Reading your article, I almost cried, not because what you wrote was inherently untrue, but because for some reason people still like to compare apples with oranges, assuming that being round, they are basically the same. If you are able, do read through this – I promise it becomes less of rant toward the end…

KDE4.1 on Debian

You started your article innocuously enough with:

“Last month I decided to see whether ordinary consumer Linux was useful to normal people.”

A perfectly valid subject to research and one I like seeing discussed, especially given that I am a Linux user (and before that a Solaris user) and I am keen to have others join me in my ivory tower, albeit somewhere below me. However, it is at this point, this initial step that for me, your comparison breaks.

Linux and Windows are both operating systems, they both work on similar hardware and both provide an overlapping range of capabilities (although all in all you can do far more with a Linux distribution than you can with stock Windows). The difference is that you installed Linux on the machine you use it on, whilst it is somewhat likely that someone else installed Windows on the machine you are comparing it to. Even if you installed Windows on your own
machine the chances are you did so with a CD from your manufacturer, inclusive of all the drivers and configuration files needed to have your hardware do what it was supposed to do.

Blue Screen Of Death

If you had compared the nightmare that is installing a boxed version of windows onto a machine and having everything work I would have applauded. It is a process I have gone through a few times (usually when someone turns up at my door with a computer so riddled with malware and adware that their own attempted reinstall and system restore failed to do anything terribly useful).

The week spent finding driver downloads for various internal hardware, motherboard, audio chipsets, graphics card, sound card and other device drivers is never much fun, indeed windows often makes this a little easier by pretending to have everything working until you realise that performance is abysmal, or something (that firewire port to hook up a camera..?) doesn’t work later on down the line. This point may even require that you have a second computer handy (RAID card not supported on boot, network card not recognised? downloading them is rather hard when your machine has no network access or fails to boot at all…).

That is before you start to download, once your network card is working, and you have the latest driver that actually allows your card to support WPA and not just WEP of course, the thousands of updates your computer has missed since the CD you installed from was placed into a box and shipped.

Assuming you get through that process without your copy being deemed illegal, or some driver update turning your display into a 800×600 16 colour mess, you can start installing the software that actually makes your computer productive, (which you bought with rather a lot of hard earned cash over theyears..).

Install media?

Assuming you have all the CD’s, DVD,s and 16 character codes to get that all installed and working, and assuming that nothing decides to conflict with anything else and the software manufacturer still exists so that a licensing server can be reached, you are almost to the point of productivity.

Of course once you reach this point you can go back through and restore the settings you have come to be fond of over the years by dropping a backup into the registry (well assuming you trust this process not to break you installation to the point of starting again…) apart from those oddapplications that use their own little stores for settings, those may need to
be configured again by hand.

You might now be able to get your files back into the places you want them, and have your media player panic if your DRM infested audio and video files show any indication that they may be copies. Still at least we are getting there now.

So, your machine all working you can configure your printer, scanner and other accessories as and when you need them (again assuming you have the driver CD’s) gleefully cheering as your printer driver installs itself using a mere 120Mb of disk space and bringing with it a photo editing suite you don’t like, a couple of additions to your web browser, a handful of shortcuts for your desktop and a veritable smörgåsbord of little applications that must now start when you log in.

Lastly it is time to renew your anti-virus subscription, your tax for the year to keep your machine running well, or at least reasonably well, and to prevent your online bank account from being emptied by an undergraduate in China or Russia.

Not a happy process, but one that thankfully most people never have to go through. The reason they don’t is quite simple, they bought their computer with windows on, it worked when it arrive, and if it goes wrong, they have a CD to return it to the state it arrived in, or the option to pay someone a not insubstantial sum to do it for them.

So, for a more accurate comparison you should probably go out and buy a computer with Linux on. The choices these days are many and varied (as long as you really like Dell…) and include things like netbooks and other tiny gadgets that provide rather more productivity per processor cycle than their Windows counterparts. Or you could pay (or simply ask very nicely) someone like me to put Linux onto your machine and have it ‘all’ work. It generally does theses days, usually without much hassle either.

I will of course try briefly to address your other issues, but I am sure that the solutions (whilst no more difficult as those outlined above) will seem more complex or less intuitive. After all Linux is not the mainstream, being a great windows user or poweruser does not translate to Linux directly.

Neither scanning nor printing work as well and simply as they do on Windows.

Printer?

Well, I assume that depends on the hardware in use, for me scanning and printing work in exactly the same manner. I press print, the print comes out of the printer, I scan a document and I can manipulate it, run an OCR over it or do whatever it is I wish.

The scanners I own (cannon as it happens) have worked immediately when being plugged into the computer, opening the scanning application of your choice elicits the “burr deeem” noice and lights associated with a scanner warming up. Somewhat simpler than with windows (which if I remember correctly involved a driver CD).

The printers I have (a cannon and a HP laserjet) are also both supported directly and work on being plugged in to the computer, or indeed connected to the network. Installing them is as simple as opening the printer control applet and adding them (as local devices when plugged in, or as a network printer if not), selecting one of the drivers available (thank you foomatic!) and running a quick test print.

Indeed the printing system within Linux is rather better in my view than that of its Windows cousin, if for no other reason than finding and using printers is a doddle.

Of course on both these occasions I have been lucky that the hardware I own and have had to use, is entirely supported (and a massive proportion is) by my distribution and drivers are at worst an automated download away.

I’ve got 100GB of music, much of it classical, ripped on to the hard disk, and there seems to be no jukebox program that copes with it elegantly.

Amarok 1.4

I would say this is a matter of taste, although for my music collection I use amarok, perfect in every way, and with all the features I would hope for (including mobile device support). There are others, but Amarok (the 1.4 version mind, not version 2 which is awful but not yet included by many Linux distributions).

As to ditto – I’m afraid I have no idea, I use nothing similar, although I find a combination of ‘klipper’ and Linux’s two clipboards (copy/paste + highlight and middle mouse) as more than suitable, I find myself at a considerable loss when returning to Windows and finding that the middle mouse button will not paste whatever text I have just highlighted…

Linux when used properly provides some massive advantages over windows in terms of productivity and capability when it comes to the desktop, (neither of which helps if the end user is 100% committed to Windows and doesn’t have time to bring his skills up to the same level on Linux) it provides more choice, more stability, better security and a far cheaper solution..

File management on KDE4

But here is the other problem, people look to Linux to replace windows as a like for like exchange, it doesn’t work quite like that, Linux provides so much more, and does things slightly differently than Windows, trying to get Linux to be windows, but free, is almost certainly doomed to failure.

I am glad however that you have decided to stay with Linux for a while, Ubuntu (whether K,X or plain U) wouldn’t be my choice (or indeed my recommendation) except for the fact that it is easy to install and use, it suffers from bloat in being all things to all people, and seems to me to be comparatively dodgy when it comes to upgrades and updates. It is however well supported and documented.

I should probably add that the Thinkpad is a rather good choice for using Linux on, support is solid and it just works (am typing this on a X41 tablet, my partner has a X31 and my eldest son an ancient a22e, all of which run Debian and work magnificently).

Image Sources via wikimedia commons: Install media.