I completely agree. I stopped reading after the second point, because I hate when people write like everyone in the world is an idiot other than themselves.
Yes, the writer seems to be apologizing for these people being idiots in his eyes for quitting the premier wunderbar operating system of the past decade that no one seems to actually give a crap about. I've used Linux on and off for the past ten years. I've spent hundreds of hours learning every little nuance of the operating system so that I would NOT fall into his category number 2 complaint.
I *DO* know how to fix most things in Linux including things that have since been fixed by GUI advances from the early years, etc. I'm afraid that's no excuse for an operating system STILL having huge limitations 12 years after I first tried it. 12 years is a LONG LONG time (we're talking WindowsME era through all of XP's LONG years of existence well into years of Vista here). The primary problem for Linux is quite simple. It's not that developers don't have the right idea. An open, free operating system is a GREAT idea in general. The problem is the organizational aspects (basically aside from a little bit of general kernel consensus from Linus Torvalds, there is NONE; people just make whatever new 'standards' that they want which no one then uses or which is fought over with a half dozen competing 'standards', none of which will talk to the other or play nice with the other and then people wonder why after 12 years, so little has been really accomplished. Linux is STILL not as usable as Windows98 in terms of ease-of-use, IMO. It's surely nowhere NEAR XP levels (although Linux elitists will beat you over the head that it is all day long and how great Ubuntu is, etc., which an average PC user can tell you is total bunk, especially when compared to moving to OS X, which is much much EASIER to use than XP even).
Linux NEEDS BADLY someone to take the reigns and force a basic level unified interface and way of doing things. Having 6 package managers and having to maintain software repositories for every major flavor of Linux (that doesn't force you to compile your own...something which elitists will argue is the BEST way for everyone anyway..hahaha; it's BSD's standard method of doing things, after all) is just plain ridiculous in 2009. How could they EVER hope to get mainstream commercial software support for Linux when they want commercial developers to jump through hoops and support a half dozen distributions and maybe throw in source code support for the rest while they're at it??? IT'S UTTERLY LAUGHABLE. I believe only Linus Torvalds could possibly hope to unify Linux and he seems quite satisfied to leave it as the gigantic hodge podge that it still is today. Thus, it's unlikely that even ten years from now that anything will change in that regard unless everyone suddenly all agrees to only use one major distribution. Even then, you'd still have Kubuntu versus Ubuntu in-fighting even within their own camp. It's ridiculous.
It's not bad that there is a lot of choices. It's bad that those choices don't really get along with each other. Even if you install libraries for everything (you almost have to or you limit what software you can run), you'll still find that unless you find a theme that exists on both KDE and Gnome (heaven forbid something designed for older libraries or more minor less used interfaces) you won't get the same themed windows across programs. It'll literally look like you're trying to run Mac and Windows at the same time or something equivalent. That's not unified. While it may be good for the programmers, it's not good for the users. It's the user who should be able to choose what his desktop looks like, not the programmers. But this cannot happen if you have a half dozen standards floating around that can't even communicate with each other. If they had an underlying universal theme manager that worked with all window managers then it wouldn't matter, but you CANNOT seriously expect different camps who essentially don't like each other (or they'd be working together one ONE interface from the start) to agree on ANYTHING, even if it's for the betterment of their entire operating system.
It might just take someone huge like Adobe to say we're releasing Photoshop ONLY for KDE libraries and ONLY via Debian packages and have other commercial software makers follow suit to create a pseudo-standard within the Linux community. Basically, the commercial side would have to force the issue and get the users to follow suit out of pure frustration. Sometimes, too many choices hamper the growth of a system. And just imagine how far along Linux COULD be if all that wasted duplicate efforts to remake the wheel over and over again had been used to further the entire operating system instead. Linux COULD have been the premier operating system out there five years ago even, but at this rate it never will be. I figure in 5 years it'll reach Win98 status and in 10 XP SP1. Maybe in 20 years it'll be equivalent to OS X 10.2?? But by then where will OS X be?
Finally, you have a very real elitist element of snobby anti-establishment types developing software for Linux and they have this idea that basically equates to "We don't need no stinking commercial software!" and they actually try very very hard to PREVENT such software from ever appearing for Linux. They do this by not allowing their open tools to be used by commercial developers unless those developers release their software under their license, which basically amounts to free open source software, which is completely and totally anti-commercial by its very nature. If you give the source code away, no one will buy it. In fact, the entitlement factor in the Linux Community soars into the stratospheric levels. Why pay for anything? Everything should be free! Yes, except people have to eat and pay their bills and while you may think you deserve to make a living sweeping floors or changing gumballs in a vending machine, you don't seem to think people toiling for hudreds and even tens of thousands of hours on a program deserve even $5 of your money.
I say these things and I love open software. I think things like Photoshop are ridiculously overpriced for the average user who doesn't make a living from it and the cut-down versions absolutely SUCK. But just TRY the Gimp after you've used Photoshop and see how well free software replaces it. The Gimp hasn't change that much in 10 years. Neither has Photoshop in its core areas, really, IMO. But that's neither here nor there because Photoshop got it right 10 years ago. Real time transforms (opposed to Gimp's wire-mesh checkerboard) are worth some real $$$ alone. I've tried to do my pinball playfield editing with the Gimp or my pinball recreation games. It's frustrating as all heck. If you're off by one degree, it'll look like crap, but how can you tell when you cannot see what you're doing? Maybe they've fixed this in the past couple of years, maybe not. I refuse to even try it anymore. The last version I used slowed things down on my old PC and added relatively few usable new features...this after several years of development. No real time transforms. No deal. But many of the open software people will tell you that is IS as good as Photoshop. Yeah, maybe for adjusting the contrast settings.... Then they'll tell you that Photoshop is "specialized" and most people do not need it. Right, I guess I'm not most people and therefore I cannot use Linux. Both Windows and the Mac have "specialized" software (i.e. commercial software). And if you think the Mac has very few games compared to Windows, see what Linux has available outside of Wine (which sorta works for some things but not very well, IMO). It's a desert.
Why don't people use Linux?
#1> Lack of commercial software
#2> It's not anywhere near as intuitive as XP or OS X
#3> It lacks a unified standard which prevents #1 and #2 from ever happening.
It's that simple. And until Linux people get their heads out of the sand and recognize that's Linux's real problem, it'll never be that mainstream success SOME want it to be. Others LIKE it being an "elitist" OS and don't WANT mainstream success. The trouble is even if I liked it being "elitist" (hey who doesn't like to feel special?) I still need to use real software sooner later and so I end up booting into XP or going over to my Mac.
