Towards Linux Desktop Comfort

or, Why Doesn't Johnny Run Linux?

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks!

It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps

at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!" Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is

true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!" -- In The Beginning Was The Commandline, Neil Stephenson

[See also my Scale4X presentation on this topic]

Most of my non-tech-savvy acquaintances, if given a choice between a just-barely-working Microsoft Windows 98 system and a nicely purring but alien Linux system, will choose the Microsoft Windows system.

Odd though it may seem, the average Joe is comfortable with Microsoft Windows. The challenge facing desktop Linux is to achieve the same or greater level of comfort that Microsoft Windows enjoys.

Here are a few areas where Linux's comfort level needs to be raised before it can thrive on the desktop, plus links to ongoing work in these areas:

win 96MB win 352MB suse 96MB suse 352MB Linspire 96MB Linspire 352MB boot/login 50 25 94 55 132 107 start OOo2.0 - - 48 10 56 16 start MS Word 2003 3 3 - - - - CPU: 1.7GHz Sempron

RAM: 128MB (32MB taken up by the onboard graphics), also tested with an extra 256MB of RAM installed

OS: OpenSuse 10.0, Linspire 5.0, or Windows XP Pro sp2

Desktop: KDE (not sure which version)



That system is more or less unusable as shipped due to the observed poor performance. (I'm not trusting George here; I verified this myself.) Presumably the similarly equipped system sold by Wal-Mart suffers as well. This gives Linux a bad reputation. Surely we can improve our performance on 96MB machines.

But given the software as it stands, surely retailers can configure their systems to perform well. To determine how much RAM OpenOffice 2.0 really wants, I benchmarked Red Hat 9 on a dual 650MHz Pentium 3 system using lwm in place of kde or gnome. Boot time and firefox 1.5 startup were constant at about 60 and 10 seconds regardless of RAM, but OpenOffice 2.0 startup time varied as follows:

64MB 96MB 128MB 192MB 448MB OOo2.0 startup 41 28 21 15 12

(I did similar benchmarks on an Athlon 64 laptop, and was surprised to find that the Windows version of OpenOffice starts faster under Wine than the Linux version does when the system only has 96MB of RAM! Something's gotta be wrong there.)

Related links:

Related links:

Case in point: OpenOffice. Some blind users are worried that OpenOffice will be hard to use. Sun has put lots of work into making OpenOffice fully accessible but admits there's more to do. They're planning to use the 2.0.2 release of OpenOffice to address a few issues in OpenOffice, and they're working on an open source tool called Orca that should make many users happy. (Especially since it replaces packages that cost $500-$1000.)

Related links:

Related links:

Related links:

In this sense, Linux is highly fragmented; there is no universally accepted way of packaging third-party Linux software for sale or download, as each distribution requires slightly different toolchains or packagers. The LSB is an effort to solve this problem; their Desktop profile should make it possible to package the most common desktop Linux software portably sometime in 2006.

But above and beyond the current LSB goals, we should enhance updaters like apt-get, yum, and up2date to treat LSB packages as first-class citizens. It should be possible in Debian to use "apt-get install" to install or upgrade apps built as LSB packages, and it should be easy to add third parties' repositories to the network updaters.

Distributions can help by making sure they're LSB-compliant. Developers can help by packaging their applications as LSB packages and giving feedback to the LSB project.

Related links:

Related links:

Wireless, sound, and video drivers are all somewhat problematic; many drivers exist, but things still don't quite Just Work.

if you plug in a USB camera, printer, or scanner, or an Ethernet cable, it should work without asking you any questions and without requiring a reboot

if you leave a USB device powered off when you boot, the system should not ask you whether you want to unconfigure it

if you close your laptop, it should hibernate or suspend properly (ok, this isn't quite pluggability, but it's close)

Related links:

Fry's does sell them occasionally, but always puts Linux on computers which are slower than any they sell with Windows.

Related links:

Although small customers are generally unaffected by this issue, the largest potential customers are more likely to be worried. Risk management and indemnification might be needed to quell these fears and allow the largest customers to adopt Linux without fear.

Related links:

To increase the pool of helpers, we should encourage the use of Linux in education; maybe Joe User can at least ask the smart kid down the block, if not his neighbor. And to increase the number of friends and relatives each helper can reach, we should encourage the development of easier ways to use things like X, VNC, and NX to control machines behind firewalls.

Related links:

Q: What OS do the CEOs and CFOs of IBM and Red Hat run on their laptops? If the answer isn't "Linux", why not?

Related links:

Comments and corrections welcome. Contact the author at dank at kegel.com

Last Change 15 Mar 2007

Copyright 2005, 2006, Dan Kegel