The problem that I continue to see is, people have this image of Linux and the "Linux Desktop". That image, that tons of "hacker" types that love OS X seem to have, hasn't changed in years and is extremely out of date.
I hear people talk about problems or applications that haven't been standard linux fair for years now, but they haven't tried it and by-golly they're unbelievably attached to those memories they have of how hard it is to use.
Aw, already with no explanation? That's fine. Let's play a game. Let's count the number of posts that make it seem completely obvious that Linux is "so wildly unusable". Then let's count the number of posts that actually describe any task that is vastly different or categorically harder to do in Linux. Let's see which count is greater.
My phone works as a modem out of the box in Ubuntu. I can do internet connection sharing to my Xbox in less than 5 clicks (it required registry editing and manual editting of UNIX files in use in OS X), and I've yet to get my phone working as a modem in OS X, period.
Getting your phone to work as a modem is not a problem that most people have. Linux solves a whole host of problems that developers have very well, and does a very poor job of solving the problems that most people have.
If you tally up a list of possible problems someone might encounter in their entire computing use Linux will definitely solve far more intuitively than Windows, however, when tally up a list of possible problems someone might have and multiply it by the frequency in which they have them the polishes on Windows and OS X to solve those problems are far better.
Lets take for example what happens when I plug my projector into my laptop using Windows vs. Ubuntu, on Ubuntu nothing happens, on Windows it starts showing stuff on my projector (once in a while it doesn't and have I have to press Windows+P and move to the projector option, or unplug it and plug it back in again).
By any standardized method of testing Linux will excel, when you put people in front of it it's obvious that it's inferior. Hell, my friend happens to have a Sony Xperia, I ask him why the GUI is so sluggish and get some answer about Sony charging his provider for updates, and them not having updates, and not wanting to root his phone, apparently the issue is fixed in some version of Android that he can't update to. When I hear this I think, that sounds like too much of a pain in the ass, I'll stick with my iPhone, when normal people hear this they think, Sony Xperias / Android are broken.
>Getting your phone to work as a modem is not a problem that most people have.
I'm just going to address this point right here. Almost all normal people I know would really appreciate being able to get internet in any variety of locales where they'd otherwise have to wrangle with stupid WiFi login screens and money portals or where even crappy commercial WiFi is unavailable (park?). The thing is that most people just don't even consider that it is or should be possible.
If the "normal person" is incidentally using Ubuntu and Cyanogenmod, all we have to do is plug the phone in via USB, turn on tethering on the phone, click "HTC Android Phone" on "the two computers on the screen" (nm-applet), and that's that.
This is extremely handy in a lot of cases. Today, for instance, I tethered my phone and used it to browse for a few hours because Comcast was choking to death on my new modem and I had to wait for a "backend engineer" to process the ticket the customer service people created. Do you think that having a redundant net connection with just your phone and a USB cord is valuable, even to "normal people"? I sure do.
As to the rest of your post, you can generalize anything you want into a niche. I could say, "You know, 'normal people' only use their computers for Facebook, they definitely aren't trying to plug them into projectors". The reality is that plugging in a projector should work on Ubuntu and often does. As you noted, Windows is not perfect in this regard either; Ubuntu works excellently for a large number of people. Is that OK with you?
Saying that Ubuntu can never take off because you have to manually specify projector output is quite far-fetched. Should I say that Windows will never take off because you usually have to install software to use your peripherals when on Linux they are almost always supported immediately upon plug in?
Here's the real answer: desktop Linux will come around when it gets a company like Apple behind it, just as embedded Linux came around as TiVO, Google, Boxee, etc., put their weight behind it.
Microsoft sells relatively few copies of Windows directly to consumers; almost all consumers receive Windows pre-installed on the computer that they purchased at major retailer X. The manufacturers integrate the OS and the hardware, ship it out, and sell the whole thing as a single product called a "PC". When Linux gets someone that does this on a major, Dell-like scale, we'll see Linux on the desktop. It's well past good enough; really, these things don't take all that much. The biggest obstacles are social: "Why doesn't this greeting card creation program I just bought for $60 work on my 'UBUNTOX'?"
Oh you meant tethering? Yeah, that's super easy on Windows, you plug your iPhone in enable tethering and it just works. Same thing with the bluetooth tethering.
I thought you meant using your cell phone to place an outgoing call to a dialup internet service.
Note: I don't have an AT&T iPhone where I understand this doesn't work and yes, if you don't like iTunes it's probably going to be a PITA to get this to work.
If the "normal person" is incidentally using Ubuntu and Cyanogenmod, all we have to do is plug the phone in via USB, turn on tethering on the phone, click "HTC Android Phone" on "the two computers on the screen" (nm-applet), and that's that.
This hasn't been my experience. Mine is similar, except you don't even have to click anything: the usb network device is detected, and network-manager immediately attempts to get an IP address. Then you're online.
On Linux, I can't even use X + Awesome + <terminal emulator> without huge amounts of tearing and nearly 1 second delays while the WM redraws my terminal emulators while switching virtual desktops. A more experienced friend of mine suggested that this could be due to using nvidia binary graphics drivers, so I tried out the open source ones, but the tearing and delays got worse, and occasionally an entire window would be mangled for no apparent reason. He also suggested that it could be due to XRandR, but I noticed no change when I stopped using it (other than that my displays were no longer vertical), so now I'm using the binary drivers and XRandR again.
