Uellue's Blog

Linux headaches

It was recently announced on Slashdot that Desktop Linux is dead. Perfect flame bait! Of course all the Linux zealots insisted that it is very much alive, and one even claimed that it works mostly without any headache and tinkering.

But none of my desktop installations worked out-of-the-box so far: I always had to search information on the Internet, download stuff, read through documentation and work on the command line in order to get everything up and running the way I want to. And here is a list of things that I had to fix during the last one or two years, mostly on various versions of Ubuntu Linux:

Any newbie user would be pretty much lost if he encountered any of these problems. ESPECIALLY preinstalled versions of Linux are poorly configured, and too much common hardware is not properly supported. But the fact that I still use Linux on all my computers means that it can't be too bad... Most stuff I could fix at the end of the day, and many, many things work much better than on other operating systems.

My conclusion: Desktop Linux is certainly not dead, it is just not mainstream. And that's not a bad thing, in my opinion.