Not Ready for General Use
Jun. 21st, 2005 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fishsupremeA couple nights ago, when I couldn't get to sleep, I booted up a Knoppix Linux Live CD, which lets you run a Linux environment off of a RAM drive. I played around with it for a couple hours, and discovered that I really like KDE (one of the Linux window managers.) I was, however, amused to find that the things I like it for are precisely the things we always tried to avoid at Microsoft -- it provides a ton of options for everything, all the time. There's a wealth of information and configuration available to the user. As a geek, this is nice -- for most general users, it's an information overload that confuses them.
Well, I decided that since I'll be soon taking a job where some Unix knowledge is required, it would be nice to have a Linux/BSD/other-Unix-like-OS system to play around with and explore. I looked over distribution choices and their advantages and disadvantages. I actually started out with Gentoo, for the simple reason that I don't actually know how a Linux system is architected and put together, and thought this would help me figure that out. Gentoo is a source-only distribution; you have to build the whole thing on your PC.
And you know, it actually did. I know how the filesystem is assembled on boot now, and what the process is for starting up a Linux system. I learned quite a bit from the several hours I spent doing this. However, the problem with a source-only distribution is that it takes a long time to get a usable system, simply because compiling and linking, even on a high-end system, are very time-consuming. I decided I'd come back to this later, and for now just install a binary distro to play around with.
I downloaded an ISO of the Fedora Core install DVD and burned it to a disc. Fedora Core is actually meant to be a Windows-alternative; a full Linux system usable by general home users (in its defense, it makes no claims of being complete yet -- only that this is intended eventually.) Thus, it has a nice graphical install process. Now, since I'm installing a dual-boot system I had to manually partition the drive, and the manual partition interface would not be comprehensible to a non-technical user; on one hand, this isn't the base configuration, but on the other hand, I'd imagine most people installing this on their PC want to dual-boot, so this is a bit of a usability issue. I began the install, and about 10 minutes into it, it failed due to an unspecified error copying from the disc.
I generated an ISO from the disc and checked its SHA1 sum with the one posted on the Fedora Core site; they didn't match, apparently I'd burned a bad disc. So I burned another one (the downloaded image on my hard drive had the correct sum), and once again checked the SHA1 sum -- this time it matched. Thus, I know the disc is perfect -- there's no errors on the disc.
Figuring this was the problem, I retried the install. Four times. Each time it failed in a different location, due to an unspecified error. I've still not managed to get it to install.
Now, this may be a hardware issue -- possibly I'm getting 1-bit errors during the disc read due to a faulty drive or connection. This said, in four years with this drive I've never had a read error on a disc that wasn't either defective or dirty, but it's possible. But even if it is, this points to a very serious usability issue that's very easily fixed -- the installer treats all errors as fatal.
Microsoft OSs, even back to the days of DOS 2.2, do not consider read errors fatal. Instead, they display the classic prompt of "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" While perhaps not completely obvious to general users, this allows recovery from a simple read error -- you can Retry if it was a bad read (the option to Retry would have meant my install would have worked by now; there's nothing wrong with the disc), or Ignore if it's truly an unrecoverable error but you don't care all that much about the particular file it was accessing. Only if you choose the Abort is the error considered fatal and the entire process cancelled.
These are the sorts of issues Linux systems will need to get past in order to be generally accepted -- the problem they have is not Microsoft's market power or the number of applications available for Microsoft software. The problem is simple usability, the sorts of issues that would never make it past the first step of the design phase at Microsoft. At Microsoft, I had to consistently reject good, useful features on the grounds that nontechnical users might not understand them. But open-source projects tend not to have usability engineers; it's like a software product created entirely by devs, with no one else on the team.
Now I'll see if I can find a distribution to play with that doesn't involve copying 4 GB of data off a disc. That or continue compiling Gentoo; at least I was learning quite a bit from that process.
