Linux for Newbies - not?

[johnnywtllts]

Didn't want to steer the discussion in Granduke's post away from installing Suse, but did have a somewhat similar experience yesterday. I finally talked my college age daughter (lives at home) into letting me install Ubuntu on her desktop (think My space + IE + 23 yr old non-geek girl = bad, bad computer)

It went OK so far (Easy Ubuntu got her the flash, codecs etc she'll need in her online world, and gaim handled her Yahoo messenger). Her webcam is another story, but that can wait (Windows was so screwed up that it hadn't been working there either).

Here's my point though, when I saw Granduke's post, it reminded me how I hit a stop with my recent attempt at a Suse install (probably a hardware incompatibilty on my new desktop) but I just stopped! I started thinking about the Ubuntu install yesterday - it was not without glitches - and just because (at some point in the past) I really wanted to get Ubuntu to work, I knew what to do or was knowledgable enough with the command line to figure it out. Just like I became familiar with Slackware because I had to, because I wanted to keep running my old desktop and laptop.

Point is this - Linux for non-geek newbies is still at a serious disadvantage:

1)Windows users don't have to install Windows.

2) If we're honest about it, even we have difficulties at times that we work through because a) we have the geeky knowledge and b) we really want to!

I know this isn't a news flash, but I just wonder if maybe we delude ourselves a bit at times about how far Linux has come on the desktop.

Maybe I'm wrong, (I've only been running Linux successfully for less than a year - so I'm definitely not an expert) but check out the instructions for installing "Easy" Ubuntu, and I even had to tweak that.

BTW - looking at the prices that Dell is selling stuff for, Microsoft has got to be just about giving them the OS, so free as in beer might not be that much of a difference. On the other end (SLED on a Thinkpad is attractive to us) - but why would your average Joe opt for it?

It would take a lot of work, but a middle ground might be Windows dropping 98 support and Vista being so hardware hungry that you could convince current Windows users to put up with the glitches and learning curve to keep their existing hardware running (if they really want to).

[Tsuroerusu]

Didn't want to steer the discussion in Granduke's post away from installing Suse, but did have a somewhat similar experience yesterday. I finally talked my college age daughter (lives at home) into letting me install Ubuntu on her desktop (think My space + IE + 23 yr old non-geek girl = bad, bad computer)

Oh dude, you don't know how right you are!

Here's my point though, when I saw Granduke's post, it reminded me how I hit a stop with my recent attempt at a Suse install (probably a hardware incompatibilty on my new desktop) but I just stopped!

Where in the install does it just "stop" ?
I've heard others talk about this, but they've never really explained to me, where it just "stopped".

Point is this - Linux for non-geek newbies is still at a serious disadvantage:

As Chris DiBona said on TLLTS: "If you have to install an operating system, it sucks universally!"

1)Windows users don't have to install Windows.

Sure they do, when their machine is full of spyware about two weeks after they bring the machine home, they call Dell and gets instructions on how to run the restore discs. If they buy the boxed version of SUSE, they get 90-days of free installation support, and they can call SUSE and they'll walk them through the installation, although after the install is finished, they're on their own.

2) If we're honest about it, even we have difficulties at times that we work through because a) we have the geeky knowledge and b) we really want to!

Do you mean problems installing on our own machines? Because the first I'd do if I got a laptop with that stupid Broadcom wireless card built-in for zero dollars from a family member, would be to go on the internet and order a D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G DWL G650 PCMCIA card which has the Atheros chipset which I wouldn't have problems with, especially on SUSE since Novell has this great new way of packaging drivers for their distro, the Madwifi project makes such packages available here: http://madwifi.org/suse

I know this isn't a news flash, but I just wonder if maybe we delude ourselves a bit at times about how far Linux has come on the desktop.

Maybe I'm wrong, (I've only been running Linux successfully for less than a year - so I'm definitely not an expert) but check out the instructions for installing "Easy" Ubuntu, and I even had to tweak that.

I've been running Linux for over two years now. I started with Mandrake 10.0 PowerPack, ran that for about six months and switched to SUSE, mainly because Mandrake 10.1 didn't have the latest version of KDE and after having played with SUSE for about five months on a spare box, I generally liked SUSE's overall look and feel a great deal better, that's not to say I didn't like Mandrake I loved it, and I've just set my aunt up with Mandriva 2006 PowerPack, and she seems perfectly happy about it.
Personally, I think Linux has been a good solution for non-geek users of desktop computers for about 1½ years, and laptops for about a year, before then there were to many problems with all the power management and stuff, and some AMD Turion-based laptops still have a bunch of ACPI issues.