After upgrading from Ubuntu 10.04 to 11.04, I was unable to use my onboard NIC at all. I thought that it had been bricked, so I put another in, but eventually someone I knew experienced the same problem and was able to fix it by temporarily removing the battery from his motherboard. Apparently the drivers that ship with 11.04 like to put your network card into an unusable state until you physically mess with the machine. You could just be careful not use them and download the working drivers, but you might need a NIC for that...
On OSX, Spaces has a bug that causes windows to randomly rearrange themselves on the Z-axis when switching spaces. It also has a bug that causes your keyboard to stop working completely. The first time I encountered the second bug I had to reboot my computer because I couldn't kill Spaces without using my keyboard, but I have since put Activity Monitor in my dock just in case I need to do that. Fullscreen games on OSX (Starcraft II or Heroes of Newerth, for example) run a reasonably high chance of never giving up exclusive mode, even after dying, so your machine will become mostly inoperable after playing the game a lot of the time. There's also no reasonable way to run these games in fullscreen non-exclusive mode (the most useful configuration on other OSes), so you can't quickly switch between the game and Skype/screencasting software/IRC.
...And I hardly think I need to tell anyone here what sucks about Windows.
"I have since put Activity Monitor in my dock just in case"
Alternatively, you could right click on the Finder icon in the dock, choose 'New Finder Window' from the menu. From there you can go to the Applications / Utilities folder, and launch Activity Monitor from there.
Wait. You're using the nvidia driver, but are you using an accelerated window manager. Are you using mutter? Are you using compiz?
Ubuntu's 11.04 compiz is unstable, don't let me deceive you. BUT, it is far superior to plain old metacity with nvidia. Ugh, that shit tears and is awful.
The thing is, the composited window managers? They're actually smoother than without due to the graphics cards. Even with minimal features (for more stability, since ahem, shipping versions of compiz aren't always crazy stable, despite how much I admire where compiz is going).
Take the time to try a composited window manager. While you're at it, install vlc, and make sure you manually tell it to "Use Hardware Acceleration". It's amazing how small things can really show you the ability of Linux.
Most people that use window managers like Awesome have no need for a composited window manager. Yes, they make window moving smoother, but you don't move windows in Awesome, so it's just a waste of resources.
Similarly, I use VDPAU output for mplayer and full-screen it, taking the window manager and compositing manager out of the equation entirely.
I think I pretty well acknowledged that even. I didn't know that you don't move windows in Awesome, especially since
the comment was about tearing, and I merely mentioned that using a compositor helps with tearing...
Awesome is composited (well, has support for compositing). You just have to use an external compositor. xcompmgr and cairo-compmgr are two that I know of.
> My phone works as a modem out of the box in Ubuntu. I can do internet connection sharing to my Xbox in less than 5 clicks (it required registry editing and manual editting of UNIX files in use in OS X), and I've yet to get my phone working as a modem in OS X, period.
And you still can't watch video without tearing on multiple displays setup :(
(You have to disable one of the displays in driver settings)
You can't have photoshop or any decent image editing software on linux (gimp is, well, a cripple).
Arguably, font rendering is still awful, and so are default fonts in all the distros.
You still have to watch out for what you upgrade and in which order. E.g. if you update X with non-repository video drivers (e.g. binary AMD drivers), your system might not even load after reboot.
Speaking of AMD drivers, they are plain horrible.
Arguably, GNOME / KDE / XFCE are all worse than Windows Explorer or OS X default window manager.
Whenever it comes to something being easy to use or well-designed visually, linux desktop experience is so much inferior compared to windows and os x.
Arguably, GNOME / KDE / XFCE are all worse than Windows Explorer or OS X default window manager.
Really? I've always thought of good window managers as one of the big selling points of the Linux experience. Moving and resizing windows just seems so much more cumbersome to me when I'm using either. Perhaps you meant to talk about the file manager?
>Arguably, font rendering is still awful, and so are default fonts in all the distros.
In comparison to what? Cleartype on windows is absolute shit, and OSX just looks blurry. In Linux I can tweak the aliasing and hinting options to be the way I like them.
Sorry, but Linux drivers are often poor-quality, and there are too many package managers and sound APIs and desktop environments. If you think connection sharing to an Xbox or using your phone as a modem are things the mainstream public even thinks about, you don't have an accurate real-world perspective. They just want to watch YouTube without the sound chopping up.
I hear people talk about problems or applications that haven't been standard linux fair for years now, but they haven't tried it and by-golly they're unbelievably attached to those memories they have of how hard it is to use.
Aw, already with no explanation? That's fine. Let's play a game. Let's count the number of posts that make it seem completely obvious that Linux is "so wildly unusable". Then let's count the number of posts that actually describe any task that is vastly different or categorically harder to do in Linux. Let's see which count is greater.
My phone works as a modem out of the box in Ubuntu. I can do internet connection sharing to my Xbox in less than 5 clicks (it required registry editing and manual editting of UNIX files in use in OS X), and I've yet to get my phone working as a modem in OS X, period.