Linux Desktop Readiness Thread

[andrew.46]

Hi,

I have my suspicions about this post. Try:

http://people.aapt.net.au/~adjlstrong/troll.html

My apologies if this post is legitimate

Andrew

[peabody]

I have 17 years of total computer use experience in every imaginable area on windows and around 4-5 years of linux server management experience through SSH.

But due to the "complexity" of Ubuntu GUI design and every little thing needing a custom setup/config and still having problems, Linux for now will remain only on our servers and we have decided to unfortunately having to buy Windows Vistas for a LOT of money for personal and corporate notebooks, because switching to Ubuntu would by my estimates decrease our company's productivity by 10 times (1000%) over the next 6 months costing us even more money.

What'dya use for that fairly specific and scientific estimate? How did you quantify the time you'd lose?

Here are my TOP problems/annoyances with Ubuntu, though most would be solvable, the effort for us is just not worth it. These are currently all areas in which I feel Ubuntu and Linux for Dektop in general is behind Windows XP and Windows Vista. Hopefully atleast some of these get fixed/added in the next release of Ubuntu and I would be happy to give it a try again.

VERY IMPORTANT THINGS TO ADD/FIX IMHO
===========================

- Simple theme installer,

*blink?* this is a business requirement? Most houses I know don't even let users change desktop settings. I can understand this being a home user's concern. You've got to be kidding me about this being a business concern.

- Simple fonts installer where clicking on a font, or selecting many fonts and right-clicking opens an option to add those fonts to system and opens up fonts manager. With Courier Newfx, Regular, Size 9 as the default font for text editor - it just rocks imho! CTRL+L and typing "fonts:///" - I have no idea where that directory is when looking for my fonts using Krusader. And why the heck are all fonts in separate directories? And why not include the OpenType fonts people have gotten used to on Windows like Arial and Verdana? Good fonts are one of the most important things, I was making a lot of typos with the default fonts installed. It would greatly improve the time people switching fom win would need for getting used to Linux.

Good fonts are also copyrighted and can't be distributed freely. Complain to the copyright holders. Fonts really aren't that bad to install, users can simply add them to their .fonts folder. And again...this is a business requirement? *blink*

- Krusader - I can't imagine my life without Total Commander on Windows and accordingly Krusader on Linux. They increase productivity 50x compared to the default file browsing with Windows and Linux.

Uhm...this is a reason you can't use Linux? It sounds like you've found your Linux alternative to me...

- Graphical firewall interface included (FireStarter), maybe possibly collaborating with snort, to see content of the packages that have been blocked by the firewall? 35 million people use zonealarm GUI firewall on windows, plus all the other GUI firewalls coming with AV software. This is a big feature! Probably 50-60% of PC users have a graphical firewall installed.

And you've the data to back that claim I assume? Frankly, yes, a better gui interface to the firewall would be nice, to that extent this is a legitamate complaint. But a lot of gui firewall stuff for XP is crap too. Most of it is extremely hand-wavy "Look at all this stuff we protected you from!!! Wohooo!" when most of the crap is just stupid stuff like netbios broadcasts.

Based on my research Loop-AES is superior to TrueCrypt/LUKS/dm-crypt/Cryptoloop
This is one of the main reasons I'm switching to Vista - employees travel a lot with notebooks and need to have everything encrypted incase corporate notebooks gets lost/stolen.

Very legitimate complaint, I agree. Disk encryption needs to be easier to setup. It wasn't until this part of your post that I stopped thinking you were a troll.

- Disk Sanitizer included by default, so instead of emptying trashcan users can easily sanitize it and the whole harddisk with multiple overwrites:

Very legitimate complaint. Although I've heard concerns about how effective stuff like this is on LVM and different filesystems. Still, something's better than nothing I imagine.

- Simple Package installer, e.g. merging "Add/Remove..." , "Synaptic Package Manager", and "Software Sources" into one menu item/app. And how about adding a text input for the search keyword into the Synaptic's Toolbar, where currently there is only a Search button, with plenty of room left, which opens the search area in a separate window. Why 2 clicks, when search could be done with 1 click?