I have had more issues installing Windows on both desktops and laptops than I have had with Linux. A prime example is installing Windows XP on systems utilizing a SATA drive as the boot drive, if you try to install a version before SP1, you're hardly gonna get started, because Windows doesn't have the device support it needs, and even with an install disc with SP1 integrated, you have to manually load the drivers for the serial ATA controller from either a CD or a floppy to get the thing going!
With Linux, you just stick CD1 of whatever distro in and you're ready to go. Also, I've had Windows installs just totally bomb out, after it's done with the sorta DOS-looking phase of an XP install, and reboots to get to the more graphical part, it won't continue and complains about a bad disc or can't see the drive at all!!
And since Windows XP prior to SP2 has been out for longer than the SP2 version, you will find A LOT more XP installation discs that won't set up a firewall by default once the system is installed, the user who don't have a router, and installs Windows, boots it up and goes to download updates.... HE'LL GET ROOTED BEFORE HE HAS DOWNLOADED 10 MB OF THE LATEST GIANT SERVICE PACK!!!
Such enourmous lack of security and driver support is just baffling to me.
Sure, Linux can have a lot of issues with wireless cards not working right or not working at all and so forth, but I prefer not having a wireless card work at all, than having the driver being poorly written, so that it potentially causes security issues and stability/reliability problems and I absolutely hate having to deal with crappy connection managers that conflicts with WIndows' own etc. etc.
When people I talk to come to me and say that their laptop's wireless card doesn't work in Linux, I just tell them why it doesn't work and they should go buy a D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G DWL G650 PCMCIA wireless card, because that works very smoothly. Some of them then say something like "Well, with Windows my wireless work fine", and then I say "Well, the security of Windows is worse than not working, plus somewhere there is a cost to Linux, the software is certainly gratis in most cases, the cost comes in form of hardware, if you have some piece of hardware that doens't work, you probably need to go buy a replacement that does work, and that will cost you a little bit, but is it not worth it when you'll have a new OS that's of endlessly higher quality than what you're currently using?".

The way I look at the issue of non-geek people installing Linux, is this: If you can install Windows, even by just using them crappy restore discs that you'll get from Dell or HP (If you get any at all), you can absolutely install Linux (In this case I am referring to SUSE, Mandriva, Fedora and for the most part, Ubuntu).

BTW - looking at the prices that Dell is selling stuff for, Microsoft has got to be just about giving them the OS, so free as in beer might not be that much of a difference. On the other end (SLED on a Thinkpad is attractive to us) - but why would your average Joe opt for it?

He probably won't unless he's told by a friend to buy it instead of Windows laptop, the same is the case with a stinking Apple product, a Joe user probably won't buy it, or doesn't know about it, unless he's specifically "told to".

It would take a lot of work, but a middle ground might be Windows dropping 98 support and Vista being so hardware hungry that you could convince current Windows users to put up with the glitches and learning curve to keep their existing hardware running (if they really want to).

[johnnywtllts]

Good points Tsuroerusu, and I feel your pain, but I don't know man.

I don't know that things on the Windows side are bad enough for the average user, and I'm as surprised as you that people can use the crap, but they do.

My son is in college and works part-time at CompUSA (a fairly large computer/software reseller in the states here). He sells very little if any of the 3 distros they offer - Xandros, Suse and Linspire. The biggest seller is - you guessed it - Spysweeper and Norton Anti-virus. But that's the point, are they gonna pay the $70-80 bucks for that or the $50 for Linux?

Of course, he tells them about their restore disks (which most people are scared of,) and about Firefox. But they buy their medicine and go home and keep using Windows. I don't work in I.T., and I'm the only one I know of at my job that doesn't use Windows, and they're all chugging right along. My son is a gamer/video guy and he's a Windows user (Firefox + Updates + Anti-virus + 3 anti-spywares + careful behavior = smart Windows user). I mean spyware and such is bad, but anybody with even a little geek in them is either going to change their behavior or get Linux.

And I love Linux, but I can't say that using Linux is easier than Windows and be honest with myself. Using Linux is better , safer, more fulfilling, challenging, smarter, cooler and a lot more , but I don't think I'm ready say easier. Maybe in a limited sense, someone who just wanted to get their Email and browse the Web. But if they wanted to exist in the broader online/computing community (MP3s, M$ apps) and unsupported hardware etc - I don't know just yet. (Not that any of that is Linux' fault, but it's there - why would they put up with it?).