Well, I decided that since I'll be soon taking a job where some Unix knowledge is required, it would be nice to have a Linux/BSD/other-Unix-like-OS system to play around with and explore. I looked over distribution choices and their advantages and disadvantages. I actually started out with Gentoo, for the simple reason that I don't actually know how a Linux system is architected and put together, and thought this would help me figure that out. Gentoo is a source-only distribution; you have to build the whole thing on your PC.
And you know, it actually did. I know how the filesystem is assembled on boot now, and what the process is for starting up a Linux system. I learned quite a bit from the several hours I spent doing this. However, the problem with a source-only distribution is that it takes a long time to get a usable system, simply because compiling and linking, even on a high-end system, are very time-consuming. I decided I'd come back to this later, and for now just install a binary distro to play around with.
I downloaded an ISO of the Fedora Core install DVD and burned it to a disc. Fedora Core is actually meant to be a Windows-alternative; a full Linux system usable by general home users (in its defense, it makes no claims of being complete yet -- only that this is intended eventually.) Thus, it has a nice graphical install process. Now, since I'm installing a dual-boot system I had to manually partition the drive, and the manual partition interface would not be comprehensible to a non-technical user; on one hand, this isn't the base configuration, but on the other hand, I'd imagine most people installing this on their PC want to dual-boot, so this is a bit of a usability issue. I began the install, and about 10 minutes into it, it failed due to an unspecified error copying from the disc.
I generated an ISO from the disc and checked its SHA1 sum with the one posted on the Fedora Core site; they didn't match, apparently I'd burned a bad disc. So I burned another one (the downloaded image on my hard drive had the correct sum), and once again checked the SHA1 sum -- this time it matched. Thus, I know the disc is perfect -- there's no errors on the disc.
Figuring this was the problem, I retried the install. Four times. Each time it failed in a different location, due to an unspecified error. I've still not managed to get it to install.
Now, this may be a hardware issue -- possibly I'm getting 1-bit errors during the disc read due to a faulty drive or connection. This said, in four years with this drive I've never had a read error on a disc that wasn't either defective or dirty, but it's possible. But even if it is, this points to a very serious usability issue that's very easily fixed -- the installer treats all errors as fatal.
Microsoft OSs, even back to the days of DOS 2.2, do not consider read errors fatal. Instead, they display the classic prompt of "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" While perhaps not completely obvious to general users, this allows recovery from a simple read error -- you can Retry if it was a bad read (the option to Retry would have meant my install would have worked by now; there's nothing wrong with the disc), or Ignore if it's truly an unrecoverable error but you don't care all that much about the particular file it was accessing. Only if you choose the Abort is the error considered fatal and the entire process cancelled.
These are the sorts of issues Linux systems will need to get past in order to be generally accepted -- the problem they have is not Microsoft's market power or the number of applications available for Microsoft software. The problem is simple usability, the sorts of issues that would never make it past the first step of the design phase at Microsoft. At Microsoft, I had to consistently reject good, useful features on the grounds that nontechnical users might not understand them. But open-source projects tend not to have usability engineers; it's like a software product created entirely by devs, with no one else on the team.
Now I'll see if I can find a distribution to play with that doesn't involve copying 4 GB of data off a disc. That or continue compiling Gentoo; at least I was learning quite a bit from that process.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 08:52 pm (UTC)Personally, I find Linux scary... and I'm probably technical enough to qualify for its intended audience. I find the entire process intimidating. I think this is mostly because of the documentation. The documentation is, to put it bluntly, a fucking mess.
For starters, the installation process is documented *on the web*, which strikes me as galactically stupid -- if I had an internet connection, I'd also have an OS already and thus probably wouldn't need Linux. While I admit this is fine for those of us who are using this as our primary OS, it's entirely useless for the general user Linux wants to woo -- the user who is using Linux as their sole OS and won't have an internet connection until Linux is actually installed. Is it really that hard to put an explanation of the installation options on the screen during the installation process? My router's UI does that whenever I want to change the settings -- it's extremely handy.
