The latest Ubuntu only suspends and resumes correctly on my wife’s laptop with the linux-backports package that pulls in the Atheros driver from 2.6.28. Upgrading at beta time (she’s my test guinea-pig, you see) caused flash to stop playing audio because of a bug in pulseaudio.

A friend of mine who does Linux kernel work for a living just switched to a MacBook because he observed that after upgrading to a more recent Ubuntu his battery life dropped from 3 hours to 45 minutes – useless for a transatlantic flight.

I was chatting with a colleague of mine who asked me the question “Are we losing our idealism?”. I think that in a lot of cases, 10 years into this fight, I’m starting to find that the Windows desktop has actually been good enough. So suddenly where I might before have been willing to spend time doing ACPI dumps, and check the bleeding-edge FD.o git repos to see if I could get a driver combination that Just Works(tm), I’m now inclined to just wait and see if another apt-get upgrade will get my test laptop to where it will work. The nice part is that with the Ubuntu 8.10 release, I finally seem to have a “yes” on one machine – my wife’s laptop. If we can start seeing yeses like this, we’ll at least have the people who are interested ideologically happily running their machines. Until that happens, I can’t imagine how we’ll see gains anywhere else.

As an academic, I exclusively use operating systems based on the linux kernel, and never had a serious problem. Furthermore, I understand that SPSS is available for GNU/Linux based systems; I’ve not tried it, because it’s non-free. But there is a really user friendly, tried and tested, usable free version of SPSS, called PSPP. PSPP looks like spss, feels like spss does much of the same functionality as spss but it is GPL’d and doesn’t cost an extraordinary amount of money. Some of the advanced statistical methods are lacking, but anyone who understands what those are for is clever enough to use R, Gretl or another more advanced tool.

that is the greatest idea i’ve heard in the “how to help linux flip the desktop” debate for a loong time!

Christian worries about how to grow the desktop share in the free desktop. … Adobe releasing Flash 10 for Linux on the same day as other platforms.

Unheard of.

So what does mean for Christian’s question? …

done.

A few untouched areas:

There’s a huge opportunity when someone is upgrading their OS, where the choice is: do I upgrade to Vista or upgrade to a Linux distro? The latter is very appealing, and there’s real money at stake. Get people to try it with a Live CD.

There’s a medium opportunity when someone is migrating to a new computer (which is just about everyone over 12 years old). Yes the new computer comes with latest Windows “for free”. But there’s still real money and hassle at stake for all the old programs that no longer run. Maybe distros could ship with an easy way to virtualize your old copy of Windows 98 or 2000.

A free desktop has subtle but significant benefits besides price and ideals that aren’t emphasized enough. A lot result from the collaboration that FOSS makes possible.

* I have *EIGHT* updater programs constantly running on my Windows PCs (Windows, Acrobat, those jerks Symantec, iTunes, Java, Lenovo ThinkVantage Apps, Google). Plus a dozen other programs checking for their own updates like Firefox. It’s ridiculous! One updater for all my software is a huge win.

* I have Windows’ control panel to configure my screens, but then Intel or ATI adds its own systray icon for their graphics hardware, then Lenovo adds another one for presentations, and they all fight each other. Likewise in my systray I have Windows’ wireless network icon plus Lenovo’s Connection Manager both trying to decide whether to turn on Wi-Fi. Trying to enhance a closed source O.S. is a major pain for hardware vendors and users.

Keep the faith!

* People will never change if they don’t have to.
* People will change if they see something that compels them. Something that makes them feel like they’re missing out on something. Havoc is right, you have to know what motivates people before you can target them and drive them to want to change.

People switch from Windows to Mac because they become convinced that “things just work”, or “I can play w/ my photos and home movies faster”, or iTunes will work better with my iPod, or somesuch. And frankly, people stay on Mac at a higher rate because the high cost associated with the switch ends up reinforcing/justifying it in many people’s mind – they will repeat to themselves over and over again how important it is for them to stay on Mac now because they just spent a lot of money.