P.S. The problem I get with Suse 10.2 is at the point where it just loaded the kernel, about 2 minutes left on the 1st CD, it just freezes. MSI K8T mobo, AMD 64 2800+, Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4800. I posted on a couple of forums and will check to see if anybody has any answers yet. From what I've seen so far online, it must be a hardware issue, especially since every body on TLLTS hasn't had an issue yet.

[k9wkj]

i have a box here with a MSI kt8 series board and a 754 pin amd64 3000
and have not been able to get any 32bit distro to install right
usually bombs out with some sort of kernel issue
have flashed the bios to current level
but every 64bit os i have tried loads up fine
weird for a A64 as it shouldnt care
running sled10 64bit on it now works great

[Tsuroerusu]

I don't know that things on the Windows side are bad enough for the average user, and I'm as surprised as you that people can use the crap, but they do.

Monopoly man, that's the reason. Microsoft has the market so tightly locked down that people are, in a lot of cases, forced to use what they got, because there are no alternatives for them, for example, I havn't found ANY retail store in Denmark that sells SUSE's retail box product.
Also, one of the reasons a lot of people see a lot more issues with Linux than Windows, is because they're so used to these problems that they kind of do a workaround in their mind, like graphics drivers have workarounds for hardware bugs, so that they don't see these problems. For some reason, people don't "cut Linux some slack" and let it have it's own issues, but just let Windows do as many things wrong as it wants to, personally, I cut Linux some slack, and this way I see it having less issues than Windows, for example, if a distro can just provide MP3 support out of the box, then people aren't afraid of downloading codecs as much as they would be without MP3 support out of the box, because they're already downloading and installing codecs on Windows, try playing a DivX or XviD video on a fresh Windows install, not gonna play, so you need codecs.

My son is in college and works part-time at CompUSA (a fairly large computer/software reseller in the states here). He sells very little if any of the 3 distros they offer - Xandros, Suse and Linspire. The biggest seller is - you guessed it - Spysweeper and Norton Anti-virus. But that's the point, are they gonna pay the $70-80 bucks for that or the $50 for Linux?

I think the reason for this is advertising, Linux hasn't really had a BIG desktop ad campaign on TV or in other medias, sure Linspire has done some, but it's not like Dell, HP or Acer has.

Of course, he tells them about their restore disks (which most people are scared of,) and about Firefox.

These are the people who can't install Windows, and if you use my logic of "people who can install Windows can also install Linux", these people can't install Linux. This is why I think it's great that Lenovo will be preloading SLED 10 on their ThinkPad laptops, I'll bet ya a 1000 bucks that Lenovo themselves won't be aiming at home users, but I don't see why home users wouldn't be able to buy one of these laptops, as more sales means more income for Lenovo. You can go to novell.com and, as a home user, purchase SLED 10, Novell is not aiming for home users today, but they are not preventing home users from buying SLED 10, which I think is a good thing, and SLED 10 is very reasonably priced, it's just 50 bucks per year, which I think is less than Symantec's crappy Norton antivirus products, a lot of people don't like the per year thing, but that's because this pricing is aimed at businesses and not home users, but home users who don't have a problem with paying 50 bucks a year, can absolutely buy it, it's good for them to have the option, and it's good for Novell as it means more income for them.

But they buy their medicine and go home and keep using Windows.

People are afraid of change, it's a classic phenomenon and not something specific to computing, you can apply it to religion, society, and lots of other things.

My son is a gamer/video guy and he's a Windows user (Firefox + Updates + Anti-virus + 3 anti-spywares + careful behavior = smart Windows user).

A classic saying is that "nothing is perfect", and that "nothing is right for everyone", in the case of PC gamers, console gamers like myself is a very different story, Linux is currently not a very good option, unless the games they wanna play can run on Linux through the use of Cedega. It's not because Linux technically isn't a good option for gaming, because it certainly is, SDL is a great technology for this kind of stuff, but it's the same as with Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc. etc., the software is not available for Linux, hopefully this will change over time.

And I love Linux, but I can't say that using Linux is easier than Windows and be honest with myself. Using Linux is better , safer, more fulfilling, challenging, smarter, cooler and a lot more , but I don't think I'm ready say easier. Maybe in a limited sense, someone who just wanted to get their Email and browse the Web. But if they wanted to exist in the broader online/computing community, I don't know just yet.