This is the most legitimate complaint, I agree.

- Adding a Terminal's shortcut to the quick launch bar - currently it's still in use a lot, until the GUI's get more mature and bugs less frequent.... probably not before a year.

Isn't there one? Huh, I don't remember adding mine....

- Beryl included by default. Beryl kicks Vista's ***, but without Beryl, Vista's GUI kicks Ubuntu's ***, even XP does. Installing it screwed up my Ubuntu system, and with all those Beryl videos floating around on Youtube, I bet most home users coming to Ubuntu will install it too, probably screwing up their systems and going back to Win like me.

I'm sure the Ubuntu folks would love to make Beryl work out of the box. The current reality is that it's bleeding-edge, unstable software. That's the reality, and until the development gets the software stable, it'd be foolish to include something that can't be supported.

- Flash plugin installed by default. I tried to installl the flash plugin needed by firefox, the link on official page doesn't work: "Totem could not play 'fd://0'" Could not determine type of stream.
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get...lease.i386.rpm
Important apps should be installed by default cuz if there's a chance there could be a problem installing them, there likely will be.

I'm sure Ubuntu would love to include Flash. It's a licensing issue. It's free to use, but not to distribute. Complain to Adobe.

- a simple way to login as root instead of doing sudo everywhere and a simple way to drop root privileges, like in old Gnome GUI's

I dunno, it just doesn't bother me. Mac OS X works the same way.

- GAIM - Possibility to make the buddy icons smaller in Gaim messenger (e.g. MSN Messenger size) - heck of a lot of scrolling to go through 100+ contacts to see who's online. Also, feature that allows to block/unblock contacts through right-click menu. Also message encryption option would be very cool - as Linux mostly still relates to security!

Other people have commented on his, I've nothing to say.

- OpenOffice support for all MS office file formats, or converters for these formats, e.g. .MDI files, can't open them with office atm. but need to!

Well, no one said reverse engineering proprietary formats was supposed to be easy. I doubt any incompatiblities are due to the OOo team just not trying...

- Default support in players for all the popular video and music formats - quicktime, mp3, wav, wmf, wmv, swf, etc.

Serious, serious, serious licensing and patent issues. It's the legal problems that prevent it from happening.

- making webpage, contribution and bug reporting easier - couldn't find forum areas for bug reporting. Lesst text on webpage - people want to use/do, not read and read and read.
========================================

Oh, c'mon now. Ubuntu's got to be the best distro there is at this.

A recent series of studies, titled "When Choice Is Demotivating", provides the evidence. One

study was set in a gourmet food store in an upscale community where, on weekends, the

owners commonly set up sample tables of new items. When researchers set up a display featuring
a line of exotic, high-quality jams, customers who came by could taste samples, and

they were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one condition of the study,

six varieties of the jam were available for tasting. In another, 24 varieties were available. In

either case, the entire set of 24 varieties was available for purchase. The large array of jams

attracted more people to the table than the small array, though in both cases people tasted

about the same number of jams on average. When it came to buying, however, a huge difference
became evident. Thirty percent of people exposed to the small array of jams actually

bought a jar; only 3% of those exposed to the large array of jams did so.

Is this your sig or is it an anecdote? Anyway, as an IT guy it is kind of up to you to narrow the field for your clientel.

[cmost]

Go ahead and switch to Vista. See if we care. I for one am not going to try to talk you out of it. If you want to be Steve Balmer's little bitch as well as a slave to DRM it's your choice. If you want your OS to work according to the way someone else decides, fine by me. Oh, and enjoy emptying your bank account of $400.00 for Windows Vista and another $400.00 for Office. Bye! (Don't let the door hit you on the way out.)

[konungursvia]

I also think this poster is full of it. For instance he says "a simple way to login as root instead of doing sudo everywhere and a simple way to drop root privileges". Any experienced computer man can type "sudo" easily. But more importantly, I don't think anyone in charge of a network having many inexperienced users would want to see lots of accounts and passwords floating around the office that have admin privileges. Do you sign all your cheques the day the bank sends them to you, then leave them lying around for anyone to fill in and cash? Neither should admin logins be taken lightly.