Some of us have switched to Linux because of reasons like:

* We care about our own freedoms above most other things.
* We want to learn more about the environment we’re in.
* We value flexibility of configuration over other things. (There’s got to be a way to make these 5 things work together, despite the fact that no one else has ever done it…)
* We can’t afford the alternatives.
* We value lack-of-long-term-change above other things. (This is an interesting one because open source projects tend to be “category-killers”, you’re far more likely to use GIMP or Firefox or some other tool in pretty much the exact same way for the rest of your life. You are less likely to have to change what you know. This simply reinforces the notion that people don’t want to change if they don’t have to. However, most people don’t carry enough of a long-term view to actually consider this one.)

These are great reasons, but they aren’t good enough reasons for most people to change.

That’s why the place to get it right first is with the New. Netbooks are a great example, but we’re going to lose that battle quickly if more isn’t done soon. Mobile phones are a good example. The more you get people to adopt the New, the more they’re re-think the Old in terms of the New. E.g. you want people to say things like “My old PC just doesn’t work right w/ my hot new Android phone or my cool new netbook – what do I need to change to make it work better?”

I read a long time ago that Stu Feldman of Bell Labs & IBM fame, the original author of the original “make” utility, had a 5-point system for determining when something was mature. It went roughly like this:

1. You have a good idea.
2. You can actually make it work.
3. You can convince a friend to try it.
4. People no longer ask you why you’re doing this.
5. Others get asked why they’re not doing it.

Given that 5 point scale, stop and think about Linux on the desktop. Where do you think we’re at?

When it comes to attracting casual users such as my fellow college students, we need to take a close look at usage patterns. Most students, for instance, do very little other than basic word processing, instant messaging, and web browsing, specifically YouTube. In my evaluation, we’re doing well on each of those counts besides than the last.

While I agree with the sentiment, I must disagree with the statement about games. Most families share a computer, and there is at least one person there who wants to play a game. They don’t play the game often enough to warrant buying it. The huge pirate market in software and games means that Windows effectively has more software available for free.

This is just what I have seen from experience about the same age group.

* stick in there, make sure you can keep playing for a LONG time
(at least the FSF gets this part), maybe wait for the market to
mature/shift/change, wait for that one opening, don’t give up

* match all of the important features that the competitor has, and
offer an excellent compatibility story for migrating users
(MS Excel runs Lotus 1-2-3 macros and IE had a help menu item “For Netscape users” etc)

* try to build up one or a few scenarios that the competitor does not have (killer apps)
I think ubuntu is doing great here (wireless switching and 3G is much easier in ubuntu).

—

The long story is told above of course. I think it comes down to:

* Flash needs to just work and not crash (honestly, how hard can it be?
libflashsupport is open source and adobe IS cooperating)

* Find a market that really _needs_ GNU/Linux and use that market to
evolve and grow it to the point that it can break into the harder established markets.

* Listen to the users: linuxhaters.blogspot.com

* Fully integrated WINE and MONO.
* Make windows users feel at home (backspace==BACK in FF)
* Make sure SAMBA works out of the box (the stuff that ships
today in ubuntu is not nearly good enough, maybe it would help
to add better error messages like “cant connect to windows machine
because of BLAH and maybe then some devs will actually fix it.
Ironically SAMBA works perfectly between *nix machines but it
seems nobody is testing the user experience for copying files
between windows and ubuntu machines)

* “Twelve year olds don’t give a shit about Exchange”.
I agree that targeting young people is a good idea. They are not afraid to
try stuff, they learn quickly and they don’t have tons of data to backup
before migrating.

* Higher quality graphics drivers (high performance, open source)
WHICH ENABLES: new super nice themes/effects and consistency (nice smooth effects)

* Stop making de-stabilizing features (pulse audio in hardy sucked big time).
I like pulse but man try to land things smoother!

* When booting on unsupported hardware or without the correct drivers,
linux needs to revert to offer some sort of failsafe operation mode.
This goes for graphics cards and disk controllers etc.

* Content creation needs to be as strong on linux as content consumption is,
this includes making sure that it’s trivial and “just works” to record and
upload youtube videos etc.

* Someone said “professional rich client apps” but I honestly don’t think those
are that important. How many CADing architects is there about there?

* Someone above wrote this (which I thought was an absolutely great comment):
Going from “less than the sum of its parts” to “more than the sum of its parts.”
The little touches help fuse the cohesive experience into a synergistically effective whole.