The Cynic Says……

Well, I’ve had FC3 installed for a good little while now, but I finally decided to boot into it and dick around with it. I’ll admit, Linux has come a LONNGGG way in a short time, but there’s still quite a bit of improving to do if it ever expects to make its way onto the desktop of the average user. One thing that shocked me is that even on my nforce2-based AthlonXP system with a Radeon 9700 Pro, it still detected every piece of hardware without incident. Heck, it even recognized that I have a wireless MS keyboard and mouse. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s still a nice start. For whatever reason, I can’t logout. I have to actually reboot. I think it has something to do with the display driver because my monitor clicks off when I logout or when I use the GUI boot screen. Minor problems, but still annoying by any stretch. The one thing that annoyed me to no end was that Fedora, for whatever reason, has decided to disable mp3 functionality in XMMS (a media player like winamp). Whenever you try to play an mp3 in xmms, it comes up with an error msg saying something about licensing agreements requiring them to disable mp3 functionality. I ended up having to download realplayer 10 just to listen to my favorite streaming radio station, xtcradio.com. Also when I went to install realplayer, it complained that I didn’t have a required dependency, libmp3lame. While this is acceptable for the power user, the average user won’t have the fortitude to go to rpmfind.net or even google and search out the required package. All in all, while I think Linux is “neat”, it’s not really ready for prime-time.

Some applications still require configuring from the command line or compiling from source. The average user isn’t going to take the time to learn to do these things. For example, enabling java in firefox was not what I’d consider easy. Installing the actual Java runtime environment was simple… getting firefox to actually SEE the java plugin took some work. I had to open a terminal window, “locate firefox” to figure out where it was installed.. then cd into that folder… once inside that folder I had to create a symbolic link (ln -s) to the full path to the java plugin, which was in the folder where java was installed. To Sun’s credit, the instructions are on their website, but all that works shouldn’t be necessary. A shell script could easily be written to tun at the end of the install and create the required symbolic link. Installing Flash was much easier in that the installer only asked for the path to firefox and copied the required files for you. Compare this to Windows where both installations just ask which browser you wish to use with the plugin and it does the work for you. I think Linux just leaves too much work up to the end-user. While I think the ability to compile software from its source code is a great idea, I don’t think it should be the ONLY option available to install a given piece of software.

Overall, Fedora comes loaded with most everything you’ll need to have a fully functioning system. It installs GAIM, which is an open-source messaging client that allows you to connect to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, IRC, and a couple others. It does also come with the Linux version of Yahoo installed, but it doesn’t support webcam.. It comes with Firefox and Epiphany for web browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail, x-chat for IRC, OpenOffice for office apps, and gimp for graphics. Obviously there’s tons of other stuff installed, but those are the basics that most people will use most often. For those windows users stuck on Photoshop and MS Office, they’ll find that GIMP & OpenOffice take a bit of getting used to, but they’re nearly equally as powerful (though GIMP lags behind Photoshop quite a bit). As of yet, I haven’t found Linux to be worthy as a full-time only OS, but it’s nice enough to use a fair bit and keep windows for gaming and a few other purposes.