Oh by the way, if he needs a solution to needing root privileges for a longer while, doesn't he know he can launch the root privilege terminal? Easy. And wanna know an easy way to turn off root privileges? Close it.

[peabody]

Now, now folks. He/she ain't a troll, I've seen other legitimate posts by this user. That's not to say the reasoning isn't flawed, but still.

[aysiu]

I've moved this to a more appropriate place than General Help.

[m.musashi]

Now, now folks. He/she ain't a troll, I've seen other legitimate posts by this user. That's not to say the reasoning isn't flawed, but still.

Well, if ones intention are good then it might be harsh to call them a troll but when you start a negative thread and just leave it, it's kind of hard to say otherwise. In addition, you have a user who has only been a member for 5 days and started with this thread.

If you gave a hungry person a loaf of bread that was 95% cooked and they threw it back in your face saying it wasn't edible and why could it be a pizza, would you make them a pizza or tell them to pi** off? I like to think I'm a reasonable and helpful person but I don't think I'd make the pizza.

[undertakingyou]

I also think this poster is full of it. For instance he says "a simple way to login as root instead of doing sudo everywhere and a simple way to drop root privileges". Any experienced computer man can type "sudo" easily. But more importantly, I don't think anyone in charge of a network having many inexperienced users would want to see lots of accounts and passwords floating around the office that have admin privileges. Do you sign all your cheques the day the bank sends them to you, then leave them lying around for anyone to fill in and cash? Neither should admin logins be taken lightly.

Oh by the way, if he needs a solution to needing root privileges for a longer while, doesn't he know he can launch the root privilege terminal? Easy. And wanna know an easy way to turn off root privileges? Close it.

I addition. With Vista's new content manager thing, your having to put in your password and click ok over and over and over. If Vista is to be such a better solution, why does the problem seem worse there?

[yigal.weinstein]

An aspect of the context of the word readiness has to do with how one is willing or interested in approaching one's computer experience. I have seen a lot of threads where the computer user's definition of what makes a good computer experience is being able to play the gamut of games available via Microsoft. This seems to be a rather silly way of viewing what makes an OS superior but to them this is what makes a desktop "ready".

This is not how Macintosh has made its name and it is probably, by many non-linux users, considered the ultimate desktop experience because of its "ease of use" and its capability to produce a "productive" work environment. This usability is probably more to the point of the "usability" that Ubuntu is interested in.

Linux is setup so that there is still a sharp learning curve, relative to the 2 commerical OSs. Ubuntu puts a pretty face on this sharp learning curve - which can irritate people who are used to Macintosh and Microsoft. At the same time the power of the OS is apparent upon a little inspection and this makes staying with Ubuntu more easy to swallow.

There must be reminders about what free software is for Ubuntu users. Instead of you putting $ in you will be using your own time. If this is an enjoyable pursuit - it happens to be for me - then nothing is lost in this decision, but not realizing that time will have to be put in is a shame. Time is a resource and a very precious one.

[udha]

Ok...so I have a grandma who is completely computer illiterate (aren't they all?), and I'm not talking linux illiterate, im talking like windows illiterate. If people can't even figure out windows what hope have they of figuring out linux? In order to make linux more popular, it needs to be even easier than windows to use and set up. Just a thought.

I'm sorry but while your intentions are good you're reasoning makes less sense than a spinning top on the moon. What you are in fact saying here is that your Grandmother can install Windows. That's not what you mean but it's what you've said, because the reality at the moment is that Ubuntu Linux is EASIER to use for someone who's never seen a computer before, than Windows. But not if they have to install it, and even then, ,Ubuntu's installer is easier, and faster, with a simple double-click, next next next next ok done routine to get it installed and running in over 90% of cases out there.

So Linux is actually HARDER to become accustomed to if you've been taught on the Windows system first, you learn bad habits and and that means Windows is wrong, not Linux. But it's free for you to modify, so if enough people want it to do something, it will eventually do it.

And just a friendly FYI: The kernel is the Linux kernel, but the system is actually GNU/Linux.