I personally believe that Linux IS easier to use than Windows, but if we're going to say it isn't, I'd say it's just as easy to use as Windows, it just does some things differently. All the Mac whores out there always brag about how easy and wonderful their crappy OS is, but I think it's a lot harder for a Windows user to use, because it is SO different, not only is the way you do things different, but the UI is as well, with Linux, in the case of KDE, the interface is not very different, when I came to Linux and used KDE for the very first time, it took me two hours to get to know it almost inside and out, and I've gotten the same feeling as I have introduced other people to Linux, people just have to kind of learn the culture of Linux, and what I mean by that is the places where it does things it's own way. People going from Windows to Mac OS X have to learn the culture of the Mac, and this is a big change, this is the UI, and how things work and so many things is different, I don't see how in the world people could ever claim that OS X is easier to use/learn than Linux is, when Linux is just doing what you already do with some small differences here and there, and OS X is completely different.
OK, so what do I mean when I say that "in some places Linux does things it's own way" ? Well, that would be things such as driver installation and software installation. Driver installation is something I used to see as a big roadblock, because we always talk about how much easier things would be for people if hardware manufacturers would provide drivers for their hardware, but if you sit down and think about that for a minute, you get a different picture. If a new user installs Linux and notices that he needs to download a third party driver to get his scanner or whatever to work, he goes to manufacturer.com and goes to their Linux downloads, and what does he find? He finds a tarball or a zip file that contains some sourcecode or something, and even though the driver is available, he has no idea how to make use of it, aka even when the driver is available, it's still unusable for the new user because it *was* so difficult for them to install it, and even if a slightly more technically experienced user managed to install them, then we get into the whole issue of kernel updates being issued and the recompiling of the third party driver etc. etc.
Today, I don't see this as a problem anymore, thanks to Novell, they have developed this new thing called "Partner Linux Driver Process", which you can read about here:

http://en.opensuse.org/Kernel_Module_Packages
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index. ... er_Process
http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index. ... er_Process
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS5423433687.html

I'm not gonna go into the more enterprise oriented parts of this, such as certification, but for the end user, this means that the manufacturer sets up a repository that contains the driver packages, and when the user goes to the Linux driver page on the manufacturer's website he'll get instructions on how to add this repository to the package manager, and install the packages he needs to get the driver support he needs to use the hardware that needs third party drivers. When kernel updates are released, through dependencies the system makes sure that the kernel aren't updated before an updated kernel module is available from the manufacturer's repository or that the current one will work with the new kernel. So for example in my own case, my kernel won't be updated unless the NVIDIA module that I already have installed will work with the updated kernel, or that updated kernel modules are available from NVIDIA through their driver repository (ftp://download.nvidia.com/novell). If you look at this, this makes for an even better experience than Windows offers, as updates won't break driver support, which is something I have seen happen several times in the Windows world, and yes, I realize that this is a Novell only thing, but I don't see why Ubuntu or other distros couldn't do something similar, which I think they already do, but not as efficiently in my mind.

Problems with software installation, is something I think got solved almost completely about 1½ years ago, when dependencies was no longer a problem for any modern distro, the only thing I think needs to be done is to let the user know HOW to install software on the distribution they use, distros don't do that strongly enough I think, because once the user knows what to do, it's a trivial thing for him or her to do, same goes for software installation on Windows, becaus X number of years ago it wasn't something that was difficult anymore, but the user had to know what to do in order for it not to be difficult, because I remember installing software on Windows 95 by manually putting .dll files into system folders and adding four or five registry strings/values to the Windows Registry to make it see and use the new libraries, and let me tell you something, that was a real big pain in the butt, because that Windows Registry man, that is just a nightmare to navigate through! It's like one of those mythological mazes!!

Today, when you wanna install software on Linux, you don't go to the developer's website to get the software, you need to go to your distributer itself, or it's community. Today, it's the distributer that goes to the developer's website, and gets a hold of the sourcecode, or even just binaries in the case of some non-Free software, and packages it/them up and makes it available to their users, who go to the distributer by having added a big repository (I think all distributions should do this out of the box, but for some reason some still don't) to their package manager, and installing through that.
If the distributer does not provide the software the user needs, which is very much the case with multimedia related stuff, the user needs to turn to the distribution's community, which in this case would mean the Guru+Packman repositores for SUSE, Livna for Fedora, and PLF+SoS for Mandriva, and add their repositories and then install through those.
This may seem like a lot for a user to learn, but I've found it not to be that big a deal if you or the distributer tells the user about it, for example, Fedora has their main+extras repositories set up out of the box, so the user has access to a whole shitload of additional stuff, for some darn reason that I just don't understand, SUSE and Mandriva still doesn't do this, they set up their installation CDs as an installation source, not their big repositories available on the internet. This is where software installation on Linux still needs a little bit of polish, but so far it's within nanometers from being good enough for everyday users. Here's a good example of it being within nanometers:

http://en.opensuse.org/Package_Repositories
http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_ ... positories

