I want to preface this rant (and it’s going to be a rant) with some background. I do this not trumpet my own experience , but to point out that I’m not ranting because I’m not capable. I’ve been playing with (and programming) computers for about 25 years. I ran my first Unix-based computer 17 years ago, started using Linux 12 years ago, and worked as a professional system administrator on Unix systems for over a decade. For everyday of the last 12 years I’ve had a personal unix server running in my home. Which is to say that I’ve got skillz. I fear no command line, and I can fsck with the best.
The failure of Linux is that there is no practical way for an average person to use Linux as their desktop. If a user encounters a problem, there is no source they can reliably turn for support. My particular rant addresses one such instance, but there are more, many more.
Over the last year I abandoned Windows on all my machines, eventually landing on Ubuntu for both my spare laptop and the prototype MythHDTV setup. Overall getting both systems up and running was relatively painless — except for wireless access. The house uses an 802.11g wireless access point running WPA encryption; nothing too exotic (ok, we don’t broadcast our SSID, but I’m flexible on that). But my attempts to bring these two systems onto the wireless network met with failure at every turn. The laptop has an Atheros 5212 chipset, supported by the madwifi open-source, as well as, BSD wireless drivers. In neither case could I get the system to associate with the base-station (iwconfig, iwpriv, wpa_supplicant not withstanding). On the MythHDTV (built from my Shuttle) the built-in adapter doesn’t support WPA (with or without wpa_supplicant), and the two external usb adapters I tried wouldn’t connect with the basestation using open source drivers or ndiswrapper.
After 2 months of wasted effort I’ve finally capitulated. The little laptop is now running FreeBSD 6.2, which was more tedious to setup for Gnome, but had wireless working in minutes. And I’m about to order a wireless bridge for the MythTV box, since I can’t reliably find a wireless adapter that works under Linux.
I know that part of the problem lies with the vendors, cost cutting measures mean that they’re using runtime loaded firmware in the devices (which is going to be a problem for more and more types of devices) and Linux (or Mac) support isn’t high on their lists. But there is a large portion of the blame that can be placed on the Linux community. I spent hours scouring the net looking for information to help diagnose/fix the wireless configuration on the systems to no avail. There is no single source (or even a reliable set of sources) of diagnostic support. When there is a clue how to proceed it’s poorly documented, and often incorrect or incomplete. But more glaringly the Linux community seems to have lost sight of the practicality of using computers. It’s not just good enough to mimic the features of a commercial OS, the experience of using the system has to accessible to the average person.
Why isn’t there a web-based diagnostic center for Linux users? A tool that walks users step-by-step through diagnosing and fixing problems with their system. A single, interactive, knowledge-based solution for supporting real users with real problems using Linux. No stale links to external sites, no referring to out-of-date how-to’s and broken message boards. Until such a tool (or it’s functional equivalent) exists, Linux on every desktop is a long way away.