Open source software won't take over by being 1.86x faster and using a totally sweet heap sort algorithm. I'm a geek and I find that kind of thing interesting at an intellectual level, but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. "Normal" people absolutely don't care and won't put up with the hassle.
With Steve gone, there's a taste-shaped hole in the entire technology world that I can't see anyone stepping in and taking over. Until the open source world gets its own Steve Jobs -- someone out there who starts focusing relentlessly on the users (how to make software "just work" and look/feel great at the same time), it's never going to unseat the dominant players (as much as I might want it to).
Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing.
Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of fish but you can't really blame the Linux driver writers for that, they need information to work with and if manufacturers are not going to supply that info it needs to be painstakingly recovered, which is not always possible and almost always incomplete to some extent.
Who cares? It doesn't work. When I buy an Apple laptop I know all the hardware works. That's it. There is no blame to Linux devs (I've counted as one at times). This is the real world -- I'm not giving out consolation prizes to software that almost works.
The vast majority of people are like that; my use of the first person singular was not an accident, I count myself among them. It's not a matter of assigning blame, it's a matter of recognizing reality.
For Linux to take over the consumer desktop market, it doesn't just need to be as easy to install and maintain as Windows or OSX; it needs to be significantly easier. That is the hole a "Steve Jobs of free software" could fill.
And for fucks sake, don't say "it's FUD". I had a hard time installing drivers for an NVidia graphic card this month in Ubuntu's latest stable version, running in Dell workstation. I could even put out some videos.
I'm tired of people who had difficulties with Linux being called liars and getting down votes here.
Linux is great, but it's not finished yet. There's room for improvement. (Same with Windows. Same with OS X).
Someone who installs an OS has immediately gone beyond mere "user". A fairer comparison must include pre-installed machines.
How? By writing drivers for undocumented hardware?
> it doesn't just need to be as easy to install and maintain as Windows
Have you tried to install Windows recently? Fat-finger one prompt and you need to return it to the store to get it back. Make one little mistake in your backup and you need to buy install disks, etc. Don't buy anti-virus software and kiss it goodbye.
It's only easy because nobody does it - they all just pay the $100 install tax and have the store do it for them.
If you actually had to install a system and run a non-trivial program Mac would win, followed by Ubuntu, and then the rest would trickle in at the unusable-by-the-masses level.
You're making my point. I (someone who works in the software industry) had a problem with a piece of open source software. If the open source world is going to go mainstream, the reaction can't be "That's FUD." It has to be "That's unacceptable, we need to fix this immediately."
Don't do it for me. If I decide the tradeoff of effort vs. benefit is worthwhile, I can eventually resolve the problem myself. Do it for my mom, who just wants the printer to work so she can print handouts for her students. Do it for your grandparents who just want to check their email and look at their grandkid's pictures. Or just tell me I'm an anti-open source propagandist and dismiss me.
I've made my decision. Computers are made for people, not people for computers.
But thanks for proving his point by calling him a liar.
Really.
Counterpoint to your story: I bought a notebook with a 3G card in it, couldn't for the life of me get the thing to work under windows vista (which it came installed with). It got so bad that I suspected that the hardware must be broken.
For kicks I booted the machine using ubuntu NBR, not only did it detect and configure all the other peripherals properly but it also auto-detected the 3G card and it made it work instantly without further configuration, other than clicking the 'connect' entry in the menu and entering the PIN code (four times '0').
Just because there is the occasional glitch I'm not going to say 'windows vista doesn't support lots of hardware'.
If you say your soundcard/wireless/etc doesn't work under a major distribution then that's really unfortunate, but that does not make your story representative of the vast majority of Linux users. Personally I haven't seen any configuration issues in Linux for over a decade unless it was because I was using some very rare and either very new or totally obscure hardware, and even in those cases I could always get it to work by using google for a bit.
Except for that one time with the 3G card under windows. But that's not proof of anything other than that there was at least one instance where someone had a hardware issue with a windows machine.
But that sorta proves his point. Linux isn't good to normal people today just because it's full of geeky magic dust. It is good today because it "Just Works™".