The other problem with the docs is that it's written, as you pointed out, by devs. Half the time I can barely understand what the docs are saying; my grandmother doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Windows gives you plenty of walkthroughs; Linux gives you "man chmod".
The other thing I've noticed is that while it's great that steps have been made to document config files and write GUI apps that make things easier on the user, they really don't. The GUI apps generally don't take the time to actually *explain* anything, instead just masking the config file editing; the config files, while well documented, are still config files. No matter how well you document a config file, having a user performing the following steps to change things...
1.) Find the config file
2.) Edit to taste
3.) If you're lucky, restart the service; if not, recompile the application and restart it
... is not intuitive. Ever.
I fully admit that it may have been that I was using a crappy flavor -- I tried Debian, I think -- but that was one of the problems in the first place: which flavor to use. With Windows, it's simple: XP. Home or pro? Choose one; the installation and usage processes will be identical. But Red Hat vs. Debian vs. Gentoo vs. Mandrake vs. TinyLinux vs. Bob's Homebrewed Distro? Balls if I know.
I should give it another shot -- I gave up last time when I was unable to do something as simple as sharing out a media drive on the Linux box so that the Windows machine could use it -- but I dread doing it.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 11:02 pm (UTC)The desktop environments have made tremendous progress as well. They look great and configuring them isn't hard to do at all. It is different though. Just like anything else there is a learning curve.
I agree that the distro selection is confusing. If the linux community ever really wants to compete with the MS market share they need to work on one damn distro and put their focus on usability. Having a choice is nice, but really...is it that necessary? It drives me crazy when one flavor has a wonderful package management system that gets all dependencies, configures, compiles and installs everything, but has a horrible implementation of *everything* else :P
no subject
Date: 2005-06-22 12:37 am (UTC)I am inclined to give it another shot, though. With a different distro. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-22 01:26 am (UTC)Again, I'm recommending something I don't really use myself, but if you wanna give it another shot, Ubuntu has this (http://ubuntuguide.org/).
Linux isn't gonna be super user friendly until one of the big Linux-backing companies, possibly HP, gets serious about the desktop market. Which may be when hell freezes over, since I guess most of the money's in servers.
Only problem with Ubuntu is they don't really do KDE, only Gnome, and KDE is infinitely easier to use.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 10:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 11:38 pm (UTC)The advantage that slack and free have other competing flavors, in my view, is that they don't try to be a Windows replacement for completely new people. Yes, there's a bit of work involved. Yes, Ari's grandmother probably couldn't figure it out. :D But they're both fairly compact, and they both run very well once you get them running. And as someone who is relatively new to *ix, but very experienced with DOS and Windows, I was able to get through the installs relatively painlessly. Not to say I didn't use my internet connection to look stuff up on a different PC while I was doing the install; I did that quite a bit actually.
The bottom line is, I don't think *ix is ready to replace Windows yet, and yes, it's an issue with usability AND with the apps available. I'm not sure when (if ever) it will be ready to do so, and frankly I don't care. I have enough PCs to where it's not an issue; my main PC will probably always have Windows on it, and I'll still have five or six running *ix.
Also, yeah. Fedora kinda sucks. RedHat has always been bloated, because they ARE trying to replace Windows. Therefore they try to make it super easy to install (comparatively) and it ends up NOT installing on many configs. Much like it did on yours.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-22 03:20 am (UTC)As for install docs, while compiling Gentoo I have the docs open in Lynx on one console while I work on the other, and switch between them. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-21 11:55 pm (UTC)Quite right.
When contemplating the successful there will always be those who feel compelled to ascribe that success not to the superiority of the product, system, person, or, indeed, nation, but to nefarious behavior, dumb luck, and such.
Thus is the position of everyone from Bill Gates haters to Jacques Chirac explained.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-22 01:19 am (UTC)You might try Ubuntu. It still comes on a big fat DVD, but it might like your hardware better. I couldn't get it to install properly because it didn't like my graphics card and monitor, though I eventually fixed that with an updated Nvidia driver.