These two pages needs to be more instructional and explain to the user what he or she needs to do, and the distribution should have it's main repositories set up out of the box. Also, correct me if I am wrong, but I don't believe it's illegal for Novell to "tell" the users where to get stuff like MPlayer and all and that related stuff, and by telling I mean having their openSUSE wiki explain that they are, by law, restricted from distributing things such as XviD/QuickTime/Windows Media/Other playback, and that the user can get this from the Packman repository which is located "here", and that the user should add "this" URL to the ZEN package management system, and then they have all the stuff they need available to them.
I talked to some SUSE people on IRC (#opensuse @ Freenode) and they said that the reason they rely on Real to, through the Helix framework, provide MP3 playback for their distribution is because the fees for distributing ANY sort of MP3 encoder/decoder is either 60,000 dollars per year or 5 dollars per copy, and that is just not an option for them ([Sarcasm] Ain't software idea patents just a wonderful thing? [/Sarcasm]).

Ubuntu provides a lot of controversial packages (MPlayer, FFmpeg, additional codec support for Xine etc. etc.) through their universe repository (I don't know how in the world they can do this and "get away with it"), which the user can enable through Synaptic, and that is a good option as well, but it still has this sort of post-install process to it, and I don't think that is going to change any time soon, as the US is probably still gonna have software idea patents for many years to come, we just have to find ways to deal with them, though things such as the GPL and partnerships like Novell does with Real.

P.S. The problem I get with Suse 10.2 is at the point where it just loaded the kernel, about 2 minutes left on the 1st CD, it just freezes. MSI K8T mobo, AMD 64 2800+, Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4800. I posted on a couple of forums and will check to see if anybody has any answers yet. From what I've seen so far online, it must be a hardware issue, especially since every body on TLLTS hasn't had an issue yet.

Which version did you try? 32-bit or 64-bit? SUSE's AMD64 support is very good, they have been supporting it for VERY CLOSE to three years now, and were the first distro to support the AMD64 platform.

[johnnywtllts]

k9wkj,

I've successfully loaded Fedora 32 and 64, Ubuntu 32, Slackware 10.2 and Puppy Linux so far on this mobo. (Also had an issue with Ubuntu 64). But I haven't spent a lot of time looking into any of the issues - I've been using Ubuntu Breezy 32 as my main OS on this computer.


Tsuroerusu,

Great points and info. You're exactly right that the biggest installation problems seem to be nothing once you get the right info - it's just acquiring the right info that seems to the biggest hurdle. (I think I remember a blog entry once by someone that was titled "10 things I wish I'd known about Linux before".)

I am looking forward to trying out Suse. As you've shown and others, they seem to be doing good stuff even though they might be aiming higher than the audience we've been discussing so far. On the other end of the spectrum, as in Mowestusa's topic the other day - you have the chance to save older hardware on the low-end. It would be nice if Linux could make some inroads with the people in the middle who'll have to make the decision to upgrade to Vista soon, I guess cost will still be an issue there though (if you can get an entire new M$ computer system for $300 from Dell).

There may still be hope though - have you listened to the latest Security Now - "Vista's Virgin Stack"? Maybe things actually could get bad enough in the Windows world.

So that's the ticket - what's bad for Window's users is good for Linux. What we need are higher Windows prices and more security issues - and for Apple to keep their ridiculous prices up. Linux Prevails!

[jsusanka]

i have a box here with a MSI kt8 series board and a 754 pin amd64 3000
and have not been able to get any 32bit distro to install right
usually bombs out with some sort of kernel issue
have flashed the bios to current level
but every 64bit os i have tried loads up fine
weird for a A64 as it shouldnt care
running sled10 64bit on it now works great

if it is any conselation I too have a amd64 machine that I tried to get ubuntu 5.10 32 bit installed and was never able to - it alway blew up loading initrd close to the end of the install.

anyway i have put suse on it and never looked back - it runs great and never ever crashes no matter what I throw at it. and this machine has a lot including web server apapche/zope/plone mysql/postgres/php - and tv tuner card for converting my home movies when I have to - I still have a analog video recorder and so I have to plug the tapes into the vcr I have hooked up to the tuner card to make family dvd's - and to also record the occasional tv show with streamer. I always wanted to try another 32 bit distro but suse runs so darn good when i sit down to do it I just sit there and say why?

so I do think there are some 64 bit motherboard/cpu combos that won't take a 32 bit distro -