical.
Distributed File System is another really nice feature of the Microsoft Server family. I wont go in-depth here but if you’re not familiar with it take a look at Microsoft DFS pages.
To clear this up, I’m not saying these things are impossible to accomplish in other systems, I’m just saying it takes more work. And work hours cost money.
Places I promote Linux
Well after my short and maybe even evil rant about why Linux has issues I’m going to turn the table a little, because there are places I’d rather use Linux than any Microsoft product. To mention a few:
- Databases with information that could save/take lives. Like patient journals.
- Backup systems, we use EMC Networker as our backup solution and it runs stable as a castle. I wouldn’t even dream of using Microsoft products as a foundation for this when it’s available for Linux.
- Some web applications. Because Apache is a great software and it runs so smooth on a Linux server.
Use the best tool for the job
To everyone out there who now wants to dig me a grave and make me suffer I have a few finishing words. The point of this article was to point out that you, at least in general, cannot say Linux or Windows or even OS X is better than one of it’s competitors. It all depends on who you are and what you are doing.
Let’s stop these flame wars now and agree that everyone should use the best tool available for their task at hand.
No related posts.
Comments
Openoffice opens .doc files and office 2007 saves as .doc.
Yes. And the stupid thing is that Office 2007 saves docx by default. And the standard user does not change this setting.
Openoffice opens .docx fine, but Office 2007 does not deal with OpenOffice documents without addons. THAT is the problem.
I use Linux full time now, with Windows XP on VirtualBox. While I have found great replacements for just about everything I used to use, there are still times I prefer the Windows based stand-bys. I use MS Office Applications and Crystal Reports from within Virtualbox. If we could get a decent office application, preferable a newer Office on Wine or native and Crystal Reports, same or native, then I’d give up Windows completely. Sure, Linux has it’s quirks. I’m using F10 and run into things here and there, but I find I get much more work done with Linux, much easier and quicker than I did in Windows.
As I said, I have been using Linux as my main operating system. I’m not right now because of the quirks. Also I really found myself being unproductive. I spent more time tweaking my OS or trying themes than working.